After years of pecking away on this epic 22 minute pilot cartoon, only few have had the nerve to shell out hard earned moo-lah to buy a copy! Now here is Family Pants’ Hole in ‘Da Roof!…. FREE!
And if you want real quality… so life like you can actually watch it on your TV! Then buy a copy here!
A Family Pants fan has recently asked if or when I’ll have a DVD of Family Pants available… Well I already have! I guess I had it hidden in this blog. So here it is in all it’s glory, un-hidden!
This is the CREATE A SPACE store where you can get a Family Pants DVD:
And this is the same DVD at Amazon.com:
Family Pants is now available for digital download or for digital renting, through Amazon.com’s UnBox!
Here’s the preview of “Family Pants’ Hole in ‘Da Roof!”. It took years of weekends and nights to put the thing together with writing help from Jason Sawtelle.
We wrote the script years ago, with the original idea to simply write a 22 minutes of “black out” gags in the old fashioned Tex Avery style. (Where you have a simple set up, then start with gag after gag separated by a fade to black and back again.) We thought we couldn’t hold a viewers’ attention with such an epic outing even if our gags were fantastic! So we decided to make it a conventional sit-com format. (But managed to squeeze in some Tex Avery style slapstick and silliness!)
I made a rough storyboard directly in Flash using a PL-400 wacom tablet and emailed it to Jason for his opinion. Some of it I agreed with, some I did not and some I simply had to omit due to lack of time!
We recorded the dialog from a real studio in one afternoon. We did each line separate to help me stay in character, because sometimes I could lose the character of a voice if I were to jump from one guy to another. By the end of the day, we all were sweating and hoarse!
I edited the soundtrack in ProTools Free over the next year. After that, I broke the cartoon in to 12 parts so my flash files wouldn’t explode from the file size and started key framing from the rough boards. Next came animation and the tough job of coloring. I’m not too confident when it comes to color, but after watching some Pink Panther cartoons, became inspired from a limited palette.
Complete details of how I work can be found in another post under Animation Production Process.
Why make a DVD? Well, I always wanted to be a syndicated cartoonist and draw comic strips. After 5 submissions to the major syndicates and being rejected, I started drifting toward on-line comic strips. Perhaps I could syndicate on-line? Then I animated one of the strips as an extra feature to the site and found more people like the animated cartoons than the static ones. Plus zany antics work more easily animated than in comic strip form, especially with such a limited space to work in. So I made a slew of shorts. Eventually I thought, where can I go with this? Jason came into the picture again with an idea to license cartoon shorts on-line, but it fizzled out. So thanks to CustomFlix and WAB I pursued making a DVD. Here’s a review on this mess, if you wanna take someone else’s word!
One of the extra features on the Hole in ‘Da Roof! DVD is a commentary track with Frank Mueller himself babbling on about stuff. Jason Sawtelle phoned in asking straight forward questions and I, playing Frank, ad-libbed trying like hell to stay in character. Our schedules were so busy, that we couldn’t make the recording in person. So I put him on speaker phone and set up my mic and recorded him remotely! Another triumph for lo-fi!
We fumbled around a bit, where I’d pause trying to think of my next line and Jason, hearing that pause, would think I, or Frank, was finished talking, so he’d start asking the next question. We ending up stepping all over each other. There was a lot of “Hey! I’m not done yet!” yelling from Frank. That was funny the first time, but after a while it wasn’t.
So I asked that he email me the question and I wrote the answers in a stream of consciousness kind of way. Then the next weekend, Jason called back and I recorded the whole thing in one shot. Jason never knew my responses until I said them! Later I edited out the pauses and laughing between the questions and some of our own comments like, “wait, I think I got another call” or “hold on, my wife asked me something”.
I had lots of fun with this and realized that Frank is funny talking as much as he is falling off roofs. At the end, I was inspired to write more comic strips and have another go at Syndicate submission!
Hope you dig it!
In this last part of Behind the Seams! I talk about and show artwork from Family Pants’ Hole in ‘Da Roof! DVD. I spent a lot of time on the artwork and got a kick out of it, but then when the DVD was done, I suddenly realized no one would ever see some of the details I love-inly put in there!
In this part of the Behind the Seams! I talk about streamlining the Family Pants artwork for animation, ending up with the look you see now…
Click on the image to watch the slide show…
In this Behind the Seams crappy slide sho- I mean feature-ette, I talk about the early Family Pants idea…
Click on the image to watch the slide show…
Lots of people ask where all this Family Pants stuff came from. So I make a behind the “seams” feature-ette…. (well more like 4 crappy sideshow SWFs) with me talking about Family Pants and showing old pictures I’ve drawn when I was a kid, up until now. I felt a little uncomfortable just talking by myself, so I had my Mom sit in. She plays the voice of Blanche Mueller. And since lots of this stuff was drawn when I was a kid, she was my “biggest fan” since then!
Anyway, here’s part one, where I talk about where Gruno the Gorilla came from. (Click on this old picture of Gruno to watch the slideshow.)
Family Pants Blog! 