LET'S GET GRODIE!

Well... I guess at this stage it would be silly of us to say (again) that Sparkle Friends has come to an end. Looking back it seems we've "officially" announced "the end" at least 2 times. So even though, for now, it seems Sparkle Friends will end with it's 42nd episode...who knows what the future may bring. If anything Sparkle Friends has been an amazing training ground, not only in fast turnaround animation but in short form story telling, quick fire gags and rapid character development. We always tried to fit so much in to each episodes 3-4min duration....I guess we considered every episode our chance to make a mini-movie.......the problem was we'd have to cram that movie in to a trailer length short.....tricky.....but like I said, an amazing training ground for future projects.

Thanks to everyone who have had amazing things to say about Sparkle Friends over the years, it's really meant a whole lot to us.

Anyway, this episode was quite the monster resulting in the longest Sparkle Friends episode to date. As with most Sparkle Friends episodes - coming up with a new villain was the most fun and the musically inclined, Grodie Starlight was definitely the most fun to date.

So without further a doo doo.....here's Sparkle Friends: Next Level Part II



Here's some development stuff too, it was fun trying to come up with Grodie's design, trying to capture a 80s glam rockstar! In the end I went with a costume from one of my favourite 80s rockstars...




Grodies minions were pretty fun to design too, I thought it's be cool to have a throw back to some of the goblins in The Labyrinth, it also worked quite well since we saw them as kind of being like bikers or Grodies road crew when he was on tour...



If we had more money and time we would've we originally thought it'd be cool to do Emilio in CG, so we decided to make him a box shape to make it easier, maybe we can do it next time (if there is a next time!)...

So much room for activities!!!

This is an activity page we made especially for Armageddon a few weeks back, we thought it'd be cool to hand these out to kids for free, just a little something something to take away with them for free! The idea actually started as an entire 'Lanky Lampton Activity Book' but, again, like many Mukpuddy ideas was just a little too ambitious and we ran out of time. We really wanna do the book for next year, but in the mean time print this sucker out and have a play...

Making Muk Stuff...

So here's another little insight into the happenings of Muk HQ, we actually just got ourselves a Flip HD so were just testing it out but we'll be using it to do more of these thingys...

This is also pretty cool, Amid over at Cartoon Brew posted (briefly) about the above clip, so thanks a bunch for that dude, we really appreciate any exposure we can get, especially on a popular site like CB!

Surprise... It was all lies!

So we pretty much lied about not doing any more Sparkle Friends episodes, What Now (the local kids show Sparkle Friends is made for) got a new female presenter part way through this year and they wanted to introduce her to "the kids" via the magic of animation. So 2 new episodes were born, yip it's an epic 2 parter, introducing the new Sparkle Friend, Gem and yet another villain voiced by Ryan. We tried really hard to make these look pretty and Tim did a bang up job putting his After Effects fingers to work! It was a mountain of work, yet again, but might I say both episodes look bloody swank for being made by 3 blokes in just a few weeks...

Drawings by Alexander, Aged 30...

Draw Da Gungi!

WANNA BEn Titles...

We finally posted the opening titles we animated for the new show we're working on. Ben and his team are awesome to work with so we hope they get picked up for a second season so we can keep working with them...