3 days down!!

Well, that's 3 days and a preview night of the San Diego comic con gone. Now there's only one more to go. To be completely honest, we're not sure if we could do anymore than that. What a crazy overwhelming experience! Today (saturday) we stayed clear of the actual convention floor and stuck to the Hall H panels. A decision we don't regret. Firstly, we got to see Pixar's Wall.e panel. Andrew Stanton took the stage and owned it, bringing out sound designer and legend Ben Burt to demonstrate how the sfx/voices of Wall.e work. Then, the showed clips from the film and they were no less than breath-taking. This may turn out to be the best Pixar film to date, and that is quite a claim. The next panel we sat in on was the Marvel panel. Here we got to see Edward Norton, Liv Tyler and some of the crew of the new Hulk movie, there was no footage to be seen, but it sounds like the film is in good hands. They also brought out Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jnr, Gwyneth Paltrow and Terence Howard to talk about Iron man. The footage they showed brought down the house, it was amazing and I think it's gonna be a great film.

We also go to meet a couple of our online buddies today. Chris Hardwick and Mike Phirman who make up the musical comedy duo, "Hard 'n' Phirm". That was awesome.

To top off an awesome day this afternoon we also randomly found ourselves with tickets to a private screening of some scenes from the new Laika stop-motion film "Coraline" based on the Neil Gaiman book of the same name. It's directed by one of our personal heroes Henry Selik, who of course directed Nightmare Before Christmas. So we go into the theatre and who do they bring out for a Q 7 A session but both Neil Gaiman and Henry Selik... we pooped!! They had us put on our 3D glasses (thats right 3D, it's the first stop-motion film to be filmed in 3D!), played the footage and we were amazed, what they've finished of the film so far is freakin awesome!! We then had he chance to get autographs and Alex and Tim were lucky enough to draw tickets to get posters signed...

and here's us waiting in line to get a ticket so that we could wait in line again to meet director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) and Nick Frost. We soon found out that we were actually waiting in line to get the chance to win a chance to wait in line to meet them. This was done by pulling a ticket out of a bag. We were sad.

And finally, check this out....Last night we went along to a comic con Disney party. We were invited by our friend from Disney, Mike Moon (thanks dude). We met some great people (including some actors from Heroes - Sylar and Peter Pertrelli shook our hands. We smiled) but the highlight (and a completely unexpected one) had to be meeting the legend himself, Stan Lee. He was great. We got to have a little chat with him and then......

we had a photo with him!!! (that half person is Tim)

Yeah so that's the story so far. We'll be back with an update on our "adventures" soon.

Comic-Con Day 1

Well today was our first day and what a day it was!! The crowds were crazy and something you can never quite prepare yourself for but we did manage to finally meet a a whole bunch of cool people from the blogs... Darryl Young, Patrick Morgan, Javier Guzman, Stephen Silver and Martin Hsu were all really cool!! We also got to meet an artist whose work has been a huge influence on us and that is Chris Sanders, co-director of Lilo and Stitch and voice of Stitch... what a mind trip!! Joe Moshier and all the peeps at the Conduct Happiness stand were also all really cool!!

We also brought heaps of cool toys and other stuff that we can't get in New Zealand, not to mention all the artist's sketchbooks!!!

We're staying in a part of San Diego called Old Town, it's really cool and done up kinda like an old Mexican town, so we're getting plenty of proper Mexican food which is awesome to us all... except Ryan! (see image below)

Tim also like bugs....

Mukpuddy Does America!!!

Well, the time has come. Mukpuddy is coming to America!!

Tomorrow night (wed) at 7.30pm we'll hop on a plane and take a 12 hour flight to L.A, then we'll drive down to San Diego to the comic con (for all 4 days). Woo hoo!!

We'll be in the U.S for 3 weeks, travelling between San Diego, Anaheim, Burbank & Vegas.

Let us know if any of you will be there. We want to meet as many of you as possible!

It's gonna be righteous!

Sparkle FriENDS!

Well, here they are, the last two episodes of Sparkle Friends season 2.

We got a little swamped with other work, so it's taken us a while to post them up, but better late than never.

These are the last episodes ever. Probably. There's not much chance of a 3rd season, just from a creative point of view. We feel we've taken Sparkle Friends as far as it can go and are happy to go out on a high. We will however be making something new to fill that space. We'll let you about it when it happens.

Enjoy...

We made a film in 48 hours!!!

Well, after many weeks of anxious waiting and general pants wettery it's finally over. The national finals of the 48Hours Film Competition were held last night, but unfortunately we didn't take it out. We're a little disappointed but we're still really happy with what we created and think it can have a life outside the comp!! And the good news is we can post it online... yaaayy!! We're also posting another little clip that we made - each of the finalists had to make a 1 minute clip to introduce their film for the televised final. So enjoy!!

Also wanted to mention the great job Ryan and Jeremy did voicing the 2 main characters!! Jeremy voices Jerry and Ryan voices Sid!!

*UPDATE*

Here's a treat, Jeremy stayed up all night cutting together this and we all think it's ace!! So have a gork....

UPDATE2: Wooo hooo, we got our trophey back from the engravers and think it looks pretty snazzy!!

Alex and his new neck!!

I recently had my neck tattoo finished so thought I'd post a pic!! The idea behind my tattoos is to get stuff that has inspired me to be the artist I am now so, obviously, this is my homage to Pixar and my favourite film of theirs....

FYI- Sully hurt like a mofo!!!

Woooo Hoooo!!!

We delayed posting this episode a little bit as we wanted our buddies at Channel Frederator to have the exclusive!! That's right The Muks are back on The Fred, for an awesome 4th time!!! We're really stoked and as our pal Jeaux Janovsky said, we're BFF!!

This is the episode where we put a call out a few months ago for Flash animators to contribute some animation to a scene where the kids are flicking through channels on the TV. We thought it'd be a cool way to collaborate with some of the awesome artists animating in Flash out there! We got some really cool stuff so check it out!

A big thanks to everyone that gave us clips, below is a list of all those who's work made it into the episode (a couple of clips went bung when we brought them into flash so really sorry to those guys!), they were all really cool, and we'd like to think we could all work on something else in the future!!

GREG GUNTHER

DAH VEED
MATT TORODE

RAMIRO OLMOS

ASHLEY DAVISON

DUSTY HAZE

NELSON C WOODSTOCK

TODD RAMSEY

JERRY FUCHS

PAUL LALO

MICHAEL FOSTER
STEPHEN LEVINSON

AARON BLECHA
NIKO ANESTI

Here's some sketchy stuff too...

Bigfoots

Hey folks, there's gonna be a little hold up on posting "Sparkle Friends Episode 18", but we'll let you know why very soon. In the mean time, here's some production sketcharoos from the last episode, "Are We There Yeti?". Enjoy!

My, What Big Foot You Have!

We're big fans of Bigfoot here at Mukpuddy, so we knew right from the start of Sparkle Friends Series 2 that he had to be included somewhere. Episode 17 felt like as good a place as any.
I (Ryan) got to provide the voice for Bigfoot himself and Jeremy got to provide the voice of.....ummmm......I won't give it away, but lets just say he's red and angry!
We're pretty fond of this episode and once again we think the outside setting helps (thanks to Alex's wicked BG design). We think the episode has a cool old timey cartoon feel to it, hope you do too.

Something cool happened to us last night!

A few week ago we participated in a New Zealand film making competition called the 48Hours, where teams come together around the country on one weekend (18th-20th May) and, basically make a short film in 48 hours!! Every year to make sure teams don't cheat and pre-make a film, each team picks a genre out of a hat and every film must contain certain random elements. This year those random elements were a character called Jerry Reed who had to be a hypochondriac, a line of dialogue "What do you call that?", and a prop, this year it was a rope.
We had never been involved with the comp before but had always thought it'd be a kick to see if we could make an animated film in the time allowed! So this year we decided to give it a try. We went on the Friday night to get our genre and were nervous as all hell, I guess it was just the not knowing, as there were a few genres we really didn't want to get, or would've been really hard for us (Grind House and Unnecessary Sequel) but we pulled out Horror and were happy as larry!
So we set about making the film and everything came together really smoothly and, unusually, we had no computers crashing... yaayyy!! And most importantly we had heaps of fun and very little sleep!
So then 2 weeks after we handed the film in it came time to watch our film in a real life movie theatre for our heat. It was at The Civic, which is the actual theatre that appears at the end of Peter Jacksons King Kong, the one Kong destroys!! It was a really cool atmosphere but watching a film you've made with a big audience is death inducing, we were sooo god damn nervous!! We got a really positive response though and actually won "Audience Fave" for our heat so were really stoked!! We then found out we made it into the Auckland Finals so were super stoked!!!
Which brings us up to last night, the Auckland Finals back at The Civic Theatre! We were up against 11 other films, some of which were freakin rad!! It was nail biting stuff, the place was packed and we actually felt like pooing AND spewing at the same time and that was even before the films started! Once again we got a really cool response with heaps of people cheering but it wasn't until the awards were getting handed out that things got crazy!! It came right up to the "Runner Up" award and hadn't won anything so figured we were out of it, and kinda relieved that we wouldn't have to get up in front of 2000 people! Then comes the last award "Best Film" and we get our name called.... F#*KIN HELL!!! Everything else was a blur, not even sure what we said when we went up to get the award, which is a really cool trophy called an "Apee", sculpted by a dude who worked at the Weta Workshop, we also won some money and a few other bits and bobs... man what an essay but it was such a cool night we just had to post about it, so here's some pics... (from left to right, Jeremy, Tim, Alex and Ryan)



Here are some rough development sketches from when I (Alex) was designing the characters! Right from the start we knew with whatever genre we got we'd just use 2 main characters. We decided to make them monstery because a) We knew almost everyone else would be using humans and we thought it'd be a cool way to stand out, and b) They're cool to draw!
I also wanted to make them up of just basic shapes, like a square guy and a rectangle guy, so it would be relatively easy to animate them. We ended up settling on the square and circle guys which we aptly named "Sid and Jerry".




But it doesn't stop there, we now go onto the National Finals where we go up against the other final winners from the other cities around New Zealand, and it's televised LIVE on TV on July 1st! As if watching it in the theatre wasn't scary enough!!!

So to sum up... yay for us!! And we want to say a huge massive giant THANK YOU to Ant Timpson and everyone else behind the event and all the Judges and everyone who liked our film... you're all rad!!! We just treated this like anything else we do and just made something that cracked us up, we never really know if other people will find it funny, so I guess we're just lucky they do!!

We can't post the film online just yet since we're in the finals but as soon as we can it'll be up on our blog quick smart so be sure to check back!!

This is how you treat a Lady...

Here's a treat for ya... an episode of Sparkle Friends that's a musical!! Well it has one song in it, this one is really Jeremy's baby, he came up with this random idea of a singing french bread stick and then wrote the song and then the episode came together around it!!
It turned out to be quite a hard one to put together but we're really happy with it. Jeremy also did a sweet job of providing the talking and singing voice of Pierre, so check it out...



Here's some sketches...

"Please don't stick anything up my...."

Here's episode 15, to us this one feels a little like the first episodes we were making last year, but we're still really happy with it! Hope you likey!!



And some sketches...

Chicken Soup!!

Once again we really went crazy with this episode, trying to see how far we could push it! We're not really sure how we got certain things past, but we did and Ryan did an awesome job voicing a vital character, won't tell ya which one before you watch it but I think you'll figure it out!!... ENJOY!!!



Heres some process work...

And some sketches of me trying to work out a design for the pirate from the last episode:

Piratey Pirates!!!

Heres episode 13, we really dig this one, it seems as soon as we introduce a 'crazy' outside character the episodes seem to take on a life of there own! Our very own Ryan Cooper provided the voice of the pirate and did a mighty fine job if I do say so myself! Enjoy!!

Finally, something to show....

As promised heres the first 2 new episodes of our cartoon 'Sparkle Friends' we make for a NZ kids variety show called What Now. This years first episode really felt like we were making last years series. We ended last years series with a cliffhanger and therefore had to kick things off this year by wrapping up that story line, but as soon as we started the 2nd one we kinda took a new approach and really pushed the 'craziness' of the Sparkle Friends 'world' and have since made, possibly, the most insane cartoon for kids to come out of New Zealand! So we're pretty happy!
We also get a little longer to spend on animation this time round, we are giving ourselves 1 week per episode, where-as last year they were from script to screen in one week. We're still killing ourselves though, so thats cool!
Anyways, enjoy these first 2, they only get better (we reckon)...

Not long now...

It's almost time for the new series of our cartoon "Sparkle Friends" to air here in New Zealand, so we thought we'd cut a trailer together from what we've made so far, check it...

Calling Flash Animators!!!

NOTE: THE EMAIL LINK WE POSTED WAS WRONG, SO PLEASE RESEND ANYTHING YOU HAVE SENT RECENTLY. SORRY, WE IS IDIOTS!
Hey there Flash Animators, we have this idea so if ya want to contribute please read on....

Basically we have written this episode for the new season of Sparkle Friends which starts out with the kids fighting over the tv remote, we then cut to a shot of the tv flicking through heaps of channels, thats when we thought instead of flicking through stuff we've done why not put the call out and get other animators to contribute Flash animation to an episode of Sparkle Friends!

We're not looking for anyone to make anything new, just if they have some exsiting stuff that we can pick out a couple of seconds from! Obviously, the animation has to be completely original and owned by the artist, and they must be willing to give us the rights to use it anytime and anywhere Sparkle Friends is played. The clip must be broadcast quaility and, of course, suitable for kids! Also SWF's ONLY PLEASE!!!

Email us at sparklefriends@gmail.com if you're interested!!

CheersThe Muks

Feelin' the love!

Chances are you're probably getting sick of us getting plugged on the Frederator blogs, if so, you won't like what I'm about to say.... Our good buddie Jeaux Janovsky has kindly posted about our Sparkle Friends Myspace page, so don't be a hater and go check it out!

Happy Chocolate Day!!!

Well, it's that time of the year again, where we remember that 2000 years ago some fella sadly passed away from eating heaps of chocolate eggs and bunnies.... or something like that!?

I was watching an awesome episode of Ying Yang Yo the other day and it inspired me to throw this together, hope everyone has a cool holiday!!