Everybody loves a spin-off...

except for that show 'Joey'.......he's nothing without Chandler.

Anyhoo, as we mentioned in a previous post, last year was the end of the line for the Sparkle Friends. After 40 episodes it definitely felt like it had come to a natural end and it was time to move on. We love what we've created and are extremely proud of the progress we made while working on the show, but we'll take that experience and apply it to new projects.

However... Over the 3 years of making Sparkle Friends we came up with far too many fun secondary characters to just throw to the wayside and felt they needed a bit more screen time. So with the inclusion of Sparkle Friends star, Gungi.....we created a spin-off skit series that features some of our favourite special guest characters from the last 40 episodes, each finding interesting ways to use Gungi.

So enough blabbing from me, here's the very first "What's a Gungi Good For?"

Ryan



p.s a big thanks to musical genius Ben Sinclair who did a great job of making my mediocre jingle singery sound pretty rad!

A New Thing...

Here's a sneak-peek at our new cartoon, all shall be revealed very soon...

End Of An Era...

We didn't know it at the time of making these, but these 2 episodes (an "epic" 2-parter) might be the last Sparkle Friends episodes in this format... EVER!

The original plan with these was to run a competition where kids would draw themselves as a Sparkle Friend and the 2 winning entries would appear in the episode which was going to be in 3D and kids would grab their glasses from a local shopping center. Well like a lot of things down here in little ol' New Zealand, it proved a little to ambitious, and the 3D elements were dropped because of time constraints... but, good gracious, that would've been cool!

However the comp still ran though and we got to see a bunch of really cool entries and the 2 kids, Olivia and Wallice, do appear in the episode, just in case you were wondering who those randoms were! Episode 40 also features the return of one of our favorite "elements" from Series 1 (that's a long time ago, if you're counting).

Here's the 2 winning entries...

As for the future of Sparkle Friends, it's a little uncertain at this stage but we are making some short skits involving Gungi at the moment. They've have been a bunch of fun to make and will be hitting the net very soon!

Nothing but the tooth!

Here's a new Sparkle Friends episode that's full of lovely weirdness. Sometimes we look back at an episode and are amazed by the chain reaction that occurred between us which resulted in the finished episode....I don't want to give anything away from this episode, but I will say that the ideas that ended up in the episode lent themselves perfectly to one of our favourite Sparkle Friends end gags ever.

Once again a big thanks to Jocelyn Christian who did a wonderful job as the voice of the Toothfairy.

Here's some design work, twas fun designing these two ladies...

Armageddon a cup of water!

Look who's here......it's you!

Enough of that, lets get to the real story. Soooo, every year something called the Armageddon Expo is held throughout NZ (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin) and it's kind of a comic-con style geeky extravaganza of all things comics, movies, TV and anime.

Mukpuddy first had a stand at Armageddon in 2003 and it definitely helped in getting our name out and about in the industry.

We have had a stand at Armageddon on and off over the last 7 years but we thought this year we would make a grand return to see if the kids who were trying to scab free stuff off us years ago have grown up to be rich and want to give us lots of money to make cartoons.....ahhhhhh.......thems the dreams of crazy folk.

Anyhoo, if all goes well we will be at Auckland Armageddon October 2010 and to help promote it we've created a short viral skit......enjoy or don't enjoy.....that's up to you ;)

A little green...

A week or so ago we created a permanent green screen in the Mukpuddy studio (our landlords were gracious enough to let us deface a wall!). We thought it would be a nice feature to have on hand whenever we needed to jump in front of a green screen.......as we often do......wah?

Anyhoo, to give the new toy a whirl we grabbed Tim's puppet, Ember, and ad-libbed a bit of puppet tomfoolery. We filmed it with an old digital camera (which is all we had on hand that day) then took the footage in to After Effects and threw in some BG elements we already had made up etc, and this is what we produced.

It's a tad rough, but it's only a test. We have plans for some more........next time we might try proper lighting as this test had none. Hopefully they'll only get better.

Stay tuned.

WHAT TIME IS IT?

...ADVENTURE TIME!!!!!!! Here's my contribution to the up and coming tribute book! Thanks to Chogrin for asking me to be a part of it...

-Alex

Lets Get Girly!

A Sparkle Friends episode with a message....get outta here. Don't worry......it's still full of random weirdness, but we thought it would be nice to tackle an issue that kinda bugs us, growing up.

This episode also features a TV commercial parody that Jeremy had been dreaming about for some time......so like we always do, found a way to slip it into Sparkle Friends. See you if you can spot it.......it the one that looks like a TV commercial parody.....silly.



ALSO>>> Check out the brand new Mukpuddy Animation website and let us know what ya think!!!

Donut look here!

For over a year now we've done some work (on and off) for a company called Donutology. They specialise in Donut related merchandise, mobile phone jewelry, t-shirts, rings etc



We've designed a bunch of characters for their merchandise, mainly t-shirts and posters (see above), but at the end of last year we pitched the idea of donut related skits to help promote Donutology in a viral form. The idea was well received and we knocked out 4 skits based on the "bad uses for a donut" theme.

Mukpuddy does Star Wars...

Here's an idea we've had for a while and thought we'd put it together to get the creative juices flowing as we start to get into the year...

Luck Of The Irish...

This episode was a pretty fun one to come up with, last year we met an Irish dude that boasted he never forgot a name but kept getting ours slightly wrong, we thought it was hilarious and wanted to put it into a cartoon, and here it is...

And some process work...

Wild Things Are Here....

I ‘ve been visiting the blog Terrible Yellow Eyes for a while now and love the idea to bits! I asked Cory if he’d be keen for me to contribute and said he loved my stuff so here’s what I put together, it’s really cool to be involved in such a cool project…

-Alex

Sparkle Friends Ep35: Spooky Sunday

This was an interesting episode of Sparkle Friends to make as, writing, directing and animation aside, it sort of relied heavily on spot-on performances from the lead Sparkle Friends voice cast to make the joke really work. I'm happy to say I think the real Serena and Charlie absolutely nailed it.

Merry Saint Nick...

He's back for his 3rd year in a row! Will he ever stop drinking the booze? You'll have to wait until next year to find out...

ROADBLOCK!

We posted a sneak peek at this episode earlier this year and got a really positive reaction to it, so we've been really wanting to get the whole episode out there! So without further ado we present the greatest 80's star that never was.... Roadblock!!!



Our older post also has some sketches and a clip of our buddy Jarrod recording Roadblock's voice!

BRINGING SPARKLE BACK!

Hey there, long time no Sparkle Friends!

As you may (or may not) know Sparkle Friends now plays on Australia's ABC, so to give the nice folks over there a decent head start on episodes 31-40 we held off putting the episodes online. But enough time has passed now so we thought we'd finally unleash the newest episodes on the world wide web.

I'm super happy with how the 4th series turned out. With some super crisp writing and editing from Jeremy, cool new character and bg designs from Alex and of course the smooth animation stylings of myself and Tim, this definitely feels like the best series yet. But I'm biased.....sue me.

We really enjoyed making the "Super Tu" episode in the 3rd series of Sparkle Friends so we thought it was only fitting to kick off series 4 with a new "Super Tu" adventure. Jeremy then had the idea to do a Super Tu trilogy.....so we did. Because we decided to bring back all of the major Sparkle Friends villains I got the chance to do a whole heap of voices, I think in total (including the Seagull and the theme park attendant) I did 9 characters over the trilogy, I may have missed some, but who's counting.......probably my Mum.

I'll stop writing now and let you watch all 3 Super Tu episodes.

- Ryan

HE'S NOT A CAT!!

Last year our friends at Nickelodeon International asked us to make a cartoon for a project they called Open Mic - it was basically a chance for a group of studios to strut their stuff and make cartoon shorts with minimal studio interference. The only condition was that the cartoon must be driven by a 'star character'...

Rewind 10 years to the very early beginnings of Mukpuddy, and a Secret Agent Lemur by the name of Dirk Banzai. Cue hideous 10 year old drawings...





Dirk was the first ever Mukpuddy character, and has been through several incarnations over his 10 years. He starred in a couple of webisodes (back when that seemed like a potential way to make money) and even had his own comic for a short time. We've always thought he had star potential, and thought Open Mic might be a good time to get him out of moth balls and give him a revamp.



The 'secret agent' moniker was dropped, and Dirk became more of a kid who creates drama and intrigue wherever he goes, even when none actually exists. Naturally villains assume Dirk is their nemesis and try to destroy him, but Dirk finds it all quite fun and amusing!



We had a few attempts at trying to find a voice for Dirk, but ended up seeking out the original Dirk - our good friend Matt Kelly. Matt had slipped off the Mukpuddy radar for a few years, but turned out to be irreplaceable. Take that Beyonce!

We also enlisted our friend Richard Simpson as the voice of Dirk's nemesis, The Toyminator.

And Jeremy wrote the theme song (as he often does) with the help of our new-found musical genius Ben Sinclair. It was the first time we worked with Ben, but we doubt we'll ever make anything without him again.

Anyway, it turned out it wasn't really what Nickelodeon were after, but we enjoyed making the short and are grateful for the opportunity. Let's see what you think of it... go on... watch it!

Here's some production work...

Horsing around!

We made a pilot! No silly... not a man who flies planes. A pilot is another name for the first episode of a TV show. Chuckle.

About a year ago our buddies Jamie & Ben (better known in New Zealand as 'Bill & Ben', the creators of the award winning comedy show Pulp Sport) approached us with an idea for a couple of characters called Edward the Horse and Warren the Rabbit.

We took their idea, fed it into the Mukpuddy Cartoon Making Machine, and baked it on high for several months. This is what came out the other side.

We think it's our best work yet, and are particularly proud that we made a NZ-flavoured cartoon that doesn't involve a kiwi. Some of the references may be a little too 'local' for our overseas viewers, but hopefully that will make it seem 'exotic'.

As usual, Alex's pencil went into overdrive. Here's some early development stuff for Ed and Warren...

Secondary character development...

Here's some layouts from the pilot...

And some backgrounds...

Let us know if you'd like to see more!

Jeremy