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...

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.

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...

Sparkle Friends: Series 2

Hey Folks.

Last year we were thrown in the deep end with our animated short series "Sparkle Friends". Somehow we managed to produce a 3-4 minute episode a week (from script to screen) without going completely insane. Well, due to the popularity of the series, we're doing a 2nd series! Yikes.

This time things are a little different, we got a couple of weeks up front to work on 5 of the scripts and animatics, which allows us to have a full week of animation on each episode (still not much time, but better than last time). Then we have a break in the middle to work on the 5 remaining scripts and animatics, then 5 more weeks of animating.

We're really happy with how this 10 are turning out, we've definitely improved the animation (although still limited due to our schedule) and the scripts are way crazier and alot funnier. We've also gone bigger action wise, so that's made the 1 week animation turnaround pretty tough. We've compelted 3 episodes and have just started ep4.

If you didn't happen to catch some of the original Sparkle Friends Series 1 episodes, here

they all are on YouTube

We'll keep you posted on the progress of Sparkle Friends Series 2 and we'll post links to them as soon as they have aired in NZ. Heres a little sneak-peek in the mean time!!!