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!!

Muks on the Fred again!!

Yayyy those awesome peeps over at Channel Frederator have found it fit to showcase us for a whopping third time in their 73rd podcast!! This time around we submitted a music video we made a few years back, 2003 in fact, for a local NZ Hip-Hop artist King Kapisi. It was the first major job for tv we ever did so it's kind of a milestone for us, so we're really stoked to have it featured over there even if it does show it's age a little and makes us cringe a bit!! But we really appreciate all the support the team at Channel Frederator have given us over the last year, so to celebrate we've dug deep deep into the Mukpuddy archives to bring you some stuff from the making of the video... Enjoy! (Watch it here)

Heres some design work:

A sequence storyboarded by Tim:

And some backgrounds:

They also interviewed us about this project, check it!!

A new painting....

Here's my first painting collaberation with my fiance Karla. We did it as a gift for a good friends engagment!! I think it turned out pretty cool, I did Ganeesha and Karla did the lotus and spray painted the background (through lace), as usual it's (mostly) acrylic on canvas!

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!!!

Some new stuff!!

In the immortal words of blogger and Frederator commentor extrodinaire "Stephen Levinson ©"..... "NEVER STOP PAINTING!!", well, I won't and here's some stuff I've been working on. A couple of kids school chairs and a commission I did for a Trekkie!!

More more new Plushies...

Once again some new plush toys me and Karla made, we're going for a Mexican-type vibe with these fellas! -Alex (sorry for crappy photos, don't have a decent camera at the mo!)