Scribble Kibble is a show about animation made by an animator.
The previous episode talked about how to make a good cartoon pilot episode.
I thought I’d continue that line of thought with today’s feature, Lloyd the Rock'n Unicorn.
Before you get all excited and start clicking, a warning that this is an adult humor cartoon.
Lloyd swears a lot.
Lloyd the Rock'n Unicorn is a 15 episode web series.
My talk today isn’t going to have any plot spoilers, so no worries there, but if you’re
thinking you’re only going to watch an episode or two and not the whole thing, I highly recommend
you watch 4 and then 5.
Don’t skip 5, but you gotta watch 4 first to appreciate it.
First off, I was floored when I found out the whole series is animated by just one guy,
Colin Fleming.
In order to create this high of quality he basically did nothing for three years but
go to his studio job, come home, and then work on his own show.
After 2014 he kind of dropped off the face of the internet due to being burned out.
He’s still working on pitching the show, though.
Let me put that timeline into perspective.
Lloyd began as an idea around 2009.
It looked very different.
Colin got busy with work, so he had to sit on the idea for a while.
He got back around to Lloyd in 2011, got the first episode done, and premiered it at an
independent theater in LA.
Then he turned it into a web series that went from 2012 to 2014.
For the next two years he developed a studio pitch and started practicing it.
At the end of 2016 he started to actually pitch the show.
That’s your reality check on building an animation series for TV.
Not all of them take that long, but a lot of them do.
The previous episode about Final Space - there were at least six years of development that
went into that idea.
And one more reality check - Colin Fleming doesn’t do absolutely everything alone.
Mary and John Garside voice the other main characters.
John also writes some of the episodes and does the first audio cut of all the recorded
dialogue.
Once an episode is animated, the whole soundscape goes to Max Repka, who cleans the rough audio,
balances levels, adds panning, and so on.
This whole process is well documented in two “Making Of” videos, as well as a handful
of late night animation livestreams.
There aren’t any shocking surprise techniques to the production of each episode.
Write the script, make the storyboards, record the audio, rough edit the audio, make the
animatic, make the animation, composite all of the pieces together, add effects, master
the audio, publish.
I actually have no idea how the 3D elements are incorporated into the episode.
I’m going to assume the cars are modeled and animated in a program like Blender, composited
into the scene in After Effects, and then Lloyd is dropped in there as a different layer.
The other route is to import the 2D layers into Blender and move everything around in
there.
Just for these special scenes, and then you can go back to Flash and After Effects for
everything else.
Those are two possibilities but if you’re familiar with 3D animation I’m sure you
can think of many more ways to achieve a scene like this.
As for the content of Lloyd the Rock’n Unicorn, oh my gosh does this make me feel like it’s
the 80’s, except with modern puppet animation.
I guess that’s not surprising since the series is inspired in part by He Man.
Snakeface even has that bulky and mostly naked design, with a weird color choice outfit.
Imagine what he would look like without the snake face.
Mmmmm.
Ha ha ha.
That’s as much as I care to talk about without spoiling anything.
If Lloyd is your type of humor, I’m really glad I got to introduce you to the show.
It’s surprising not many people know about it.