Hi guys! For the past 2 years my brother Tommy and I have worked on Space Chickens In Space for Disney XD and Channel Nine Australia 🇦🇺 — it’s been a totally surreal and crazy experience working on a surreal, sci-fi cartoon series and oooooh boy... animation is the BEST and all the amazing, passionate artists and producers on the team make the work day SO much fun. The animation team at Studio Moshi in Melbourne are an incredible bunch of young, passionate, quirky artists who really make the show come alive. :) When we visited them in Melbourne, we found out that fellow Newgrounders Colin (from The Onion Skin YT channel) and Nick (who was in the RWD and made this with Tyler Naugle lol) also work as animators in the show!!! how amazing is that??!!?!
Emrox
Hey, I saw this on twitter! It was really cool to see the actual show has a lot of your guys' individual style in it - you don't get to see a lot of creativity in tv animation these days, at least not where I live. Was it hard to translate your work into something a whole team of people could consistently do?
MarcyVF
TL;DR THANKS!!! Yes it was really hard, but the team are super talented and playful, and when they get creatively invested in the show too, all we have to do it regulate it a bit! <3
Very very very hard and different from what we're used to! And I'm really happy to hear that you can see our style in the show... It's weird, cause it's not a show we created or had much initial control over production-wise (because we're not investors) – so when Cake called us and said "hey, you guys wanna direct the show??" is sort of came out of nowhere, and from there we just started drawing and making rough animatics and sketches, and later animation guides and style guides that would help the team of around 33 animators get the vibe, tempo and craziness of the show. The show is RIGGED, which made Tommy and I go like "aw crap, this is gonna be stiff and lame", what we've done is combined rigged animation with hand drawn animation + the animators are encouraged to manipulate and mess with the rigs a lot, so IMO the show has a very unique style when looking at whole episodes. It's on model, but then suddenly goes insane stylistically, cause the animators have a lot of freedom to make weird expressions and follow their gut, of course within the style limits, and according to our notes <3 <3 <3 We're also working remotely – the animators are in Australia, we're sitting here in Oslo, so we travelled down there for a week + have weekly animation calls.