[Personal project] A look back at Oddball pt. 1: Pre-production

Oddball chapters 1-3 have finally been compiled into the first Omnibus episode and released on Newgrounds. I think now is the best time for me to look back at the development of the whole project and have some reflection on it. Prepare for a long post, I'm going to try and get as deep as I can into the creative process.

A year ago, I released a Halloween animation starring Redi and Antique, the two protagonists for the Oddball series. As this was their first animated appearance, people were naturally asking about their background, as one had an 8 ball for an eye, and the other was a talking clock/bear. This generated some interest in the characters as well as getting me a winning place in the Halloween contest on Newgrounds (yay, money!)

To me, this was a good start for the series, so I started thinking about the actual origins for the two characters to satisfy people's answers and also delve deeper into the world I'd created. I started by explaining Antique, I already had some idea about him being in charge of Redi's lifespan so I just developed that more until the Timekeepers were created.

Quick side note about Timekeepers. When I was younger, on my birthdays my Dad would hide my presents and give me a piece of paper with a riddle on it, I'd follow that riddle to another clue, and so on, until I found my presents. One of them was pointing to a clock, the clue was something like, "I have a face, hands, but no body". In a way, I guess my Dad was responsible for creating the Timekeepers.

Moving forward to 2012, I started writing the first draft of the story and running it by my friend Jack, who has now become a co-writer for the series. At this time, the show was made fully in Flash. I later moved onto After Effects as we had used it in the Flow project and I was keen to get more practice with it. AE let me create the snow effects in the show with ease, and also make my backgrounds a lot better with the inclusion of textures and better lighting.

After some time, I'd finished a rough version of the animation in Flash, with the original story that had some tweaks later down the line. You can find the original version here

A few members of the cast were already picked, but I had to do a lot of casting for this episode too. From past experiences, I knew of a few approaches. Seeing as this project was so big, I took them all. Newgrounds voice acting forum post, voice acting allience threads, direct contact with people, and a new method I created that has proved extremely beneficial, my own voice acting hub.

I often get messages from people asking when I'll have voice roles open, so I created a flash file including demo lines for any characters I have open for auditions, this has been a huge success and also smoothed out the process too. I included a set of instructions at the start of the file covering things like contact details, microphone quality and file format. Now that those are included, I get a lot less untitled files and such. Although people who were serious voice actors already knew these things, I still think it's fair to let less experienced people have a chance.

Now armed with a team of voice actors and a rough guide to the animation, it was time to start the animation properly. I will cover this in a future post, for now, here's a video of 10 hours of animation work sped up, just to show the time that goes into these videos. Ironically, I've been told by people who watch my Livestreams that I'm working at a fast pace too.