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Like everyone, I tend to come up with a lot of ideas that I never get around to doing. Sometimes, it’s because they’re pretty stupid ideas. So, in order to do something with them, I’m throwing them out here. If anyone wants to make these stupid ideas a reality, go for it!
Stupid Idea: So, I was watching the absolutely brilliant Stevie Washington: The Angry Youth shorts by Joe Horne the other day, and was struck by how absolutely amazing the sound design was. (The visual design is too, but that’s more to be expected in an awesome cartoon; sound design is often kind of neglected.) Joe Horne also did The Specialists from the second season of Liquid Television, which was also one of my favorites. Anyway, I hadn’t seen the Stevie Washington shorts in ages, so I forgot how cool the sound was. Lots of collage, outtakes, other stuff makes it sound really, really cool. It looks to me that both were designed together — the audio was most likely cut together first, but it looks like the design was planned from the beginning, as it really fits the visual style.ANYWAY, THE IDEA: I’d love to do a series of shorts — probably each around 2 minutes, give or take — where everything is scripted out before hand, but the animator wouldn’t know the complete story. S/he’d get the script and the audio for the current segment ONLY, and would go from there and do the design and animation for that — then once the first segment was done, s/he’d get the script/audio for the second and so forth. I wouldn’t expect to throw any curveballs in, nothing that’d be like “Oh, I wish I would have known that, because that screws up the cartoon before it” — but it’d be pretty cool.
The animator would have complete control over the visual side, and I’d have complete control over the audio side. And we’d have it come together and I think we’d end up with something really cool.
Why I Never Did It: Actually, this is a stupid idea I hope to move to the “actually done” column. The main reasons I haven’t done so yet: I just thought of it, and I don’t know an animator who’d be interested in working with me on it. In fact, um, if you’re such an animator, let’s get in touch. I don’t have anything written yet, let alone recorded, of course, but still. I would like to make this happen. I think that’d be AWESOME.