And so it all started...

Greetings people. This is going to be a blog about an animation project being produced out of good old Wolverhampton in the UK. Looking around me every day I saw a sea of wonderful people; friends, family, work colleagues, but saw all these people surrounded by a dark, grey city that had no ambition and seemingly no hope. I had an idea for an escape, a thought of my own set of characters and stories.

It probably started when I first created an 'animation' in PowerPoint at work using pictures robbed from Google image search and our 'people directory' of faces and made several little 5-10 minute stories. They had no sound, instead the speech was provided in text bubbles and as the images were composited using MS Paint it had little finesse. They were a pastiche of the A-Team and entertained people so I continued to make these little stories until predictably, management stepped in and I was not allowed to make or send them any more.

I then created the idea in my head for a series of characters and a premise for a cartoon. I jotted some of these ideas down but then never went anywhere with them and then something happened. Maybe it was the relentlessly depressing tone of a home town that I perversely still love or maybe it was that I'm now part of the management team that had stopped my fun in the past but I decided I needed to start writing again.

After a break of several years and after one very caffeine-fuelled day at work I sent the following insane message to my friend on 18th March 2008. It was entitled: "the ramblings of a mad man.txt". Here it is in all its insane madness (spelling mistakes included…):


"My idea is very simple - I want to write my own long-running animation show. Initially it would probably be say, a 20 minute pilot but this would purely be enough to set up the characters and scenarios for a full series.

I want me and whoever I get involved to be rich and famous and to be able to look back on their lives and say "I made that". That was my contribution to the world and everyone else will damn well know about it. Like we said, I'm tired of procrastination. I'm tired of daydreaming. I'm tired of answering the fucking phone to a bunch of ungrateful cunts who get paid more than I ever fucking will if i carry on the way I'm going. I want to bring the schoolfriends back together and create something unique. I want to be able to meet Chris Morris some day and say "I made something that can stand up with the kind of stuff you did". I appreciate this may be difficult but I'm not in the mood to think through the technicalities of it all right about now.

My idea is something I've had for a very long time and I want it to create our own little world of characters and places that will be as recognisable as Springfield, Peckham, Fawlty Towers or Quahog. I want to create a british animation that will stand up to anything America has produced and be as globally accepted as them. I want it to have it's own look and feel, something you can buy into, no matter how ridiculous and absurd it is because people care about the pixels moving about on their TV screen as much as they care about their own friends and colleagues.

As for the actual animation itself, I want to move away from the family-based/school based animations that seem to have become de-rigeur these days. Sicne Family Guy i can't think of anything truly distinctive, nothing that has captured my attention. I've tried to get into Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Robot Chicken and various other non-animation based comedies (the IT crowd, etc) but nothing has jumped out at me. I see no other choice than to take matters into our own hands.

I want to base a comedy around a group of friends (and enemies) who are in their twenties, much like us. There's no point writing about something if you haven't experienced it. Yes, I intend to have wacky moments and flashbacks, that's part of the visually explosive nature of animation, the fact that you CAN do things that you couldn't do in real-life but I still want it to be based around reality.

I want it to draw on a wide range of influences, from stuff like Family Guy and South Park to non-animated comedies like Only Fools, Brass Eye and Monty Python. I want the look of the series to draw heavily on the main character, in that it will have a distinctly Mexican/generic Latin look to it, even though the surroundings are familiar. I want it to be easy on the eye so it draws people in with beatiful lighting and character animation but lock people in once they're in by firstly having a lot of jokes in it, and secondly by having storylines and character development that make sense. I want it ultimately to have a natural end. I don't want to see my characters wearing the same blue shorts and orange T-shirt and staying the same age for 20 years. I want to have character ageing and storyline progression that you would see in something like Only Fools and Horses. Births, deaths, weddings, relationships, hatred and all the other wonderful little things that crop up in life. That's the kind of thing that will help us to stand out. It's almost as if it's a sort of statement: Yes, we're pretending it's real but you know ultimately that it's not but you don't care, you buy into it because you can appreciate being in those situations.

I want the humour to be brutal at times, I want it to deliberately shock people to get their attention, but I also want it to have it's silly moments as there's many different moods you can be in and comedy doesn't have a defining style, it needs to adapt to survive. I want it to have sad, poignant moments in it but are always rooted back in comedy. I like to think that no matter what happens I can always raise a smile or a laugh to something and I'd like the animation to reflect that.

I hope this makes sense, I know it's very vague but I think of it more as some kind of manifesto. I will come to you with more actual character descriptions, locations (probably more your side of things) and actual plot lines. I have an idea for main A and B storylines and some jokes that would fit but I need to get these all down together, so I'll keep you posted.

Cheers for listening to my insane stream of consciousness, it's very much appreciated.


P.S. - I'm provisionally going to title it: "The Cautionary Tales of Esteban Sanchez and Others". Rolls off the fucking tongue, don't it?""

So that was that. Luckily my friend was thinking the same things, albeit slightly less psychotically REDRUM as my stream of consciousness, but he too wanted to do something. A plan was formed, which I'll talk about tomorrow.

For now, take a look at some of my friend's animation ideas here: http://chulk607.blogspot.com/