It's been far to long. The waiting, and the wishing - it is high time that we, as fans of D.C. Simpson's genius artwork, create a stunning, masterful, glorious animated tribute. Yes, I want to put together an animated O&M feature. I do not know how long or short it will be, and I don't know what it will be about, yet. All I know is that I've got a lot of drive and I'd really love to see this made. But I need help.
What kind of help? Loads of it! We need animators, researchers, writers, and - oh yes - VOICE ACTORS! So please reply here if you'd like to help out, and how you can help. I'll go over in detail the steps that we'll need in order to complete this project.
Phase one -
We'll need to find voice actors, writers, story board artists, and brainstorm-ers! I'll be the director (unless D.C. decides to get involved...you never know!) but even as the director, I want people to give criticism, and to be open and honest. Everyone will get his or her voices heard.
The first decision to make, I suppose, would be this: shall we write an original storyline, or should we take a beloved storyline from the comic strips and rewrite it for an animated short? Also we need to decide, will this be flash, or traditional hand drawn animation in AVI or MOV format? If we decide to go the flash route, I can help - I have flash MX and I can draw, but I'm not well versed in that program. I could make the sketches and we could have animators bring them to life in Flash; the same way artists would create the puppets for the animators to move and photograph for "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and other stop motion animated features. However, we need some flash peoples who've got flash skillz. If you can help, please let me know! Making this in Flash would be much easier and much quicker - but if we have to go full on traditional hand animation, that's fine. We'll pull it off.
So basically, right now, we need these people -
Voice actors (I'll provide a list of characters down at the bottom)
Writers
Story Board Artists
Creative people willing to brainstorm!
I can post all of the files up on my website so that we can share our stuff... and I could also open up a GMail account for us to use so we can stay in touch and easily share our work. If this first animated short is successful, we will probably get goaded into making more (hopefully!) so we need to stay in touch.
Phase two, three, four, and so on, will all include - animating, recording sound effects, writing music, and creating special effects like text and so on. There will be much more, too, but I can't think of them all and list them all at once. If you feel like you can contribute, but you aren't sure how - just go ahead and jump on the bandwagon and have fun. This won't be perfect, but it doesn't have to be! It just has to be fun and the best you can do!
Now then - about the voice acting, we're going to need quite a few roles fulfilled. The voices needed will vary depending on the storyline, but we absolutely must have the voices for these characters before we begin production -
Millie
Ozy
Llewellyn (one I'd like to try out for)
Ms. Mudd
Various Misc. Characters (the characters I'll probably mostly fill in for!)
I personally would love to try out for Llewellyn and/or Captain Locke (if needed) but we'll see how that turns out. I'll upload some voice samples of myself, later. If I could be Ozy, I would be ecstatic, but I don't know if I'd sound too old for everyone to handle. We'll see!
Have a microphone? Awesome! Got some recording software? Great! Try reading some lines from various O&M strips and post them here... if you can't post them anywhere online, send them to my email address here - mandoandy (at) gmail (dot) com - and I will host it on my website for you. If you have a mic but no software to record with, check out "Audacity" - it's a free recording program, but I've never touched it, so I can't help you with it. Google it!
Do yourself a favor, though... be realistic. If all of your sound files are REALLY low quality and can't be heard, or can't be used in the animation, then... well, things probably won't work out for you. But keep trying anyways! There will be many people who will be needed to help with lots of things!We'll all decide together who plays who... as for the other positions that need to be filled (sound effects/animators/etc.) I'll be posting info later on, so keep checking back for new stuff!
And remember - spread the word!! Tell everyone you know about this, and tell them to tell everyone THEY know about it! If you can't help, find someone who can, and bring them here! =) I think I might start looking around www.newgrounds.com for people who can help. If anyone feels like contacting D.C. and getting him excited about this, then go ahead! That would be a huge help! And remember... the more people you tell about this... even if they don't want to help, we'll all be spreading the infectious Ozy and Millie bug! Huzzah!
Please help if you can! I'd love to get things started soon! Send me a message or give me an email if you've got questions or anything else to say! Or just post it here! Well guys, what do you say?
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And let us know when you've finished that music video - sounds cool!
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Thanks osprey!!!! I've sent you an email!
so I must be patient! You shall all hear my voice soon enough!
