Stephen P Neary

here's the youtube embed for toxie:

I drew some original sketches, thinking toxie could maybe be a turtle. Because I love turtles.

Still have Toxie coughing up change and all that.

But we decided to go in more of a monster direction to keep with the feel of the first animation. I think it ended up being a better design anyhow. More of a mischievous gremlin-type character.

from there I started building models for everything. Lots of hand-drawn elements scanned and puppeted in after effects. For me this is the fastest way to work. Also I animated a stock bounce that could be reused and adjusted into lots of different scenes:

At the same time, I'm thumbnailing story boards to the audio track:

Then cleaning these ideas up into boards for an animatic. I try to keep the boards clean enough to serve as really bad layouts for animation, but loose enough to draw quickly.

Then I just animate the after effects model over the boards. the finished still is below.

All in all we had a little over 3 weeks to do everything. 1 week for boards, 1/2 for models, and the rest of the time to animate.