Channel Frederator Blog

Episode 73

A new one this week from Channel Frederator featured favorites, “Mukpuddy! The word “stomping” is mentioned 47 times in this video, plus, “When you bang your head to this there’s no need to player hate”. You can check out some of Mukpuddy’s other work on Channel Frederator Episode 18 and Episode 56

Tim, Ryan, Alex, and Jeremy comprise The Muks”, and unfortunately, I’m never sure which one is answering the interview questions…their goodness all melts together. So I’m going to toss a coin. Ryan, you’re it! If I’m wrong, let me know!

MELISSA: What was your creative process in creating this short? How did you come up with the idea? How do you know the musician?

RYAN: “Stompin” was the first major project Mukpuddy picked up (in 2003) after finishing our 4 years of animation training. Mukpuddy had been going for about a year, trying to make waves in the web cartoon world, when we met Samoan musician/rapper “King Kapisi” at a New Zealand comic con. He had always wanted an animated music video and we were the chaps to do it. We pretty much had complete creative freedom on the video, so our crazy animator brains went into overdrive, hense the idea got way too big really fast. We wanted to have King Kapisi as this kind of Universal Hero, who travelled from place to place defeating monsters, aliens and other such bad folk. By the time we had all our ideas down on paper we had enough to make a feature length Michael Bay-esque music video……but it had to be 4mins……oops! We managed to narrow the ideas down to our 3 top scenarios, storyboarded the video, made an animatic and then split the sections up between us. We made this vid back before we really had a grasp of Flash, so we did the whole thing traditionally.

MELISSA: How long did it take you to make this?

RYAN: From initial concept to finished video was about 4 months. Which sounds crazy to us now, as we churn out an 3 minute episode of our show Sparkle Friends in a week. That’s slave labour for you!

MELISSA: What do you do when you get stuck creatively?

RYAN: We’ve always got along really well, we’ve been friends for over 8 years, so working has always been like a bunch of pals hanging out, so if ever we get stuck creatively, we stop and maybe tell some stupid stories, muck around for a bit, play a game and it usually ends in us all fairly re-invigorated. It’s 100% a team effort with everything we do at mukpuddy from writing to animating, so no one thing is really ever lumped on one person (except for Alex who is kept in a cage until he finishes drawing).

MELISSA: Who are some of the artists who have influenced you?

RYAN: That list could be a mile long, so here’s just a sample of the few who really get us motivated. There’s the obvious greats Mary Blair, Jim Henson, Chuck Jones, Walt Disney, Genndy Tartakovsky, Ward Kimball, Ed Benedict etc. But lately we are truely inspired by heaps of the artists who have amazing blogs out there like Lou Romano, Nate Wragg (and numerous other Pixar folk), Todd Kaufman, Paul Watling, Miah Alcorn, Anna Chambers, Mike Kunkel, Ben Balistreri, Saxton Moore, Peter Michail, etc, etc, etc,…..
Most recently we’ve been really digging on all the stuff the El Tigre team of genius artists have been blogging, guys like Steve Lambe, Gabe Swarr and Dave Thomas have a tonne of cool stuff to check out on their blogs!

MELISSA: What program did you use to animate this?

RYAN: Everything was animated and cleaned up by hand, then scanned in and put together in Flash. Old schoooool! That is sooooo 2003!

MELISSA: What was the most challenging part of the video to animate? What is your favorite part?

RYAN: It would have to be the zooming through the city intro. Even though there’s no real animation going on, it was an epic scene to put together and there were a few times when we weren’t even sure it was going to work. Our fave part? That’s a tough one, we are always quite critical of our older work, and there are things about Stompin’ that make us cringe (particularily the pacing), but the break-dancing nerd still tickles our bits.

MELISSA: What other projects are you working on now?

RYAN: Right now we are working on a 2nd series of Sparkle Friends. It’s heaps of fun, we’re spending a little more time on each scene, whilst still limited animation (thanks to our crazy 1 ep a week schedule) it’s a massive improvement over the first series (which you can see here ) . We pushed ourselves to go a little crazier story wise and humour wise, which is why you’ll see such wonderul sights as a pissed off chicken fetus, a beatboxing dinosaur, a pirate who cant determine gender, a singing french bread stick and so on…..

Guys, you’re the best. Thanks so much for your continued support!!

Melissa