The Making of Christmas at the Hullabazoo

In early december, my dear chumette Danielle and I decided combine our skills to produce a cartoon. Luckily enough, she has a gift for cartoon-style drawing, and I had experience in the animation department (to a degree). Surely the combination of our handiwork would produce something truly inspiring!

With Christmas approaching, we decided a seasonal cartoon was a top idea. And what better place to explore the meaning of Christmas than a zoo full of talking animals! We knew it made sense to combine the two; the marriage of critters and Christmas is an inexplicably exciting notion. With a seasonal, talking-animal-starring flick on our hands, we just knew it had to be themed as if it were for children. Not in a mocking, kids'-TV type way - in more of a cute, heartwarming, brightly-coloured fashion. With this in mind, it occurerd to us that Christmas cartoons cry out for poetic narration. So it was decided - we would make a cartoon, to be released in time for Christmas, set in a zoo, starring talking animals, with a rhyming script.

The winter holidays hadn't started yet, so we were still stuck in school - might as well take advantage of the situation, we thought! Below is a page (from Danielle's maths book, I believe) of initial character ideas for the residents of the zoo. You may well recognise a few of these from the finished cartoon!

The initial page of character designs.

Some of these animals never saw the light of day, because when it came to choosing an elite crew of seven animals for the final production some of them were overshadowed by our favourites. And others were adapted into our finished set of characters. For example, Gizelda the penguin underwent a gender change, became a nerd and was renamed Urkel.

That weekend, Danielle and I spent the best part of an afternoon sat in a coffee shop, writing the poem that would serve as the narration in the film. What follows is essentially a transcript of the cartoon.

What we originally wrote was a nine-verse poem, but as you can see, it ended up with twelve verses. We added the others (the two narrating the food fight, and the closing verse) during production, when it became apparent to us that they were necessary.

We were happy with the script, so Danielle began drawing up the final character sketches. Some of the characters had been changed various times, thanks to our collaborative analysis of each and every drawing, and my slavedriving feedback ("I like it, but can you redraw it a dozen or so more times, with slightly different length toes? We really need to come to a toe-length decision - now get to work!"). This is one of my favourite drawings:

Flippin' awesome indeed, Urkel!

When we were content with each of the characters, Danielle scanned all the drawings. I imported them into Flash and redrew and coloured them, making slight tweaks along the way as I saw fit. I like to think of this method as 'digital rendering', because it makes me sound both more competent and less of a fraud than 'tracing', which is essentially all I did.

As they were required, I made requests of Danielle to provide me with the animals in various key poses, the most prominent of which was the 'asleep' pose. Thankfully she was more than up to the task of drawing every animal in a state of sweet slumber. The next two images show her drawing of a sleeping lion, and then my 'render' of the same thing.

Sketch of Sam the lion having a peaceful sleep.

Final render of Sam's napping position.

With the characters sorted, I began work recording the voices. Danielle didn't have a microphone at home and wasn't overly keen on voicing a character anyway, so I assumed the burden of voicing every character. Looking back, I'm not too happy with the narration - it doesn't have the charm a narrator should have. Still, I'm kinda fond of most of the character's voices, which were easy enough to do; a mere pitch change was enough to make most of the characters sound different enough from each other. And my personal favourite, Carlos' nondescript foreign accent.

We wanted a unique style, and I'd never seen paint used in a flash movie before, so we opted to give the cartoon painted backgrounds. I sketched out roughly what we would need for each scene, and Danielle lovingly handpainted them all using some bright colours that I have reason to believe she 'borrowed' from school (don't worry, I won't tell!). The art was then scanned in for me to optimise and import. Below is the first completed painting.

The painted background of the opening scene. Look at all that snow!

This project was made with a tight deadline, as we wanted it finished by Christmas. Because of this, there isn't a huge amount of actual character animation to be seen in the cartoon. That doesn't mean I had nothing to do as an animator, though! I don't think that the relative lack of movement in the animals dampens the cartoon in any way, so I deem it acceptable. There are enough view changes, dialogue and fresh art to be seen throughout - there wasn't much need for the animals to move, save for when they're the centre of the action. That's why the more observant of you may notice a lot of image recycling - using the same poses over and over.

I wanted this cartoon to have a well-polished feel to it, despite being rushed. I'd learned through the magic of hindsight that rough and unfinished-looking projects serve only to haunt you (I can't watch Tomsplitters all the way through without shuddering with embarrassment, and let's not even mention my earlier works, which thankfully don't appear on the site). I think working on making a nice menu helped this effect, and also I was proud of the introduction sequence with the logos (at the time I was 'Banana Milkshake' and Danielle was 'Bleach').

We didn't have to look far to find suitable music for the credits - Slade's 'Merry Christmas' fit the bill to a tee, especially as our unwritten backstory features Noddy Holder as the Hullabazookeeper. You never know, if we make more of the series some day (it's not planned, but we're not ruling it out!), you may just see Mr Holder in a promising cartoon role.

That's the basic premise behind our arduous journey from concept to conclusion (although to be perfectly honest, I've written this in a way which makes us both sound more organised and efficient than we really were).

Final versions of all seven animals!
From left to right: Urkel, Crump, Carlos, Sam, Wilson, Jake, Mike.

We intended to release the cartoon to the world on Christmas Eve. Somewhere along the line time got away from us, and before we knew it, Christmas Day was upon us! The cartoon was painfully close to finishing point, but I wasn't spending my Christmas fine-tuning an animation, so I worked myself into the ground the next day and we were proud to announce the completion of 'Christmas at the Hullabazoo' on Boxing Day! Hurrah!

- Tom Rolfe