A few weeks ago I was given an interesting project by my boss. It was to create a promo for Staria, a comic strip character that has been around for over 20 years in Australia and published in the Daily Telegraph. She's a "space babe" in the vein of Barbarella. You can see that she has considerable "assets". She's got a good sense of humour, and considerable combat skills - she gets to fight baddies and monsters!
The purpose of the promo is to introduce Staria as a potential cartoon for release on TV. I've got no idea if there is a market for such a show, but then again I noticed that "Stripperella" (based on Pamela Anderson) is now airing on free-to-air TV.
So the promo I was asked to cut had to introduce Staria, her side-kicks, and a couple of villains and monsters - whilst maintaining the mood and style of the original comic strip. I had access to 5 full stories, from which I could choose the black and white animation cells for the promo. I was to write a script, record a guide voice track and put it all the selected cells together! Once my offline edit was approved, it would be recreated by our 3D department, in order to finish the promo as a full moving colour animation.
Anyway, this has been an ongoing project for me, to fit in amongst everything else I do at work, and it's been a really challenging and fun exercise! The most hilarious thing was editing in the characters' lines, and I credit one of my editing assistants Nat who took full charge of this and cast various work colleagues in the roles! She got young Nicoletta to voice Staria and she did a superb job even though she was not convinced she could do it! Nat also does a killer Russian-slash-French accent for one of the female villains...let me know if you require such a voice talent....
The producer who has commissioned this through my work, was thrilled with the offline edit last week, and now we have a meeting with the original illustrator Roger this Thursday. I really hope he likes it. I can imagine it would be quite scarey for him, seeing his creation come to life in the video format. Fingers crossed.
4 comments:
Wow, that sounds like a ridiculously cool job, getting to shape the look & even story line of the whole thing, & drawing out the untapped talents of your co-workers hehe, fun.
give the cartoonist some of that icecream cake, coz, first comes the tv animated series, and later the live action movie starring Jude Law (with a boob job). You KNOW you want to edit that stage too ;)
wow your job is so much more fun than mine. I am working on a construction brochure and this afternoon I am attending a good time management course...boring!!!!!
Rani when you come home we will have to make Andrew find some of the ice-cream cakes for us to eat yum yum :)
yer it's been pretty fun working on Staria :) my work colleagues could not believe i was getting paid to read comic strips for a couple of days. i then knew how Margaret and David must feel, as well as all those tv presenters of getaway-type shows....
i will hunt down those ice-cream cakes, and we can have a feast and feel sick, but sated afterwards....
You're on. Though, I'll be on the soy ice-cream, maybe 3 or 4 flavours should be almost enough. I'm gonna eat so much soy food that I'll come back to Japan as one big soy bean! mmmmmh tomato & cheese toasted grilled sandwiches with fresh oregano, salt and pepper...drool...
Post a Comment