So I've decided to give away all of our secrets on how we make cartoons. Just kidding. I won't give them ALL away, but I thought it would be interesting to some of our toon fans to show how a cartoon is made  from start to finish. We're going to use "The Holiday Hijack" as our subject for today. The first thing we do is form a gathering between myself and the PTB (powers-that-be) which is usually done online or over the phone. At this point, we basically brainstorm and come up with some ideas that we think will make a really killer cartoon. Usually one or more of us will throw together an initial script in a Word document. This document is then passed around and we do a little tweakin' here and there and the final result is usually pretty close to what the final result will be. You'll notice in the screen shot to the right, that there's mention of Thanksgiving instead of Christmas. Well that's because we couldn't get it out in time for Thanksgiving so we made a whole new Thanksgiving toon and re-wrote this one for Santa.

The next step is usually character design. If we have any new characters or anything, I'll sketch some mock  ups and we will determine if they'll do or not. This is a pretty fun stage because I get to go a little nuts and bring these characters/creatures to life and give them a little personality. These sketches are usually kinda messy and are pretty much the equivalent of a doodle.

Once we've got a general idea of what everyone is going to look like, I move to the storyboarding stage.  This is done in Illustrator and I sketch the scenes out right on the screen of the Wacom Cintiq that I use. This makes the process so much easier because I don't have to deal with eraser crumbs, scanning and having to redraw whole scenes. Every storyboard looks different and I use all different kinds of techniques to produce them, so the process is still pretty laid back and sketchy at this time. The storyboards are not very detailed and basically have the general elements of the storyline.

Next is the creation of the characters. In this case the LoadGremlin sketch was pasted into Adobe  Illustrator CS2 and placed on a lower layer and locked. Next I basically trace the character using the pen or pencil tool. Color is added along with shading and anything else necessary for the character. If the character is going to talk, walk, give a high-five, blink, or drop kick a dude, then all of the extremes or details need to be produced. Some of these things can be done later in Flash, but I prefer to do them in Illustrator so I have everything safely tucked away in one file and plus I can work faster in AI. The color profile needs to be sRGB so the colors don't get jacked up when you export the characters in swf format.

Now a cool part of this process is the creation of the backgrounds for the scenes. Since I sketched the  backgrounds in Illustrator, I can copy those sketches onto another file that I will use to eventually export to Flash. I trace the backgrounds just like I would a character and export them all as swfs. Now we've got all the building blocks to create the next toon! This next part is fun and fun-ny! This is where we record the voices for the cartoon. It's actually a pretty  amazing process, no one is in the same room when the recordings happen. They're all recorded from different locations depending on who is doing the voice. I will usually do all my voices first. I do the voice for Guy, the Boss, all the Gremlins (oh yea, that's me) and any other 'made up' characters that no one else wants to do. All of the other people who appear in the cartoon do their own voices - and, they work for Load! The only three fictional characters who are Load employees are 'The Boss', 'Guy' and 'Eva' the LoadGremlins and LoadGnomes are real and do a fantastic job. I do all my voices when I am alone because it is highly embarrassing and ridiculous. We use a nice little app for voice recording called Goldwave, it's pretty cheap and does a really great job. The resulting sound files are imported into Flash and a soundtrack is born. For special effects I use my voice and whatever stuff I have laying around my office that I can clunk around or make noise with. In the Easter Toon, when Adam eats the Easter egg; I actually was eating a real chocolate Easter egg. And because of the exceptional quality we strive for here at Load.com, I ended up doing 32 takes because that's all the chocolate - I mean I wanted it to be right.

So once all of the images and sound are done, it's time to throw this bad boy together. The entire process to create a toon can take from three days to around two weeks, depending on the final length of the toon. There's a lot of hard work and painstaking animation that has to happen to get everything just right. We make it look easy here at Load, but this process is finely tuned and we can pull these toons off in a relatively short amount of time. The rest of the animation process is very detailed and would take way too long to discuss here.

Voice synching is one of the most time consuming parts of the process. This is where you need to match the mouth of the character to audio track in Flash. There are software applications out there that can do  this on the fly, but I am not that impressed with their quality. I think the best way to do it is to go old school and match the mouth to the audio, one frame at a time. This is the best way to ensure that every syllable is exact. For example, Guy has over 14 different phonemic mouth shapes to make him say pretty much everything. If he is angry, upset, sad or his expression changes, an entirely new set of these mouths must be constructed. Is it a total pain in the rear? You bet?  Since we animate at 30 frames per second, each second of animation can feature up to 20 different changes in the character's mouth. My technique for animating these characters is to animate the entire head first. The head, each eye, eybrows, eyelids, hair, the mouth, everything that moves is on it's own frame and is animated indepentently and synched with the soundtrack. Every head is placed inside of a Flash graphic and not a Flash movie clip, that way I can see the actual animation as I scrub the timeline when outside of the graphic and so that we can more easily convert these cartoons to other formats other than Flash, like for TV, DVD and other media.

After a head is complete, then we move on to animate other body parts. I nest all of the body parts inside eachother for convenience. For example, let's say we have three main graphics, Guy's head (Guy_head),  upper torso (Guy_uppertorso) and lower body (Guy_lowerbody). These are all nested inside one main graphic called "Guy_body" inside this graphic, you will find a new timeline and two graphics, the upper torso and lower body. "But Steve, what about Guy's head???" Don't worry my friend, Guy's head is nested inside the upper torso, I'll explain why. Since I've already animated the facial features of the head, the head needs to move now, since in real life, we don't all talk with stiff  necks; we move around. So, you double click the upper torso and you now have a new timeline on which we move the head around, back and forth, up and down to create further expression. then we back out of that graphic and move the entire torso around so as the whole torso is moving, the head is bobing and the facial features are moving at the same time, tadaaaaa. If that wasn't enough, we back out of THAT graphic and are back to the main time line. Now we can move the entire body (Guy_body) around slightly so that some of the movement appears on the legs as well, thus creating the illustion of life in a 2D character. It works pretty well.

Usually, at the end of a cartoon, I'll throw in some Easter Eggs just for kicks. They are usually outtakes of  our recording screwups or Adam Rogas singing hip hop songs in his George W. Bush voice, and it's pretty dang hilarious. When we're all done, the final cartoon is then put live at LoadToons.com which you can get to by clicking on the LoadToons link, right here at Load.net. The entire process is really fun and we get quite a kick out of producing our own custom cartoons, right in house. Most of all, we love to share them will all of you and hear your feed back. We have some great stuff planned for the future so keep checking back and drop us any funny ideas if you have them, we love to involve the input of others in the toon-making process.