Scream Scraper - Cancelled Animation Project

At the beginning of my second semester for my final year of university. I had planned on creating a short animated pilot episode about two friends, a geeky monkey and his simple minded poodle friend.
 The episode was going to involve the characters meeting a crazy doctor who had just created a new flavour of ice cream. The ice cream however tastes horrible and has a side effect of turning whatever consumes it into a giant monster, due to the chemical solution the doctor has used. The poodle character is established as not being a fussy eater and straight away devours the ice cream without question. Instantly he is transformed into a twenty foot monster poodle with a hunger for more food. He sees the doctor's ice cream truck and begins to pursue it around the city as the doctor tries to flee his monstrous creation. The monkey at the same time is trying to calm his friend in the hope that his friend might turn back to his normal self. The ice cream truck eventual crashes into a pond with the poodle jumping in after it. It turns out that water is the remedy to the situation, turning the poodle character back his normal self. The animation would end with a shot of a duck swimming up to another ice cream that had fallen out of the truck. the duck would then eat the ice cream, transforming it into a monster duck just before the credits roll.

 The show was intended to be child friendly and was going to be produced with a variety of different animation methods, similar to shows such as 'The Adventures of Gumball' and 'Adventure Time'. Each character would be drawn in a different way or would have been animated in 3D. All the backgrounds were also going to be rendered in 3D, just like in my previous animation for Dejaview.
 I started creating assets for the animation very early on but I soon realized that the scope of what I wanted to create was going to be impossible to do within the time constraints that I had. However not all the assets I created were useless. I managed to salvage a lot of the work and use it for other smaller animations that I created instead. I still might go back and finish this animation one day but currently I'm busy with different projects. I think I would have seen this project all the way through if I had the whole year to work on it but because of the 'Throwing Dirt' music video I didn't think I would've had time to make something up to my standards. Below are concept images of characters and locations that I created for the project.

Above are concepts for Dr Boulderham, the crazy doctor. I managed to get him fully rigged in flash as a puppet. I felt he had the most potential as a memorable character as he wasn't necessarily evil but just misunderstood.
 Below is the concept for what would've been the monkey character. Originally I wanted the character to be a skater dog but I felt that character might have been a bit too cliche and boring. I never settled on a final design for the protagonist unfortunately. I found myself constantly dreaming up new sub characters and episodes that could surround them instead.  

Above is the concept for the protagonist's best friend, the poodle. This character was going to animated with a very similar aesthetics to the bear character from the previous Dejaview music video. I knew I wanted at least one character to be done using frame by frame animation and I didn't know exactly how many characters I was going to feature in the pilot. So I decided a main character should be animated in a style I was familiar with.

 Here is an early 3D model of the ice cream truck the doctor would have been driving during the episode. I did the rough build in of the model in 'Sketchup' and was then later going to texture and fine tune the model within Maya. The horrific colour scheme on the truck was intended to make uv mapping a little bit easier down the line. I never got that far so unfortunately the truck remains ugly.
 Below are some screenshots of the city I was building for the animation. The idea was create the main layout  for the city straight away and then be able to use it for later episodes, adding new locations as the show went along. I had already done a lot work modelling and texturing the city. Although I don't think I'll use the model for anything now, (as it was far too big to accommodate simple scene navigation or rendering) I did use a lot of the textures I'd created for other projects however which has saved me a lot of stress and time.