My good friend David Boostrom just completed a 4-minute animated short for the FOX/Aniboom Holiday Animation Challenge. I lent my voice to one of the characters – the dorky wizard! – and Kim did the audio recording for my work. I asked David to write down some of his thoughts about the process and lessons he learned drawing and animating a cartoon solo. You can view ‘Turkey Day’ on this site, or by visiting Aniboom here

I won’t tell you the correct way to make a cartoon. I’ll just tell you how I made mine and why I made the choices that I did (much of which was based on availability and previous experiences).

1. I wrote a script using Final Draft. Even if I was going to be the only one who was ever going to read it, using strict Hollywood formatting allowed me to roughly guess the run time of my completed project. For this contest in particular, the final run time was critical (2-4 minutes) to determine and keep in mind as early as possible.
2. I had a lot of friends read it. Was it funny? Did it make sense what I was trying to do? I asked them a lot of questions after they read it. I did another draft. And another. Then I trimmed it down from 7 pages to 5.
3. I did a solo reading and recorded it, purely to establish timing. When I discovered that I was still running long (around 5 minutes instead of four), I started making painful cuts. If I could cut even one or two words out of a sentence, I did it. Anything to get under four minutes, since adding action and credits would likely beef up the final run time later on.
4. With the script done, I did some character sketches (some were done between drafts, then refined later). Like before, I showed my sketches to others who’d read the script and got feedback (“Your gnome doesn’t have pointed ears,” “your monster isn’t scary enough,” etc.). When I had sketches I liked, I scanned them, imported them into Adobe Illustrator and traced over my sketches with colorful vector-based art. Vector art can be resized without quality loss, making it ideal for use in animation.
5. I recorded every line of dialogue myself using a basic USB microphone with a pop filter and the free Audacity software. I did at least five or ten takes for each line and I performed them as well as I could. Even though I had plans to have professionals record these parts, I knew that I might not find the right people, be able to afford them, or get the recordings back in time. These first recordings were my backup plan and they also helped me get a much closer approximation of running time.
6. Armed with my final script and my best recordings (used as direction), I had several people audition for my speaking parts. One part ended up going to a friend and one went to a voiceover artist I’ve used for commercial projects in the past. The third one I selected from Voices.com after I posted my job request there. Within 48 hours I had over 25 demos for my project and I chose the voice actor who did the best job and fit into my price range. I think it’s important to note that I spent a few hundred dollars getting these people on board. I paid all three. Having evaluated hundreds of cartoons before this point, I realized that SO MUCH of the effectiveness of your characters succeeds or fails in the vocal performance and I was willing to pay to make sure I got what I wanted.
7. All of the actors performed a demo of my script before I paid them. In fact, I was able (directed over the phone) to get multiple takes, fixes and everything I would have gotten if I had been standing in the studio with any of them. A word of advice: Don’t be shy during this stage. Pay for it and then get what you need. If it’s not right, make it right. You will probably not be able to record again with them later.
8. At this point, I collected all the sound effects I would need for the script. I made a list of every kind of footstep, door sound, punches, kicks, creaks, birds, crickets, etc. After I had a list of over 50 sound effects, I went down the list and got as many as I could for free from a variety of free sound effect vaults online. of the 50 sounds, I was able to get about 20 for free. The other 30 I bought, most of them for about a dollar or two each.
9. Armed with all of my dialogue and nearly all of my sound effects, I assembled about 90% of the entire soundtrack in Audacity. This took about two days of editing (as most sounds needed to be trimmed, volume-adjusted and pitch-corrected). I now had, essentially, the whole cartoon done in audio form.
10. At this point, I’d played out the entire cartoon in my head about 1,000 times. I knew all the camera angles and so I knew all of the backgrounds I would need behind the characters as well as the furniture and props I would need them to manipulate. I made all of these static objects.
11. Using Illustrator, I made “working models” of each of the characters. By this, I mean that I made limbs that could be rotated and moved without “breaking” the appearance of the characters. If they were going to be doing any walking, I made about 9-10 frames of that activity right then. And I made each of the characters in multiple poses and facing different directions. The idea was to avoid doing any drawing in Flash itself (which I think is harder than in Illustrator).
12. Now I animated, using the master vocal track I’d previously recorded as the way to keep myself on time and paced correctly. I copied and paced my art from Illustrator into my Flash timeline. While at first I planned to use symbols, it became obvious early on that most of my animation would have to be hand-adjusted frame by frame. I battled my own laziness throughout the project and every time I got lazy the animation suffered. More drawing made for better animation, so ultimately using Flash did save time, but it did not (by any means) do the work for me. It took about 25 hours per minute of animation.
13. For editing, I did all of my dialogue syncing FIRST, then I animated the physical bodies. Trust me that this is the easier way to go. Much easier for pasting copies of artwork you will re-use a hundred times (like mouths) if the position of your character (their heads, for instance) isn’t changing each time. For framing shots, I simply made a black “picture frame” layer above all of my animation and resized all the characters and artwork underneath it for my zooms and pans.
14. After an entire summer of weekends and weeknights making this short, I found out that I needed to export this sucker into a format that video sites could use. Flash’s export options for AVI and MOV made the video overcompressed and lose syncing with the dialogue. After days of frustration, I ended up buying a small SWF-to-FLV conversion program to get a nice high-quality FLV that Aniboom could accept (and so does YouTube, apparently).
15. There are hundreds of lessons I learned during this process that will improve my next project greatly. They could not have been learned by someone else telling me but only by doing the work myself. To use the old adage: Practice makes perfect.

Be sure to take a look at ‘Turkey Day’ and let David know what you think of the work on the Aniboom site. He’s happy to answer any questions you have about the work, hear your adulation, or accept tribute!