Flavio

So cool!
Stephen
our illustrious and talented master blogger has been kind enough to send me a drawing of Flavio he drew! It looks like I drew it. Awesome stuff! Keep it up Stephen and you will surely get your own cartoon some day!

Yesterday I had my preliminary casting meeting for Flavio, which basically means I meet with the Casting director Meredith, along with Larry our Exec. Producer and Therese, the Line producer; in this case a very nice lady and we talk about who I see playing the characters.

Meredith asked for a synopsis of the story and for me to bring pics of each character, what the style of the show was (cartoony vs.straight)
What the age of the character was and all about their personality.
It was fun discussing these made-up people as if they existed somewhere.
For Flavio we decided he was aRoberto Benigni type; super emotional young and energetic.
For Mr. Frank we all decided he was Reverend Jim
from Taxi.
Bosssman is like Tony Soprano ; loud, nasally, prone to yelling but with still a hint of compassionate.

Here is Flavio’s boss; Bossman who owns the Forget Aboutit restaurant where Flavio works.

Before I even pitched Flavio to Frederator I played around with some Flash animation so I could see if I actually liked the Italian accent and whether or not it worked.
Flavio Flash test
Mostly I guess I was trying to see whether you would be able to understand him with his accent or not. I did a small piece of Flash animation to test it. I never bothered to finish it because Frederator green-lit the short before I could. Not much point now! [Read more…]

Flavio exploded view!

So what’s my short about? Well…

Full of confidence and emotion 18-year-old Flavio is set on being a famous inventor someday. In his words: “Onea day, WHAM! Straighta to th’ top!
Oddball inventions like, Lollipop Nails, Bag of Air, The Bird Spammer and Ice Cream Cone Stander are just a glimpse into the unique way his mind thinks.
The one thing he’s not happy about is that he’s not a big famous inventor like his hero Leonardo DaVinci, who appears to him and gives him advice, his Yoda so to speak, when he gets in trouble.

Flavio works as a dishwasher/waiter at the Ferget Aboutit Pizzaria for Bossman, a rotund pig with beady eyes in a one size too small track suit. Bossman is quite out of shape and yet is always testing his pulse and checking his vitamins. In theory he should be the picture of health with his soccer playing [Read more…]

Seeing as how Flavio will have an Italian accent I thought I should make the mouth codes be pretty detailed and since I will do my own exposure sheets there should not be much confusion either.

For those of you that don’t know ( but imagine most of you do…), we have a code system we use for Lip-syncing in the Animation Industry. I believe it was invented by either Joe Barbera or William Hanna when they started shipping animation overseas and the language barrier made it a problem for the animators to lipsync dialog correctly.

The letters under the mouths do not mean the mouth position that the character is speaking but rather a code to call to it on the exposure sheets (which is what we use to time the cartoon). Usually most mouth charts only go up to Pose G but with Flavio having an Italian accent I [Read more…]