HI! This blogpost goes into the production of Jay’s Day from the start till the end in excruciating detail– Of course if you haven’t seen Jay’s Day this will make no sense, so check out the toon if you haven’t already!
and if you haven’t read the first one of these I wrote, you can do that here!
POST-UNDERGROUND
After Underground released I was at sort of an impasse on what I wanted to do next. Spending two years on another 11 minute episode just didn’t seem viable or fulfilling– I had way too many ideas for these characters and this world, and a lot of things I wanted to say and develop further. The idea of doing significantly shorter episodes didn’t really appeal to me either, on the basis that working around a predetermined runtime immediately feels restrictive-- you’re not able to fully explore things as they naturally develop.
When you look at the landscape of independent animation you don’t really see many guys that are putting out cartoons somewhat often, all longform original work, and also not utilizing rigs in some capacity. The only dude at the time I was conscious of doing so was @aaron-long, so I reached out to him for advice. He introduced the idea of “chainsmoking” your projects– having a little bit of the next one started before you finish the first one. This helps keep a more consistent momentum and mitigate the slump you get after finishing a long piece of work. This was pretty formative in the way I handle ratbasterdz currently. (If you read this, thanks Aaron!)
I think prior to this I was forcing myself to think within a structure, like it had to be another 10 minutes and tell an equally ambitious story because that’s what we established with the first one. Knowing from the get-go that you’re working on something larger than a standalone piece, you can develop the story bit by bit across multiple episodes, build ideas concurrently, or focus on weird specific ideas that you wouldn't think of when trying to write a standard episode. In explaining it to me Aaron compared it to songs on an album which has really stuck with me. An album has room for experimental songs, heavy songs, upbeat songs, etc…and they all culminate in something bigger than the sum of it’s parts. I felt like this also was the best utilization of our format as an internet cartoon. The beauty of doing it all yourself even down to the distribution is that you don’t HAVE to subscribe to any structure for how you do things.
I had also decided that I wanted to make the move back to Flash after moving away from it 7-8 years ago. Partially for ethical reasons, partially for practical reasons.
Flash was and is THE program for DIY animation. To what degree this matters I dont know, but as I looked back on my own history with animation I couldn’t help but feel bad for abandoning flash! While it's not without flaws, I taught myself to animate with it as a kid, and the majority of the web animation that has stayed with me was created using it. I’m very much endeared to it, it carries a lot of history and inadvertently embodies a spirit of creation you don’t really see anymore.
Marty's video Artifacts really pushed me back into being a Flash guy too, if you haven’t checked that out yet please do. Major thanks to both him and @mikecarf for continually taking time to help me get reacquainted with Flash and teaching me so many new things about it. At first I was fretting about losing the lineart style– but I look back at Underground now, and for being a cartoon that intends to be rough looking, it’s still pretty clean. I feel like this crusty flash brush really gives the drawings the dirty, chaotic feeling I’ve wanted. It’s difficult to train yourself to draw in, largely because to get the brush texture, the wacom pen firmness has to be turned all the way up. It’s kind of like drawing with a leaky pen or something, it takes a different approach.
I knew if I was going to get all these episodes done I was going to have to limit my animation a bit more. This felt like the perfect episode to experiment with because Jay is such a slow, stiff character to begin with. Underground was supposed to be my attempt at limiting my animation– which is very funny looking back on because there’s so many goddamn cushion frames. I look at how much time I spent doing near exact traces of the keyposes, and while it looks nice, I feel like as an independent there’s a lot better ways I could utilize my time. Which is the sort of lens I try and look through now– realistically examining the position of an independent animator and gearing how you create around the limitations. That can mean different things for different creators. For example, I logistically don’t think cleanup is a worthwhile use of time if it can be avoided– it adds another eight months onto production redoing work with “nicer” lines, a superficial thing that isn’t indicative of a better drawing at all. But maybe your style is super graphic and clean– for you, that might mean gearing your work around the overall design so that the material is still visually engaging with less drawings overall.
Point being, there’s literally nothing stopping you from making a cartoon however the f*ck you want as long as you hold your work to a certain standard. Animation style can change drastically from shot to shot– put a couple shots on eights and another on twos, draw the characters differently every time, embrace weird idiosyncrasies of your process. If anything it all adds more personality, which is what we need more of in animation. Within the landscape of independent work I’ve seen this sort of shift towards chasing what appears as “TV Quality” animation or some sort of studio-level consistency, which is totally missing the point. “Indie” is supposed to exist as an alternative, giving people something authentic where mainstream entertainment fails to. Instead we’re seeing it turned into what is essentially its own mock industry. Trying to achieve the same look/mirror the practices and behaviors of that system should not be desirable or the end goal. Even within alternative schools of thought there’s these sorts of structures people seem to adhere to either out of habit or fear or conservatism. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, but I feel like on this project I really started to think outside of habit and structure, and I’m looking forward to pushing further on the next episodes.
I tried to seek out what unique and creative limited animation offerings there were out there for inspiration. Marty and @shufflehound put me onto a bunch of good stuff, one of which being the animation of Tissa David. Specifically I was thinking about her work on the Electric Company, having a certain set number of drawings and reusing them in unusual patterns. A lot of her animation is all “important” poses pushed in really interesting ways with no inbetweens or cushions– I still want to take a crack at animating more extreme stuff with that philosophy, or some of the stuff Trigger does– but this episode tonally didn’t feel like the right fit. I took a lot of inspiration from the general philosophy anime implements too– where it’s really only the important shots, or when there’s a specific movement or timing in mind, that are given the works. I tried to sandwich more static shots between more animated ones, and even when things do get relatively static, to try to inject a little something here and there to keep things visually interesting. I studied what moved and when in work that inspired me, and how things were layered. @speedo also gave me a rundown on how he times and spaces his animation. He’s got some of the most appealing limited animation out there in my opinion and works crazy fast. Through his advice I started to get more comfortable with incorporating longer frame counts, and really thinking if each motion needed 15 drawings to convey an simple action, or if 2 strong keys with a couple support frames could achieve the same effect.
Through watching the Bridge Kids process over the years, I recognized there’s certain places where incorporating symbols would speed up my process exponentially. I fretted a lot on if incorporating even the faintest approximation of rigged animation was somehow in compromise to the look/ethics. What I realized is that it only has that effect if you let it– you can use relevant bits sparingly as a way to speed up the true tedium, in turn giving you more time to direct focus to the truly creative and interesting parts of the process.
With certain shots where I could tell we could get a lot of mileage out of a little, I’d create mouth/eye packs tailored for that specific key drawing of the shot, still breaking them and doing unique iterations when a sound/motion called for it. In the past I’d draw the entirety of the lip sync straight ahead, only rarely reusing mouth drawings towards the end of a shot– which frankly feels like a colossal goddamn waste of time in retrospect-- I’d redraw the same near-identical “E” shape mouth 30 times over, and then do that again for every single mouth shape. Pencil mileage is real and I can’t think how many hours this has probably saved me. I’m still very neurotic about things looking organic and don’t like to use these more than when necessary, and don't reuse these assets between shots. I like each shot having it’s own unique drawing that’s more reminiscent of whatever I originally drew in the storyboard than any sort of standardized character model.
There were moments where I began to doubt myself along the way, whether or not limiting my animation orincorporating mouth packs was somehow in compromise to what Ratbasterdz stands for to me. An analogy Marty shared with me that really changed my perspective on it all, I will now share with you in hopes it helps someone out there:
As an artist you need to fail in different directions. Imagine getting good at something is like shooting arrows at a target:
If you’re a perfectionist, you’re likely to miss in the same way every time– detailing things to a fault, excessive rigidity, leaving projects unfinished. This is like shooting your arrow too far to the left.
If you’re more about production speed, you’re also likely to miss in the same way every time– rushing things, lacking care/attention to detail, subpar results. This is like shooting your arrow too far to the right.
You have to analyze what type of artist you are, and adjust your aim accordingly. Meaning that you’re being fast and sloppy as often as you’re being slow and methodical. Even if you're still off the mark, you’re closer to hitting the target than you would’ve been, had you kept shooting your arrow in the same direction. Each adjustment nudges you a bit closer to the bullseye.
Thinking about the cartoon from this perspective made me realize, hey, even if this doesn’t come together the way I want, I’d just need to adjust my arrow left again next time.
JAY’S DAY
Early on when I pitched "chainsmoking" to @pjorg, he mentioned “What does Jay do all day” as an example of how much freedom we had approaching the project with this mentality. Ironically, Jay’s Day was the last of the episodes wrote. The Jay-centric episode originally was “Jay Gets Sober”. There were some funny moments in that one but it felt too much like a cartoon trope, a waste of potential. We cannibalized the good parts of that and put it into what is probably my favorite Ratbasterdz thing we’ve written– which won’t be featured in this current batch, but regardless of where the project goes once these episodes are done, I’ve promised myself I will see through to completion. Without either of these the batch felt a little empty. Jay’s Day sort of came about out of that– the “what does jay do all day” idea stuck around in the back of my brain and it just felt natural. It exemplified what we wanted to do with these episodes: taking it in wildly different directions with the core focus of authentically fleshing out the world and characters. It was a simple premise with a lot of potential to build both Jay and Bluxton county, and it felt like the perfect follow up to Underground in that it establishes immediately what our intent going forward is.
In tone and pacing I wanted it to be incredibly slow, to the point of it being excruciating at times, to mirror Jay as a character. One of my biggest regrets on Underground is cutting out a giant chunk of silence in the car ride scene that was there to emphasize how f*cking awkward it was. Whenever I showed people the boards it wasn’t landing, so I cut it down– but in retrospect, that’s kind of the point! I should’ve been more okay with making people sit with being uncomfortable. On this one I decided to let each pregnant pause and drawn out sentence last as long as it needed to, and even up until the final render I was adding seconds onto certain pauses. This was the root cause of one of my biggest concerns during the production of this episode– that it was too slow, too much of a departure from the first episode, etc….which suddenly felt insanely stupid once I saw it play in front of an audience at the premiere, in that moment I realized it’s honestly more gag-driven than Episode 1 was. Something I have continually noticed about each project I do is that the elements I am the most unsure of in the trenches of making it end up being the strongest parts in the end.
The intent of this episode more than any of the others was to flesh out Bluxton County as a location. I feel like the location is central to everything about Ratbasterdz and that's something I didn't fully highlight in Underground. I spent a lot of time on google maps and driving around taking reference pics to try and solidify what is authentically the south. The characters were also very specifically referenced in that way. I went through family’s facebook friends of friends and found people that fit certain visual archetypes I had in mind, then tried to find what were the most distinguishing characteristics that I saw amongst all these people, and did a bunch of passes caricaturing them into my animal designs.
MONTAGE
The purpose of the montage in this episode was a direct extension of this idea. The first iteration of this segment was radically different– it featured a slower paced song with Jay slowly walking from background to background, eventually tripping, falling, and rolling through several more locations. I think I went on autopilot when I did this, and after sitting with it I found that I’d mentally tune out every time that segment came on, which to me is always a sign you need to redo some sh*t. Jay’s actions weren’t really funny or interesting enough on their own and the locations were all sort of breezed through with not enough focus placed on them.
The final draft of the montage began as a series of brainstorm sessions with Marty. He came up with the idea to have it instead focus entirely on backgrounds with little to no character animation, other than the occasional denizen of Bluxton County to help characterize it more. We'd only see Jay at the beginning and at the end, almost like we're seeing it through his eyes. It'd be way slower and let you live in the world with them for a minute. I really took to this as I felt like that's something Hideaki Anno does in his work a lot that I've always resonated with. I spent a lot of time studying the way he composes the "empty" and more candid shots in his work when I started re-boarding it– even in the live-action footage I tried to lean into that.
At some point I said something like "I wish I could just do that Bakshi thing where he animated characters over live action footage", and it clicked, I could totally just do that. I had the benefit of living like a half hour away from where a real life "Bluxton County" could be, it suddenly felt very silly that i'd never thought to utilize that. Throughout all the early stages of this cartoon Marty and I had been geeking out on weird and experimental media, which was also a big push in the direction of wanting to do something more out-there. I remember being concerned about whether or not it'd be too disorienting-- this was one of those big moments where I started to think about fully utilizing that we are free of any pre-established format for how a cartoon has to operate. In that, f*ck it, maybe it will be weird and disorienting, lets give it a try and see what happens. It also helped from the perspective of thinking within your limitations, as it turned what would have been 1:15 of animation/BGs into a couple days of shooting, editing, and misc. character animation that functions as something far more unique and memorable. When we started putting that sequence together I realized it sort of has a narrative function as well– in that it visually communicates what being high feels like in a more authentic way than a typical WOAHHH DUDE IM TRIPPING, instead things feeling a little more “real” or intense than they usually do.
Last summer @TheJanitor9k and I got together and spent a day driving around where I grew up + surrounding areas filming from morning till night. This was a f*cking blast and a highlight of this whole thing. In the past decade-ish, especially since the pandemic, the area is rapidly getting paved over by the day. In a lot of places it’s totally unrecognizable. This especially bothers me because it’s not like you can just create more land out of thin air. Once all this wilderness and greenery is gone it’s gone forever. That’s always been a big personal part of what Ratbasterdz is, trying to capture a specific moment in time, how I remember these places being as they will inevitably be sanitized apartment complexes and townhomes too in time. Now it does that quite literally in a way i didn’t anticipate– as long as the cartoons exist there’s little bits of my hometown as I remember it forever embedded into them. I’m glad we shot that footage when we did because in the time since a lot more has gotten torn down.
I wanted the way it was shot to also be reflective of the era, so we put fisheyes on our cameras to imitate the look of CKY & other skate videos. It only occurred to me after I had already cut the footage to music that we should’ve gotten an old school camcorder and shot it directly onto DV tapes & crunched it into early youtube res. In retrospect I would’ve shot it in 4:3 too!
Thankfully @Deadlycomics came in clutch and was able to transfer the signal from digital to analog. One thing he told me that I thought was really cool was that on his converter, there’s a PAL/NTSC switch that created a glitch effect when swapped, so during the screen recording he’d intentionally flip it to create glitch frames here and there. He’s a f*cking genius and if you’re not already familiar with his work do yourself a favor and check it out!
LIFE INFLUENCE
The first/last shot of the episode and the cyclical nature of it was very much inspired by my time with a torn ACL/Meniscus, which were the primary months we spent writing all the RB episodes. I couldn’t walk or stand up without my leg collapsing in on itself, which made pretty much every daily task a huge pain in the ass. Getting up to go to the bathroom or get something from the kitchen was either stupidly painful at worst and incredibly frustrating and inconvenient at best. At the time of my injury I was working at a pizza place, and my buddy still worked there, so hed bring leftover pizzas all the time to help me out. So this time in my life is characterized in my memory by waking in and out of a haze on the couch surrounded by half-empty pizza boxes. I ripped this directly for the cartoon because I thought it was a funny visual in spite of it being one of the darkest times in my life. Which, if you want to get philosophical about it, speaks to not only what Ratbasterdz has been to me from it’s inception, but what the art that has most impacted my life has been– taking the negatives of life and transmuting them into something positive.
From the moment we came up with the idea I wanted it to start with Jay waking up to an extremely 2007 song w/ clean vox. I felt like this immediately sets the tone for this episode aesthetically. This was also a reference to this music video by an old school NC metalcore band which is super reflective of the era. NC has an incredibly rich history with metalcore which I had no idea about until I became more active in the scene here a couple years ago-- frankly I feel pretty stupid! So the intro was my homage to that. A couple of the dudes who were in that band also play in VLVD now, who ended up playing the premiere show for this episode— really f*ckin cool and surreal how things unintentionally came full circle.
I originally wanted Jay to bike to Burger Barn, some beatup bike with flames on it that hes had since he was 10. Quickly realized it’d make the whole thing a drag to animate, and the idea of walking was much funnier. It leans into the whole feel of the episode being insanely slow with very little payoff, and emphasizes the total isolation these characters live in. It’s also just something you see a lot in rural areas– often I’ll drive by a dude walking on the side of the road, with stretches of nothing in either direction, and think how long he must have been walking for. Or where he’s going and why. It was fun to actually explore what a guy like that might be doing. A lot of high school memories are just walking the side of roads for an hour to go to a convenience store with my friends sothat was definitely an influence as well. When you’re actually walking those stretches it certainly feels like the slow-motion Jay lives in.
The drive thru scene came to mind because dudes in bands are always talking about a specific fast food chain around here, I think on the basis that when you get out of a show that’s the only thing open next to Waffle House. The drive thru guy was very much based on the dudes at the taco bell I used to hit after work sometimes. They’d keep the “We’re sorry, this location is closed” robot voice playing on the intercom, but if you sit there for a second they’d go “...whenever youre ready”. When you'd pull up to the window it erupted in a cloud of weed smell. I remembered the dude had studded earrings which felt like a very specific southern guy archetype I tried to channel.
PUPPETS
The puppet scene was another relatively “last minute” change– when boarded I didn’t really think of it as being anything special, but the more I sat with it, it felt like a missed opportunity not to have them represented in some drastically different visual style. I considered getting different guest animators to take on that part in 100% their style, but dropping close to a minute of animation on a single person felt like too much. I was also considering getting someone to 3D model the characters in a claymation style and just have their mouths flap, which is in turn what gave me the idea of getting puppets made. This also felt like a much wiser investment because not only is that a minute of screentime that didn’t need excessive animation, but we also have the puppets forever and can do more things with them in the future. It also helped to keep things visually engaging in what is otherwise the least visually interesting part of the episode. I remembered @deedledraws had done puppet stuff in college so I brought her on board, and goes without saying her work came out phenomenal. I feel like the puppets are one of the most interesting parts of this episode, but are something I honestly had next to no involvement in– so I’ve asked her to do a write up on what her process was like creating those:
Making these puppets was both a joy and a challenge! The challenge being bringing these animated 2D characters into the real world faithfully. I started with some concept art sketches to adapt the designs into puppets. The concept art noted fabrics, the general size of the puppets, and different features such as Rodney’s sculpted eyes. After getting the go ahead I created unique patterns out of newspaper for each puppet. Using these patterns I cut upholstery foam for the puppet base, and used hot glue to attach each piece together. The heads and bodies are separate for these guys for ease of movement. From here I covered the heads in their respective fabric, and glued in their eyes (painted and sealed ping pong balls for Wade and Jay.) I fitted on their eyelids and hand stitched them into place. After getting their eyelids the puppets personality really started to shine through. After the fabric for the heads were fitted on I made all fabric arms/ clothes to fit over the foam bodies. Clothes were stitched on, and from here they just needed some small details. Teeth, piercings, and tongues were all made from fleece and stitched onto the heads. That about wraps the process of making them up! I loved making these guys, I love seeing them come to life on screen!
On my end it just involved doing the actual puppeteering/filming. For that we just propped up a greenscreen I had from an old job and used some lamps to simulate three point lighting. I cut the audio that the puppets had to lip sync to and would play it on my phone and follow along. We had to do this a couple times over for various different reasons, it was a big learning curve but really fun. After that it was just comping it together in after effects, fixing the colors and masking them into the thought bubble!
PREMIERE SHOW
Putting together the premiere this time around is a great example of “failing in different directions”-- although I’d still consider it a total success! For the premiere of Underground, I was trying to put it together three weeks before the actual event. Which was f*cking crazy and stressful as sh*t. Venues were booked out, it was too short notice for most bands, and there was practically no time for promo. It’s a miracle that show was as awesome as it was and we got the amazing bands we did to play it.
This time, I naively assumed none of these things would be stressors if I was booking it further in advance, LOL. What I thought would eliminate the stress spread it out over four months instead of two weeks.
I started hitting up venues the day after Thanksgiving for what was going to be a show in April. Finally lock one in mid December. Couldn’t get a final lineup together till March.
I originally had intended for each premiere show to fit a different vibe reflective of the different niches represented in each episode, so it was like a specific extension of the cartoon in a way. I had curated a huge list of bands I was gonna reach out to and was confident that with three-four months of time on my hands I could book a perfectly curated lineup to that sound.
What I learned very immediately is it’s all about who is available, down to play, enthusiastic about the idea and can respond. I also learned that there's always going to be a million things you could never anticipate. So while the idea of each show catering to a specific niche was a cool idea, in the future I’m going to continue to prioritize bands that really f*ck with the concept. At the end of the day it’s an unconventional event that’s going to draw a mixed crowd either way, might as well lean into that.
I was stressed out of my mind for months juggling putting this show together, finishing episode 2, starting episode 3 + the rest of life. By the time of the event I had decided I was going to have to ask a friend to book the remainder of the RB shows, as I needed someone who wasn’t as personally invested in their outcome. But then the show actually happened and I decided f*ck all that, it was so worth it. It’s so fulfilling seeing it come together. It really mirrors animation in that way.
It was dope seeing the cartoon projected and hearing it on a good sound system this time. Everyone had a blast and all the worries I had during the booking process were of no consequence. Bands all kicked ass as they always do. Seeing them all f*ck with the cartoon so much too really meant a lot— hardcore has been such a positive influence in my own life and im very happy that RB resonates.
In my Underground writeup I mentioned that the first screening conjured the same feelings for me of what going to Magfest/Pico Day for the first time felt like back in the day. Through hearing friends talk about the event, I realized that this was now beginning to function as its own iteration of that, a reason to meet up with your artist friends and something to look forward to throughout the year. I never in a million years would have guessed i’d be organizing something like this myself. I also mentioned distributing your work online really removes the human element of things, something I really cherish about these premieres is the reintroduction of that. Seeing the shows develop into something that brings people together and represents more than just an outlet for my work has been both unexpected and very fulfilling. Weird the directions life takes you. I was at about 20% battery the whole time through being spread so thin— and while that’s my only regret, i kind of dont care, in that seeing everyone else having such a great time overshadows any personal experience i could have and to me signifies a good event.
The NG folks in attendance this time around were @moonslop @spinalpalm @mikecarf @nihaho @pjorg @brewster @croody @yourfriendjosh @sveekins @thejanitor9k @ghost-bat @paperisfood @bill @hannahdaigle @arniegutz @weezerbloodorgy @deedledraws @drsteen @hacho7 @cchilab @alexmigo @miikelzng @jaster @claykidng @squirm0 --a million thanks again for coming out for this! People traveling out specifically for the cartoon is something I never would have imagined, i am still very humbled. I hope these continue to draw out more NG folks in the future! Once I get more booking experience under my belt I’d like to do a larger scale version of the show/screening extending beyond just RB, still cookin on that idea.
(Video recap of premiere in the works, I'll come back and link that here when it's out!)
In closing-- something I’ve thought a lot about over the past year is that growing up, I never really had any aspirations of doing “my own tv show” or anything, all I have really ever wanted to do is put out cool cartoons i really care about with my friends. NG has always been a huge part of that. Making Ratbasterdz, let alone having NG sponsor it, would’ve made 12 year old me’s head explode. I feel very grateful that I get to live that dream every day, and that there is anybody out there at all who cares about it. It means a lot. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Episode 3 is in the works!
