Recently @fablepaint and I had the honor and pleasure of talking to Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou (Every Frame a Painting, Voir) about the adventure of adapting Lackadaisy for animation.
They are creators themselves, wonderfully analytical about filmmaking, and great interviewers! If you’re a cinephile and you haven’t watched the video essays on Every Frame a Painting (YouTube), I highly recommend it!
The color script for the animated-musical Last Call sequence we recently released alongside the Glitch partnership announcement!
There’s some explainer text on the images about what a color script is and what our intentions were with the palette changes. You can also see the ending shots that we didn’t release with the sequence, but which tie it into its broader context in the story.
Some art @fablepaint and I did for the announcement that Lackadaisy has joined the GLITCH Production ranks. Glitch already has multiple amazing shows on their roster, and we’ll be pouring our hearts and souls into being worthy of this spot!
Neither of us has had much time for fan art these days, so it was nice to have a solid excuse to get to draw these character! Rocky aside, it’s Pomni, Mel, Gwen, and N, of course. (We didn’t deliberately leave out Meta Runner or Sunset Paradise! ;_; It was just what we could fit in the attempted selfie composition here.)
In summary, this means Lackadaisy has more budget and vastly more production support than before; and that Season One will be bigger and better than we thought possible!
And coinciding with the news, we’ve released a little animated sneak peak of Season One, featuring original music “Last Call”
Never-before-published model sheets for canned Amblin Cats movie 🐈⬛✏️👁️
Hi all. As promised, I am sharing a comprehensive .PDF of model sheets that were created for the Amblimation Cats movie that never saw the light of day. Most of these model sheets have not been published or posted anywhere on the internet as far as I’m aware. I’m going to get ahead of some questions for the good of the order:
Are these real? I certainly didn’t sit and create all 117 pages myself for the sake of an elaborate hoax!
How did you get these? I work in the animation industry. A senior coworker caught wind of my cats obsession and said he had the Xeroxes and asked if I wanted him to bring them in. Internally, I flipped my shit. And then I digitized his hard copies.
How did your coworker get these? They were found in the library of the university he used to go to. (Not super unusual at an arts school in southern California.) He made photo copies back then and has been holding onto them. The thing is he knows nothing about CATS; isn’t a CATS fan, never seen it, etc. I guess he just felt it was something worth holding on to!
Can you upload better quality? Unfortunately what you’re seeing as good as the quality gets. These are scans of photocopies from the 90s. There is nothing to be done for the crunchiness.
What about (missing characters)? I’m showing you everything I was personally given!
Which character is (nondescript drawing of a cat)? If the image isn’t labeled, your guess is as good as mine! I put all the misc./unlabeled cats in the back of the PDF. The only exceptions are ones that I felt were abundantly obviously supposed to be a specific character.
Who are the artists? Unfortunately, there’s no way I can tell for sure. None of the sheets are signed. I wouldn’t even go about guessing because many concept artists can perfectly emulate more “well known” illustrators whose styles were sought after. My coworker said he might be able to figure out who the draftsmen were; until then it’s a mystery! If I find out, I will come back to this post and update it with that information.
Are these all the model sheets ever? No! In fact, there are model sheets that have been posted online that are not in the bundle I was given. I have no idea of the sum total of model sheets in existence.
I think I forgot to share this here. Just a little Viktor and Mordecai in the old days.
We have many more previews and shot progress updates up on Patreon.
Working on a (public) announcement for the BackerKit items that should be dropping soon too.
If you’ve sent a message or some artwork to my inbox lately, thank you! And I apologize for not responding yet! I’ve just been very busy, and I’m spending as little time on social media as possible right now to keep my wits about me.
In love with this rough short film animation of Rocky, it has so much character. I think this was one of the first shots they animated? He’s such a good combination of a cat and an eager young man from the 1920s
“uh— uhh… how about a- a dance?”
Rough animation by Nick Leong, who is just fantastic, and who did a lot to establish how Rocky would convey his personality in motion for the rest of production.
