Last week speaks

Last week I heard the very first voice casting auditions for Mr. King and his friends. Obviously everyone will be quite anxious to hear Mr. King speak for the first time and will no doubt have an expectation for how he should sound. We sat with Kim Hurdon, the casting/voice director and gave her as much direction as possible. I was up front with her regarding the voice being the most cloudy for me in terms of what I think it should be. Kim managed to deliver us a wide assortment of character auditions and I was pleasantly surprised. Though we still don't have a Mr. King I think we do have a Tex, Rolo, and a strong candidate for the narrator. Some of these matched the direction I initially gave and others were unexpected but felt really good. I think starting with these few characters gives me a good anchor point on which to assess the other characters as they come in.
Should be hearing some more auditions today or tomorrow. Fingers crossed we get closer to a Mr. King.

Last week today

Last week saw us picking up a bit of steam on the design front.
Don Gauthier, my Art Director, has made great progress in setting up the expanded look for the show. Currently working on Old Jim Elk's house location he is also setting up what will be reusable elements for other locations. The idea behind this is to allow for more efficient composition of scenes with pre-made flowers, trees, grass planes, etc.
Will post an image shortly.
Work has also begun on character designs. Sun Mi Yoon has been working on transferring Genevieve Cote's rough suggestions for Chanelle the skunk, and Rollo the porcupine, into production ready characters. Sun Mi worked with me on the original Teaser and was instrumental in creating the texture fill within the characters which animates.
Emily Picket has also joined the team and has been working on the turnaround of Mr. King, along with testing the newly created character brush from Scott Williamson. Turnarounds can take a while to lock down as they are the angles which will be seen throughout the series and we need to get them just right.
 Below are the work in progress Chanelle and Rollo, along with my revision notes on the first turnaround attempt for Mr. King.

Writers Summit

Last week we held our very first Mr. King Writer's Summit.

 For those unfamiliar with this term it is the process of sitting in a room with those who will be writing on the show to discuss ideas and Premises for potential series episodes.
Andrew Sabiston, our head writer/script editor, helped pull together an amazing group of writers all of which brought great energy and enthusiasm to the room. Our original goal was to come away from the two day summit with roughly 12 script ideas. I'm happy to report that we blew that away with a whopping 21. (So over half of the series.)
 My feeling is that having the luxury of working with Andrew during the development period in flushing out the writing style for our three pilot scripts certainly helped us out.
Also, the previously mentioned Writer's Style Guide played an important roll in helping the group maintaining focus and staying on target.
We also had the pleasure of having both Genevieve Cote, the books Writer/Illustrator, in the room to help provide feedback as well as a few extra script ideas, and Stacie Goldin, our educational consultant. Stacie was valuable in providing a window into the mindset of children aged 2-5. Valuable information and guidance from topics of familiarity to language and length of sentences which our audience may or may not comprehend.

My personal goal going into the summit was to come out with scripts telling stories with familiar topics in a way which is uniquely Mr. King. So far so good!