This is one of my favourite Adrenalini episodes – partly because I got to sing El Boca’s song, but also because there’s so much going on in the story, and it all leads to a satisfying conclusion.
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The Adrenalini Brothers is coming to POP UK – Sky channel 616 or Freesat 603. Tune in from this Saturday 9-11am and every Saturday from now until the end of time! Or until the end of the licence. Or until your eyes wither into little raisins… whichever happens first
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In this episode of The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers, they get lost in the forest and find a lovely little house with three steaming bowls of porridge on the table…
Trivia: Daddy Bear (who I voiced) was inspired by deceased cockney comedian Mike Reid and had a much lower, thicker accent. He originally said “We just needed an ‘oliday” but this was considered confusing for a non-UK audience. He also originally said “Ow, me bonce!” when he hit his head on the bus roof, but this was changed because the studio in Canada thought he was saying “Ow, me balls!”
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I’ve recently splashed out on a new computer to replace my aged, groaning PC which was one of the machines we used at Pesky for The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers. The new one has a fast (although loud) graphics card and more memory to play with, which should help me get acquainted with After Effects and 3D packages (I’m starting in Blender, mainly because it’s free, but also because I used it a while ago and always enjoyed piddling around with it). Having been faced with the task of re-installing all my software (Flash, Photoshop, Final Draft, antivirus, Steam, new drivers, Notepad++, Audacity and Lame, Blender, Firefox, Acrobat Reader, CCleaner, 7Zip, Skype, Deluge, KeePass) I found I needed an Office suite, mainly for word processing, but also the occasional expenses/income spreadsheet. I always used to use OpenOffice, but Googling around led me this time to LibreOffice, which is a spinoff of that product. There’s an interesting story behind the difference between the two suites – told here. If you haven’t got time to read it, the short version (from Wikipedia) is that “On 28 September 2010, several members of the OpenOffice.org project formed a new group called “The Document Foundation”. The Document Foundation created LibreOffice from their former project in response to Oracle Corporation‘s purchasing of Sun Microsystems over concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org, or place restrictions on it as an open source project, as it had on Sun’s OpenSolaris.” Which basically means OpenOffice is dead, and the developers are all working on LibreOffice.
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I’ve been doing a lot of fairly intricate animation lately, for an online company called Espresso, who make educational software and tools for education. I did some banner animations for them at the beginning of the year where you could drag the weightless characters around a tall, narrow box in different directions and they’d react as they hit the sides, or if you did nothing they’d exhibit a range of actions from bored, to impatient, to distracted. It was basically a simulation of keeping children in a tall chimney in space.
There are seven characters in all, all carefully ethnically-balanced and including a dog and a puppy. The puppy’s easier to animate than the dog because he’s young and jumps instead of running, meaning that I only have to animate two sets of legs rather than four independent ones (those black-and-white Muybridge photo-series of animals and people running along in front of large grids help to demonstrate distinct gaits to four-legged creatures, but mostly they’re too difficult to animate quickly so we animators cheat slightly and treat them as two pairs of legs) as if he’s just jumping along, or constantly pouncing. It’s surprisingly effective, and is how I animated Sizzles, Marv’s creaky old sausage-dog in Charlie and Lola.
The tricky part of these animations is that the character has to end up in the right place each time, because the files are to be output as videos and joined up in different ways (called “hooking-up” in film terminology). If the character isn’t in the right place to join up there’ll be a visible pop. This also means that all the background and scenery have to hook up too – which means that if there are corrections to one part of the background that has to be copied and pasted exactly into each of the other files, and the further I get into this job the faster the files proliferate – it’s quite an undertaking just to open up all the current files and update them, not made easier by the fact that my computer is getting a bit creaky and that Flash CS5 is a bit overwhelming. But the animation’s fun and the characters remind me of working with Pesky, lo, these many years – the characters were actually designed by Claire Underwood and I first saw them about ten years ago when we were doing the first series of the <http://www.adrenalini.com”>Amazing Adrenalini Brothers</a>.
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I did a voice for a new preschool pilot made by Pesky, the same guys who co-produced The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers all those moons ago. It’s called Boj, and I play a Scottish horse, as you can hear if you play this video.
Boj & buddies – ‘Boj-elicious!’ (HD) from Pesky on Vimeo.
They’re taking the show to Cartoon Forum in a week’s time… good luck everyone!
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At last, after almost a decade searching through the archives and painstaking digital restoration, here is the BANNED episode that was TOO HOT FOR TV!
I made this in about October 2001. Probably in the mid-afternoon.
Filed under: adrenalini, animation, directing, miscellaneous, music, oddities | Tagged: adrenalini, banned, benny, episode, hill, hospital, lost, monster, sax, yakety | 2 Comments »
The May issue of Word Magazine has a feature on the best and worst kids’ cartoons of all time. Imagine my delight, then, to find that the Amazing Adrenalini Brothers came in at Number 2, just below Sponge Bob Squarepants!
Actually, I’m not entirely sure the 20 are in rank order, but still, to be in the company of Roobarb, Pocoyo (which won the Bafta in the same year we did), and Tom and Jerry, for goodness sake, is very flattering indeed. (Even more so because the magazine is actually a really good one.)
The review says that the show “… used to be a really good reason to get up early on Sunday and watch CITV.”
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