When JR is asked to move out by his parents for losing his Father's briefcase, he sets out to retrieve it only to find his brother, Red, is working for Death Hammer. This is an action packed animation that pushed Coady &  GoAnimate's studio to the limit.

Hope you liked it. Keep following us here at toonpub.posterous.com and you will get to see the comics and sequels as well! 

When I first started this animation it was intended to be a spoof of 'Xiao Xiao #3' (Meow Meow rhymes [more or less] with Xiao Xiao). I realized no one on GoAnimate had attempted a fight even close to Xiao Xiao; so I figured I'd give it a shot (so then I could spoof myself later :P). I soon realized that GoAnimate's stick figures weren't animated to make such a high speed fight sequence, so I had to come up with my own choreographed fight (I actually created a few of my own moves with KoolMoves to speed it up- more on this below).

The above video is a combo of Xiao Xiao 3 and 5.

Fighting has always been exciting for me, I was never one to instigate a fight or provoke one in any way- but would always secretly hope one would happen; but never was a martial artist nor studied the art of fighting (except maybe if you count watching the Ninja Turtles- lol). I always thought about fighting, and the little characters I'd sketch in my school books and sketch books would be super heroes and fighters fighting the bad guys. I think my uncles whom I lived with influenced me on that- my Uncle Alan was a wrestling fanatic and a amateur wrestler in the special Olympics, and my Uncle Kirk was a muscle bound manly man-lol. It's very cool to have a fight scene realized. 

This wasn't my first on GoAnimate, but it's my first with a story. And for me, that's where the challenge was. All my little characters while growing up didn't need a reason to fight the bad guys, they just did. It was obvious, good guys fight bad guys. As a "grown-up", that just didn't do it for me anymore, so I thought I'd take a stab at a character who has a reason (somewhat) to fight.

When I was watching 'Xiao Xiao' for some more inspiration, I wondered why he was there; what was the reason? What was the end game? I played around with a couple ideas in my head. But nothing struck me.

At one point I was looking to see what I could do with GoAnimate's selection of weapons. They were good, but I wanted something less conventional. For some reason a briefcase seemed like the coolest weapon. That would be totally bad-ass, right? Maybe, maybe not. Randomly I chose a blue guy to carry a blue briefcase and all of a sudden that's when a story started forming in my head. A briefcase can contain any number of important things! Secret documents, guns, essential pieces to a machine, a Nintendo Wii, Clean underwear- whatever! Why else would the main character be there? To save his gf? pffft! No Way! I wanted something that I could twist and turn and make you keep asking questions.

So, now the story was forming; characters got names, plot formed, ideas just kept coming and coming. It was great. So I recorded the voices and put it together. Sounds pretty easy right? 

Well, there were some things I couldn't do, that I felt needed to be done for the story. For example, the Stick Figures have no flip actions, and their fight moves tend to be slow. So, I created some custom moves, but I mostly found ways around things. You'll notice if you look closely that a lot of the actions are a little stiff. That's because I was using the Stick Figures emotion actions as fight actions. 

The custom actions I made were the green guy at around 0:30 flip, JR raising his hands, JR panting at 1:28, and the ready-to-fight matrix-style pose at 2:28. I'm actually working on a custom StickFighter with moves I didn't even use in the animation. He'll be release to the Public at GoA if I get all-time most recommends for the series. 

Well, about half way through, GoAnimate's studio got angry with me- lol. I'm not too sure GoAnimate was made to have such a heavy scene. There are a lot of characters doing a lot of different things. I had to go through over 100 scenes one by one and delete any unnecessary characters. If they weren't showing up directly in that scene they had to be deleted; It took FOREVER! After that the studio liked me again, and load alright... for now.

A major change I made that was a pain was when JR is upstairs and the first guy he throws over his shoulder, originally didn't fall off the balcony. But got up and would later fight again. I was saving the fall for the end of that sequence. As the animation was getting larger, I realized that the studio would accept that kind of movement anymore - it was already taxed to it's limit. But I HAD to fit it in; you can't just have a table and chair at the bottom of a balcony in a fight scene and not have someone go through it! So, I changed everything to what it is now... 

Once I got to Death Hammer, it was hell! Shockwave (a program that lets us use and watch GoAnimate) would crash every couple of scenes I added. I lost huge amounts of animation over and over. There was much cursing done :P 

Chrome, Firefox and IE couldn't even open the animation by the end. Luckily Chrome gave me slack once (after 20+ attempts and it crashing) and I was able to add a few touch ups and change the description. Unfortuately, I wasn't able to add everything to this animation that I had wanted. I would have loved to be able to add the gunshot sounds and perfectly time the voice-overs. The studio just wasn't letting me. But, I love this animation just the same.

Even as is, it's still a video I'm proud of! Meow Meow: Family Values is my favorite of my own work and I look forward to making the sequels and exploring the relationships between the characters. 

For episode 3 (may be introduced in #2), I have a character planned that will rock your world. 

Hope you enjoyed Meow Meow: Family Values and look forward to hearing what you thought of it! :)

-Coady Nickerson (CoadyTNP)

You can submit your own Behind-the-Scenes to your animations to ToonPub. Here's How!