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"Meow Meow: For Unto Us" was a major undertaking for me. Having only made a handful of Flash props and a couple characters, What I had envisioned for MM2 was a little more work than I originally thought. Matching the pace of the animation and the script with the music was quite the challenge, but ultimately it's something I love. And it's a story that is very personal to me in a strange way. 

Having known the outline for this video for months, I figured it would be a breeze to write. But for some reason I hadn't counted on how short I had to make it. Telling this part of the story while limiting myself to the time of the song was quite a challenge. A challenge that I failed by a few seconds. But that's ok. :) It kept me from losing my mind from Shockwave crashing. It only started crashing here and there near the end. 

Carol of the Bells has been my favorite Christmas song since I heard it as a wee lil boy. It just has this great energetic melancholy behind it. I love the incongruity of the sad feeling of the song and the cheery lyrics which is why I thought it would be perfect for this animation. I wanted the whole feel of this video to be a celebration of advancement, change or evolution, but with the idea that troubles can and often will happen.

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra's version just amplified all the emotions and strength that made it perfect for "Meow Meow: For Unto Us". The song also hints at where the Meow Saga will be going. 

At the end of Meow Meow 2, you may have noticed at the end of Reddplague's speech the song changes... That's where I failed on the song for a few minutes. the speech was a little to long, so I decided to throw in the end of the caroler's version of Carol of the Bells.

Animating to this song presented a little challenge. The song is really short and GoAnimate's characters take their time with their actions. I wanted a little more control with this video, so I decided the fight scenes with Death Hammer and the StickFighters I's use KoolMoves to remake GA's characters to customize the fight the way I wanted. I wanted to be able to change the speed on the characters jumps midway to be able to show the impact of the hits in a different way. I wouldn't say I failed, but I don't think it's perfectly the way I had envisioned; that will come with practice. I do like the slow motion effect, but it still needs to be perfected. 

I thought if I could make the fight with Death Hammer in KoolMoves it would free up some time on the GoAnimate studio. It wouldn't crash as much and it would make the whole thing a smaller package (as far as computer memory goes) so that people like TET and Mojochi could watch it without problem. What I didn't realize was how huge the set is behind them. About half way through the fight I asked some people whose computers are known to not be able to make it through animations to check it out. Already it was facing the problem of messing up people's computers. I was not happy. I thought I had made it more carefully. I decided to change my plan on how to make the ending. 

Reddplague is a character I'd envisioned almost as soon as the character of Meow was thought of. Reddplague has some symbolism behind him. The obvious one is he's an ode to a GoAnimate (GA) user called Reddplague. An excellent animator on GoAnimate who uses Flash to provide the community with new characters and high quality props. It's amazing how his stuff just keeps getting better and better. And when you think it doesn't get any better than what he's already given. He ups it even more.

The user Reddplague is one of the few popular animators who uses "bad guys" as his avatar, which I kind of admire. I figured I'd ask him if I could use his name as my character's name, and he thought it would be ok. I figured it would be appropriate to name my first major unique character after the person who inspires me most on GA with his flash work. I wanted my Red character to reflect Reddplague's steady improvement by making him a scientist who is creating this massive machine that will change him into a monster that will be able to transform and make things subject to his will (much like the GA user does with Flash). Hopefully, I've been able to pull that off. And with Showtime's voice skills, I believe it provided the right finishing touch on the introduction to the character. 

On the final scene, where Red transforms into ReddPlague, I didn't want to make the same mistake as I had at the beginning. My original intent was to use the Stick Theme props to build most of Red's lab and just have to create Reddplague, But I figured with the way Flash is made, it may be easier on viewers' computers to just upload two-second-scenes at a time. So I decided to just build everything in KoolMoves (besides Meow and Death Hammer), and animate it until the end. Hopefully, this provided a smoother viewing for everyone who watches it on GA. 

The End of Meow 2 was difficult for me. I wanted the right cliff-hanger. I needed to end it quickly, but still leave the audience wanting more. I debated actually starting the fight between Reddplague and whoever, but I believe the introduction to Reddplague was strong enough with him tearing apart the lab and then promising to be a threat to Meow. I wanted the scene to give the idea of the birth of a new creature, like a reptile from a shell, the emergence of Reddplague was, hopefully, enough to show the potential upcoming threat and the haunting excitement of this adversary.

Meow Meow 3 promises to be an exciting episode that will bring the stick fight to a new level on GoAnimate. I hope to be able to finish it by mid-2010. Until then, expect to see a comic book style version to show up on http://www.ToonPub.com. 

Related Post 

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)

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