The Yeti
T his one stuck around for a long time. I’d thought it up around 2014/15 and had sketched out lots of plots, themes and characters. The idea progressed and I eventually wrote a script and had the voice-over parts recorded. I animated quite a bit here and there over the next three years and then gave up on it. It was never really going to amount to anything valuable and I’m always too heavily booked to work on a large side-project. Mind you, there’s still a part of me that would really love to take a month or two and knock out a 4 or 5 minute episode. It’ll never happen.
The plot was a bit absurd… A French Yeti, named… Yeti, was very lonely living alone in the Alps. Just as he is about to jump off a cliff, he figures he’ll give life another try. At that moment, he feels a rumbling, the earth shakes and a landslide of snow comes hurtling towards him and knocks him over the edge. However, since Yetis are super bouncy (who knew?) he doesn’t die but does knock himself out. He wakes up at the base of the cliff in amongst a pile of bones. A skull (imaginatively named Skully) has a chat to him and he freaks out but takes the skull home to his cave to keep him company. He sleeps off the effects of the fall and wakes thinking it was all a dream…however, Skully is there and the fridge has come to life. Then he meets a talking Moose. When it bites his hand, he realises that he’s awake and better yet, not alone anymore. It turns out the Moose can fly by shooting rainbows from its butt and so they fly off for a tour of his new world…and that was to be episode one.
I never got around to writing anything further but there was a rough plan to have the Moose and the Yeti meet the villain of the show in the next episode (a blizzard monster). There was an idea that it would all centre around whether or not he was just hallucinating due to a concussion and I was also going to have Hunter S. Thompson in the show. Madness.
Lost Marbles
L ost Marbles was going to be a series of ‘hand-drawn’ shorts about cartoon marbles. It would be set in the Victorian era and would tell tall and spooky tales. There were scripts, storyboards and even a few animated scenes but nothing progressed past tests and ideas. The first episode would have been about a hole that led to a hole above it creating an endless loop. There was another idea about ‘murder owls’ and one that would have featured a marble version of Sherlock and Watson. Again, I’d love to dive back in to this and revive it, but it’ll never happen.
And the above wasn’t the only version of ‘Lost Marbles’. There’s been a simpler ‘sketched’ style (I think it was the first) and then there’s been mock-ups of LMs that heavily resembled ‘Hey Duggee‘. And before any of the animated marbles, there was a comic strip featuring Lost Marbles. More recently, there was Mickey Marble that was influenced by a dream I had about being sued by Disney. The marbles also featured on our old ‘Process‘ page to help illustrate how we work through an average project.
It makes sense to use some from of these characters to promote our business for obvious reasons so I’m sure they’ll return at some point.
