When I started working on the pilot episode of Phungus & Mowld, I thought I’d be done in half a year. That was about 20 months ago. I ran into many stumbling blocks that delayed the project. First and foremost my non existent knowledge on how to animate anything. Yes I made a little animated commercial 15 years ago, but that was a totally different ballgame (but I was still using the same software as I’m using now – back then version 2.5, now version12/13 of Moho). I soon found out that there are so many things to learn, that I basically modified my character rig in every scene of the pilot to do things I didn’t think of or to fix issues.

Consistency Challenges

If you take a really close look at the appearance of the main characters you will notice that they look differently at the end compared to the first few shots in the video. Mowld started off with rubber hose arms, but I eventually had to change those to “normal” arms so it was easier to have only the lower arm be in front of the body while the upper arm was behind it, with rubber hose arms this would’ve been very difficult to accomplish. Phungus arms also have changed the same way, but on top of that in the last scenes his space suit actually has short sleeves. The arms/shoulders coming out of holes in the suit directly were just too hard to deal with when doing body turns.

I even tweaked the pitch shifting of the two characters, so if you pay attention very closely you will notice that Phungus voice is a little lower in pitch at the end, while Mowld’s voice is ever so slightly higher in pitch at the end. Also it took me a while to get a feeling for the two voices, so I think after I did the fake interviews, Mowld’s voice really clicked with me and it was much easier to get into that voice within seconds. I think that’s when it also started to have a slightly more “husky” sound.

Trailers, Trailers

Here’s the main trailer, which I reluctantly made after a friend said “you gotta pack in all the cool scenes of the film, so people want to watch it, who cares if it contains the only two jokes in the whole movie as long as they watch the damn thing”. So I took it to heart and made a flashy, loud version which to be honest I like a lot. The episode isn’t as action heavy as this might make you think, though.

Here’s another short trailer with animated scenes that were made exclusively for this trailer.

I’m currently working on an extended version of the intro music that is currently only 30 seconds long (standard for intro sequences). I see if I can stretch it to 1 or 2 minutes, and use that for trailer number 2.

Where’s The Meat!?

To everyone who wanted to get their hands on the pilot ASAP, you can purchase an episode for US$ 2.50 via Vimeo On Demand. Find the link here http://phungusandmowld.com. Yep, sorry, I’m such an ego, I don’t want to give the fruits of 20 months of labour away for free.

I have decided to send this pilot to several film festivals (yes, delusions of grandeur, I know) – the earliest will give notification by end of November and the latest ones will let me know whether I have a fighting chance by May 2021.

Other Places Of Interest

So, here are a few more places were Phungus & Mowld have found a home, and maybe you want to follow or bookmark one ore another.

Things Left To Do

Completing the pilot and the feeling of accomplishment shall not lure me into becoming complacent and lazy, I still have lots of things to do. I mentioned additional trailers. I also need to start working on episode 2, for which I have already written (and re-written) a script and I have even recorded some of the audio. This episode will feature at least 3 new characters, so I will have to start rigging those soon. And there’s quite a bit of new background art to be done (which usually takes a lot of time, because I suck at it).

I also have a nice idea for a new episode , which I’ll call “Book of Zander” so another script that wants to be written. Then there’s one more thing that I mentioned in the May update I want to start a small vlog series about how I decided to create an animation all by myself, what I learned animating it, what I learned narrating it, what I learned writing the script for it and other things. I thought it would be a good way to build up a subscriber base with some regular content while the pilot is waiting to be released after all the film festivals I submitted the pilot are over.

After the episode is before the episode…