This is a “prequel” short to the in-development WEIRDOS series. It introduces Uzo, one of four main characters. I plan to do a short for each character, showing their lives on their homeworld before the events of the first episode take place. (Although I may just skip to the first WEIRDOS episode; we’ll see.)
These shorts are not at all integral to the main series. Really, they’re just my own personal testing grounds, since I’m new to Flash. (I’ve only made one other legitimate-length cartoon and two animation tests.) By publishing these, I hope to motivate myself to actually make them good, and I hope to get some useful feedback. I guarantee you that I put lots of effort into this. I’ve been working on it for 5 months or so, but that’s been REALLY off-and-on, so don’t expect it to look like I spent 5 months on it. I paused for weeks and even months at a time.
So I guess a few disclaimers are in order. I do not expect great scores on this. It’s not that I’m just dumping my trash onto Newgrounds, but it IS too short to really impress people all that much, and it’s not humorous at all. Really, I kinda ran out of ideas halfway through, but I barely managed to squeeze another half-minute or so out of it. I made it up as I went along. This won’t be the case if I ever get around to making the full-length cartoons – I already have the script and storyboard for episode 1 (I actually did that almost year ago). But for the purposes of an animation/directing/syncing test, I didn’t really need much planning.
And there’s really not much story to tell here, which is why I had trouble figuring out what else to put in. If I got any farther I’d be overlapping with the flashback in the first episode, and if I did much more in the beginning, well, it’d be boring, because from what I can tell, the shape-shifters just sit around all day on their flat land morphing into things. I could've shown some more morphing, I guess, but that’s hard to animate!
So what can you expect from the series? Well, it’ll still have the dramatic elements shown in this short, but it’ll have a lot more comedy and dialogue, whereas this short has absolutely none whatsoever. It should be a lot more interesting, because the whole concept of the show thrives on a type of conflict that really can’t be shown on the homeworld.
I guess I have to sort of spoil it, but it’s nothing you wouldn’t hear in a series pitch or something. There are 4 different types of aliens on this planet: shape-shifters, rock guys, giant eyeballs with arms & legs, and lizard things. The aliens are forced to leave their homeworld, and the 4 main characters – one of each species – get into an escape pod, and that’s their first meeting. So that’s when characters start bouncing off each other and the fun begins. Then, of course, they crash-land on Earth, and so living among humans provides the rest of the conflict, humor, etc. That’s what the show is all about. These shorts won’t really have that.
So I hope you enjoy it, for what little it is.
(P.S. -- All music and sound was done by me. No Audio Credit necessary.)