And now, after all those mood boards, I would like to share a few video examples that I believe would help us with our little Cake documentary, in terms of not just topic, but tone, art style, narration style and overall presentation:
Nickelodeon's "Fat Files" is pretty much what we are going for when it comes to how we want to execute our overall animation, what with its cute and appealing art and animation style, cheesy music and basic and entertaining manner of presenting information to its audience. It is interesting to note that a decent amount of information can be shared in such a short period of time too, 1:13 minutes to be exact, and that includes the title
Troy McClure will be one of our main inspirations for own narrator's design, Phil Hartman just did such a wonderful job at making him sound so cheesy, pushy, inconsiderate, but still so entertaining to listen to. And this is why Zapp Brannigan is one of my favourite characters, seeing how Billy West does such a decent impersonation of him. I have visualised our narrator to be a bit of an imbecile, and despite how interesting his topic of discussion will be, he is a little too dependant on scripts and fails when it comes to making up something on the spot.
We are however also considering a more Tom Kenny-ish voice, seeing as he has done various styles of narration that would be suitable for this short (Such as the narrators from "The Powerpuff Girls" and "The Legend of Korra"), while also suiting the personality of our character, his narration style for "The Legend of Korra" also has that rather retro feel to it.
This was possibly one of the first "Training Video" episodes that came out of "Spongebob Squarepants". This makes for great reference when it comes to how we will go about writing our script. We are very keen on making this not just visually appealing, but also entertaining to listen to, so hopefully we balance out the jokes and serious information and avoid making it into a complete joke.
As a child, I did find Disney's older educational shorts to be pretty engaging. What was it exactly that made them interesting enough to children? Was it that narrator we will soon grow to be familiar with? The use of well-known characters getting slightly abused when a lesson is to be taught (Because they seriously do love picking on Goofy back then!)?
Disney did continue with these shorts until the early 2000s, but I believe the older ones were so much more appealing, daring... and just felt so much more meaningful as compared to the more 'recent' ones. The narrator was a lot less annoying too to be honest (Though something tells me that the newer narrator might be a voice actor I am familiar with...), and just seemed more natural to me.
Last but not least, rap was a pretty big thing in the 90s, and was used even in works aimed at the kiddies. As cheesy as they might seem, they were probably able to get anyone's attention, sure most people probably just end up giggling at the whole thing, but perhaps a few folks might actually bother to rewind it so they can actually catch what the character was rapping about in the first place.
Speaking of rap, this is still pretty sick.
And now I am going to end off this post with this video, we could have gone in this direction had we aimed it at an older audience (But you be playin):
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