Squash & Stretch is a 40 second animation setup to be a parody of a sitcom in which insignificant phrases are followed by an overzealous laugh track. The stars are Stretch, a who is lengthy and bouncy, and Squash, who is round and grumpy. The premise is Stretch's keys are missing and he places blame on Squash, who denies the accusation and becomes defensive. Stretch angrily points out that he can see his keys in Squash's back pocket, then scoops him up and shakes him while many objects fall out.
Conceptualism
Squash & Stretch were conceptualized based on a prompt in my club. I am the president of an animation club in my college where every other week a new theme is given. Within these two weeks, members are allowed to work an optional project centered around that theme.
My other officers and I will come up with themes, and I was excited to suggest "squash and stretch". I ended up being very busy and couldn't continue the project past thumbs then. Still, my idea was fun and my club members laughed as I described the plot.
That very week my professor in "Introduction to 2D Animation" announced a 30 second animation assignment, and I decided I could use this as a head start.
Sketch of character concepts.
Original Squash design. I was given critique to make him more interesting; I think he looks much better now!
Boards and sounds
Storyboard.
Joshua Brown as Squash and Blake Edwards as Stretch
Gathering sound and editing it all together was uncomfortable territory for me. I have done it before, but I feel like I really improved in my understanding of sound and timing during this project. I used Premiere Pro to do this.
Storyboard 1st draft.
This was the original storyboard with a slightly different script and was voice acted by me. I thought it would be humorous to include a twist at the end where someone with a chainsaw attacks the audience, but ultimately decided that it would be too jarring for viewers.
Backgrounds
Roughs and clean ups
I wanted the characters to have a sketch-line style to them. My reasoning behind this was how a loose line work can translate into loose looking (and moving) characters. Clean up was more fun for me as I just mostly erased stray lines and darkened others.
Faster tempo.
Slower tempo.
Rough draft, messy lines.
Adjusted backgrounds with cleaned lines.
colors and lip sync
I used ToonBoom Harmony's lip sync tool to help speed things along.
finishing touches
In the editing process I added foreground elements!
thank you
