Feels extremely odd to be able to write about this. About a year ago I started working with Monkeystack to gear up for Yolo Season 2 and today the first 2 episodes were finally released on Stan!

My official title was Animation Lead but it’s hard to lock down exactly what that means. So I thought I’d write a quick summary of exactly what I did on the production.

Role 1: Training

A few of us have separately had the idea of spending a little time upskilling the crew before production began in earnest. Monkeystack teamed up with CDW Studios to create 12 session summer workshop to find talented graduates and get them production ready. Tim and I spent an afternoon drinking tea and coffee and reflecting on what skills we would like to see in our new recruits. Previously I had taught animation at several places (UniSA, Carclew and Adelaide City Library). I also built the curriculum for the Animation Design for UniSA online (and offline) so I was pretty aware of what skills most graduates were lacking. I wanted to design a course that filled in any knowledge gaps BUT also one that also simulated the studio experience, where attendees had to submit shots, receive animation feedback and adjust. To this day it’s probably one of the best experiences I have had teaching. We received a lot of positive feedback from attendees and we managed to recruit about 10 people into the crew!

Role 2: Pipe-line King

I am a spreadsheet guy. That’s who I am, that’s who I’ll be when I die. So when I tell you I made so DAMN good spreadsheets to keep track of how this production went you should just believe me or else this blog is gonna get BORING! Just trust me that at the beginning of the production, I crunched A LOT of numbers and made a lot of graphs to demonstrate how things were going (Thankfully Lisa look this task off my hands eventually). I also got to work with the programmers at Monkeystack to make some very cool tools to make the animators’ lives easier. Abobe Animate is a surprisingly flexible program when you know someone who can use jsfl script well. I also worked to improve our dailies system so we could see how each episode was coming together quickly and easily. I also designed a very clever lip-sync system!

Role 3: Lead Animator and occasional Animator

For much of the production Tim and I split the crew in half and worked on separate episodes. While I am credited as lead on all episodes I worked as Lead Animator on “Planet Bali” “Jambaroo” “The Parents Episode” Tim and I shared the duties on episode 1 and the very lengthy “THis is Literally the Finale”. Most of my time on the production was dedicated to giving feedback to the animation crew. To begin with, this started as very technical notes “this is off-model”, “this needs another frame”, “this has TOO many frames”, and “this lip-sync feels off” (apologies if those words are triggering to any of the crew members who might be reading this).

Much of it was checking continuity between shots to make the life of the Animation Supervisor at PB (Marty) as easy as possible. You’d have to ask him how successfully I pulled that off. I also had to oversee the background crew and make sure that there wouldn’t be any jump cuts and that the bg’s matched the tone of the scene. Really the role extended beyond animation and was ensuring anything visual was working to the director’s vision.

Role 4: Chuffed Dude and Grateful Guy

This production is my new career highlight (move over to season 1). Extremely proud of the crew and extremely grateful to Monkeystack for the opportunity to work on this and loved getting to work with the big dogs at Princess Bento (apologies that I drew out those production meetings with all my weird questions). As always working with Cusack is inspiring in countless ways. The remaining episodes will roll out over the coming weeks. My personal favourite is episode 3 but it’s such an unhinged and hilarious season of TV that it’s hard to stick to one favourite episode.

There were many other folks involved and I can’t begin to talk about Yolo 2 without mentioning Tim and Lisa, (the 3 of us were the brains-trust) and Justin Wight for all his amazing resourcefulness to make the project happen in SA (plus the other Monkeystack folks who did so much behind the scenes). And of course, we had an amazingly talented crew and artists there are too many to name here, but pause the credits and soak up their names.