Channelate

Back when I bought the domain channelate.com in 07′ I had the vision of making it a cartoon channel of sorts. channel 8 and other variations were taken, so I thought ChannelAte could work on two levels. One, the Ate, with the original logo being a bite taken out of an eightball (nyuk nyuk). And two, it could be read ChanneLate, as in Late Night, since the humor would be adult oriented. I really was married to the way Channel 8 sounded coming off the tongue.

Anyway, the first cartoon idea I worked on was called Tested on Animals about a dude who lived with former test lab animals who could talk. A chimp named Wayne and an overgrown rat named Rat. My friend Nate and I wrote a handful of scripts, some short and others long. But in the end all that writing really just helped me learn what wasn’t funny  and I think that was an important lesson. I animated most of an episode in 3d, which took forever (almost four months). It was agonizing, because half way through it I knew the jokes weren’t working, but I pushed through until all the animation was finished. I don’t know why, really. When the animation was finished, I scrapped it.

Anyway, I wanted to post these short clips so that all my work back then wouldn’t have been totally in vain. Just kinda in vain.  Also, I thought it would be kind of interesting to show the direction channelate was heading in prior to when I was focusing on comics.

The first clip is an animation test I did to see what the character would look like with my friend Nate’s voice. Also to try out a style I was toying with. The second clip is a snippet from the episode itself. It’s what I think was the best moment in an episode of otherwise lame gags. There aren’t any SFX, just voice overs.