KERSLASH Selected for First-Time Filmmaker Sessions

I’m happy to announce that my theatrical cut of KERSLASH (which combines episodes 1 & 2) has been selected to screen in the First Time Filmmaker Sessions, hosted by Lift-Off Global Network. You can think of it as an online film festival where there’s less focus on competition and more on providing a screening opportunity to independent creators. The festival will go live to the public at 10am on Monday, July 15th and will run till July 28th.

One of the few scenes animated digitally, directly in Flash

The short film version of KERSLASH was created over a span of 7 years, starting with the first half in 2009 and then concluding with the second half in 2016. 95% of it was animated entirely on paper with traditional pencils and pens, and then scanned and vectorized using a combination of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash (Animate). It was a very convoluted process that I came up with out of necessity, as digital drawing tablets weren’t financially accessible to me at the time. The few scenes I did animate digitally were done directly into Flash, using a 4x6 inch Wacom Graphire drawing tablet that I bought from a friend for $60.

I also had a very ambitious 360 shot during the fight scene in the second half and had to rely on the assistance of 2 additional artists. Sean Tate, an incredible animator (who’s work you should definitely check out), handled the rough animation of the characters and Wayne Torres (who was an aspiring 3D artist at the time) created the 3D backgrounds. I then printed Sean’s animation out on paper, did a final lineart pass and then imported it back into Flash for final coloring. Next I had to color corrected Wayne’s spinning background animation to match the rest of the shots and add it to Flash as an image sequence underneath Sean’s finished animation. It was a hefty file that kept crashing that, after a lot of trial and error, I was eventually able to render out as a video sequence. I don’t remember how long the entire process took, but I do remember the feeling of how finishing it made the other remaining scenes seem simple by comparison.

A collaborative scene created by 3 different artists.

This was also my first time having to cast voice actors for specific roles, instead of using friends or just doing them myself. I used 2 separate resources to find amateur voice actors looking for work to build up their demo reels. The first was an online forum called The Voice Acting Club, which surprisingly, still exists today. The other one was another online forum called the Voice Acting Alliance, which seems to have evolved into a Facebook group. Both sites required me to do an open casting call where members of each forum would apply and submit voice samples for the characters they were auditioning for. Unexpectedly, I ended up having to choose from over 50 submissions before narrowing it down to the core cast of 5 characters.

When it comes to the music, I originally planned to use royalty free music to avoid any copyright issues with Youtube, but that plan fell apart when a third party purchased the company that owned the royalty free music I was using and started making copyright claims against the Youtube versions of KERSLASH. So I ended up contacting some artists on Newgrounds and Soundcloud and got permission to use their original music, as well as getting a friend of mine to create an opening theme from scratch. In the end, I was much happier having music created by actual artists as opposed to the generic royalty free sounds I had planned on using in the beginning.

Creating KERSLASH would turn out to be a valuable learning experience when it came to understanding the not-so obvious aspects of creating an animated film, such as building an efficient production pipeline and the overall organization of the project as a whole. It left me with first hand knowledge that can only be gained from taking on a large scale project like this and seeing it through to the end. It was tough, but I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to get a crash course in filmmaking.

You can show your support by attending The First-Time Filmmakers Session online, via Vimeo On Demand on July 15 as an audience member and by voting for KERSLASH for the Audience Choice Awards.