Voice Over Auditions

A few weeks back we put the word out on the street that we were preparing to hold open auditions for the part of the narrator and the Zak and Jack characters. We had a suprisingly positive turnout! In retrospect, it was clearly obvious that we had no clue what we were doing as we provided our auditioning performers with all the refreshing fruit, bagels with cream cheese and peanut butter spread and ice cold milk they desired. Any phlegm inducing substance was at their disposal. But we had several dozen people audition, each bringing their own strengths and flavor to the story. A handful of them have done some industry work in the past that you may recognize, so I thought it might be interesting to share in our blog. It was fun to watch them all vying for the opportunity to be involved with such a groundbreaking project. As charming as they were, however, none of them quite had that IT factor we were looking for...


James Earl Jones. What a diva. We loved his energy and thought he did a great read, but holy cow! Check your ego at the door, man! Complain, complain, complain. If I hear, “May I please have a glass of water...I can barely breath in this meat locker...I've been locked inside for two hours without a break...it must be 115 degrees in here” one more time, I swear I’ll lose it. Be professional Jimmy! It's a miracle he gets hired anywhere with all his bellyaching.


Too Aslan-y. And UK-y. And Liam-y.


This one was a shame. Extremely impressive resume and great style...it just turns out he’s dead. This could have been quite useful information before his agent booked the audition. Very awkward. We didn't get much of a performance out of him. Furthermore-hot, stuffy old meat locker plus hot, stuffy old meat usually equals a malodorous repugnance not to be believed. This case was no exception.


Now here was a true class act. We liked everything about Morgan and would have liked to hire him, but he contracted the hanta virus from the mice inhabiting Vincent's body and had to be taken to the ER for treatment. He's expected to make a full recovery...just not within our time frame.

When all was said and done we found a genial sounding avuncular, talented, hanta virusless gent by the name of Rudy Anderson that I think we all like for the narrator. Unfortunately, he lives on the east coast, so we won't get him back in the studio until July.


As far as the voice for Zak was concerned, we easily had a dozen kids come in and read for his part. None of them sounded right. Some were too much, others not enough, and some just plain should have stayed home. When it appeared all was lost and we were never going to find the right kid, this little boy walked in and we knew at first sight he would be the one. And then he started to speak! Needless to say, he got the job. Casting perfection.

hallway

sorry for the repetitive use of this character pose—it’s all mock-up stuff. I should probably do some more drawings just so these stills can be more varied. The main point of this shot, though, is the lockers: the coloring, the numbers, the plaques made of little typographic dingbats and so on, the wall texture, etc.

the progress of design: “A Bad Day”

R1. This is one of the very first visual mockups we did last summer when we first started playing around with what would become the Children Kids style. Here we’re using some amazing Ben Shahn illustrations. His style along with a few other artists really helped set the tone that we would strive to emulate throughout—a sort of purposeful naïveté.

R2. Still using Ben Shahn’s tree (which I still love), but have started incorporating found patterns from the Spécimen Général book. Also in there are some windows Micah drew and clouds and doodles from an old sketchbook of mine—sloppily cut out in Photoshop. The texture that forms the side of the schoolhouse is printed woodblock type reversed out and zoomed in like 5000%. So awesome…

R3. Everything here is legit except the watercolor wash background (borrowed from this book). After this, all the concept art has really nice watercolor paintings from Matt Shurtleff (I’ll try to get a link soon)—an amazing painter here in Provo, UT. At this point we started getting a pretty good feel for what our Children Kids world was going to look like, how things were going to be illustrated and colored, what’s in pencil, what’s in pen and so on.

R4. A pretty natural progression from the last illustration. More print texture, more patterns, more pencil illustrations. Zak gets his true coloring and we decide to go widescreen in our formatting. It’s all downhill from here. Right? I wish………

meet Zak.

early sketches and color combinations for Zak—the green pants win out in the end; as does the sandy blonde hair and tan skin… earlier drafts of Zak had more yellow-y hair and paler skin, as you'll see in the “A Bad Day” post.

A “never has been”

This one was received well by all, but we decided it was too Peanuts-ish (not that I could even come close to Vince Guaraldi).