8/12/2023 0 Comments Trex cartoon animated![]() ![]() We worked on Action Dinosaur for about three years, on and off, which is crazy because I wrote the first draft of the script in less than half an hour. How long did it take you to produce Action Dinosaur in the end? Many of those people ended up supporting the short film, too. ![]() By that point, we’d built a small fanbase of just over 5,000 followers. We set up a Twitter account for the Action Dinosaur character ( and tweeted jokes in his voice for over a year before we let anyone know we were making a cartoon. There are also other ways of building your audience. There are a lot of talented animators and character designers out there who have their own followings, and if they’re involved in your project their fans might support you too. Casting is a great place to do that, Kyle’s fans were so helpful in getting our project funded. Well, congrats on funding the project! Any tips for other animators hoping to learn from your success?īuild as much of an audience for your project before you launch as you can and hire people who bring their own audience, too. We figured if we fund this using Kickstarter and go straight to our audience, we can get to work quicker and at least guarantee that we’ll have something people can watch when we’re done. I’ve worked within the studio system before and it can be very rewarding, but you can also walk away after years of work with nothing to show for it. Even then, there’s every chance they might get scared and pull the plug. Working within the studio system gives you a lot of support, a big team to count on and the ability to not worry about financing, but it can also be very slow as you have to convince a large corporate entity to take a tremendous risk on you. We never contacted another actor.Īnd why did you decide to fund Action Dinosaur with a Kickstarter? From there, Rachel reached out to Kyle’s team with the script and -lucky for us- he wanted to do it. So, when my producer Rachel Liu asked me to make a list of anyone I could imagine playing Action Dinosaur, Kyle was at the top. In addition to being incredibly funny, he just has the most amazing voice for animation - it’s got this deep raspiness that you can’t fake. I’ve been a huge fan of Kyle’s for years I love stand-up and I’ve listened to each of his comedy albums multiple times. Cartoons in that era were super weird, and weird is awesome! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Biker Mice from Mars, Street Sharks, even The Mighty Ducks animated series - all shows about things that shouldn’t talk having muscles and fighting crime. ![]() Trying to squeeze an adult action movie into a colourful kids’ cartoon resulted in some pretty weird shows. ![]() A lot of those movies I just mentioned had an animated Saturday morning cartoon adaptation despite most of them being rated R and way too violent for kids. But more than the movies, Action Dinosaur was inspired by the cartoons of the era. The inspiration came from a mix of late 80s and early 90s media Back to the Future, Robocop, Jurassic Park, the Rambo films and pretty much any action movie that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kurt Russell were all major influences. Source: Jason Merrin Interview with Action Dinosaur director Jason Merrin Watch the animated pilot for Action Dinosaur above and read our interview with writer and director Jason Merrin below for his 80s inspiration, Kickstarter tips and why he decided to produce the pilot with Toon Boom Harmony. It stars comedian Kyle Kinane, best known for appearing in Drunk History and Loose in Chicago, as Action Dinosaur. Merrin and his team planned an entire series, with the pilot having premiered on December 8 in honour of Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day. Animated using Toon Boom Harmony, Action Dinosaur evolved from a Kickstarter launched in February 2018 that raised $23,000 thanks to 228 backers. *available, incidentally, on the Little Amigo YouTube channel. To get you started, we've gathered 20 kids' shows with and about dinosaurs to get your future paleontologist started! So much so that it can be hard to know where to begin! New shows are coming out all the time and, yup, the old classic ones are still available to watch today. Nowadays, with multiple streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+, in addition to network and cable programming, dino-loving kids are living the sweet life. Not only were there limited options but if you weren't parked in front of the TV at a certain time, this week's episode of Denver the Last Dinosaur* was going to pass you by.īut no longer do we need a VHS to record cool documentary about dinosaurs. But our childhoods, like dinosaurs themselves, were in the prehistoric period of the '90s, and finding quality dinostories could be a challenge. Everything from toys to snacks to TV must involve dinosaurs. It seems that every child will, at some point in their lives, enter a dinosaur phase. ![]()
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