Hey, my wife who's Swedish is wondering if there is someone who wants to help make an Esperanto cartoon. She's not so good at Esperanto herself, but she would draw the pictures / make the animation IF there were someone who could write the script, make up characters, and that kind of stuff.

Edit: no, there is no time limit on the interest in making projects, be it two weeks or twenty years, so anyone seeing this in the future don't hesitate to contact me or join in on the discussion no matter how old it is.

marbuljon:Hey, my wife who's Swedish is wondering if there is someone who wants to help make an Esperanto cartoon. She's not so good at Esperanto herself, but she would draw the pictures / make the animation IF there were someone who could write the script, make up characters, and that kind of stuff.

Would you also consider putting it on YouTube? What are you going to do about voice acting?

(Edit: from here on, editing my posts to shorten them for any future readers)

Of course it can be put on YouTube!

For voice acting, we could just get people to voice act. Either do it ourselves or ask around online for help.

And of course, there can be an initial YouTube version with bad audio and then an improved version with much better audio!

Moosader:

marbuljon:Hey, my wife who's Swedish is wondering if there is someone who wants to help make an Esperanto cartoon. She's not so good at Esperanto herself, but she would draw the pictures / make the animation IF there were someone who could write the script, make up characters, and that kind of stuff.

Would you also consider putting it on YouTube? What are you going to do about voice acting?

I don't know if she's still interested in this, but I'd be interested in helping write a non-sequential cartoon (the series does not follow a plot).

Here are some questions,
- May I see what kind of style of drawing she has and what she likes to draw
- What shows does she like, and what kind of cartoon would she like to draw (if you could give English examples, that would be helpful).
- What main genre would she like it to be
- Does she have a prefferd setting
- What length does she wants the cartoons?
- Does she expect to earn money from it?

If she's still interested,
I'd have her draw the characters (or give me an idea of what the characters look like, like are they humans, aliens, animals, what?) and then I would draft the first three episodes and we'd work from there.

For voice acting, us three would voice all the charactesr (we'd have to get creative). I could find us actors, but I want us to have something first before we put in the effort, if that makes sense.

Side note, I'm a novice Esperantist, so we would need to have another person help translate it.

I am free to do some voice acting. (Youthful female voice)

And if anyone needs help getting scripts and such from English to Esperanto, I can help; I speak English naively and have known Esperanto for nine years.

If someone else starts plotting out the main ideas of the story and characters I can contribute. What sorts of things are you interested in right now?

She did a split-second animation for this ep of Senpai Club:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cEwgrwuR4U#t=71

link from there to an account of hers:
http://jox-ani.tumblr.com/

Due to me being very tired right now I will just assume that you're familiar with anime:

- She draws in a lot of different styles and not sure she really prefers one to the other. If you want a specific style she can practise it.

- Colouring is not her strong suit but B/W looks good. Anyway, she can just practise colouring too.

As for themes that she likes to draw most, it's GLBT stuff, things which break gender roles, gag, probably serious (depressing) things, and magical girl-type stuff, also SciFi... As for what she would LIKE to draw, that doesn't matter. The point is that she can't think of something herself and needs a script. The script is up to you. It's what you want to write. If she had big ideas about what to do then she wouldn't be asking for someone else to do the script, so don't worry about it.

Length also doesn't matter unless you personally want it done by a certain specific date. if it's 2 minutes or 20 minutes or more, it's fine. As long as she has the script, she can work on it. But the first "film" should be 1-10 minutes in length as a sort of test.

Expecting to earn money... not really. Not from the start at any rate. The goal is just to get an animation done to either A. put in a portfoilo, B. submit to Esperanto tv, C. submit to Swedish tv, etc.

Personally I do like the idea of an older Disney-esque thing. You know, black and white Micky Mouse, targeted towards both kids and adults, short standalone episodes. Only it's a crocodile. : P

Of course, the script can be written in English or another language first and then translated to Esperanto, if the script writer / not all the scriptwriters aren't comfortable enough to write it in EO directly.

Here is a very good video on how to storyboard, assuming everyone interested in writing has never done one before: (in english)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux_Em1lVsjI

So she's going to be doing traditional animation, right?
Is there going to be lip sync, or not? Like, how much production value is going into the animation itself?

Are you and her able to do voice acting (because if you guys can, then we have at least five voice actors)

Do you guys have google accounts (google docs is probably the best way to collaborate).

I think the best route would be to host the show on Youtube, monetize it and (if we make any money) distribute the money to everyone who worked on it. (With the expectation that this will make very little, if any, money and is just for fun and to spread Esperanto).

Also, we should have an English and Esperanto version of the show.

Is there anything that we shouldn't touch upon, for example one of my religious friends is not allowed to say anything blapmemous (like, god doesn't exist).

What program is she going to use?

Is she alright working with another animator (like, I could do special effects and maybe draw backgrounds).

[Before I begin
ze = he/she
zir = him/his/her.
Gender neutral pronoun]

Okay,
I was going to start working on a cartoon next December called Simple English.

It was going to have a non-contiguous story line (easier to write) and have two different sections.

The first section is focused on a person named Daria (Darius), an individual who was born into a rich family (mother won the lottery) and has spent the first 25 years of zir life lazing around all day playing video games and what not until ze decided to actually do something with zir life.

This side will focus on zir goals, adjusting to life and interactions with other people. A lot of it will take place in zir place of work.

The second section is focused on a group of friends and what they do. This will do a lot more with politics, education, satire and parody.

Things of note
- All the characters are going to be animals
- There is going to be adultish humor (nothing too bad, but there are going to sexual themes. Like PG-14 at worst).
- There are going to be a lot of weird characters and situations, like satanists and fascination websites and what not.

Would she be interested interested on working on this or do you want me to come up with something else or do you want me to give you more details about this (I some character sketch references, and epsiode examples that I can realize).

Yeah, 2D drawn animation (using digital tools). Of course the lines can be drawn to match the voice movements. As for quality, as mentioned before, it will be taken seriously, but since she's sick she can't draw a good sample yet. If someone makes up a short storyboard that would make the sample animation go faster.

Tools: Photoshop for animation, iMovie for final video editing (though ideally another program should be used), Garageband, Audacity, and probably Aria Maestosa for sound and music (possibly among other things).

Do you mean dubbing or subbing to English? Of course, we would /sub/ it to English and any other language.

We can certainly do voice acting as long as our computer mics are good enough for you, haha. Either way, it doesn't really matter if we have few voice actors, there's tons of series that were (professionally) only dubbed by 1-3 people so...

We have Google accounts but I don't know how to use the Google docs. What about Dropbox? We've both used that before, it's just simply "stick stuff in a folder" so it's easy to use.

We shouldn't discriminate or ex. outright insult a group of people. Otherwise anything goes.

Working with another animator is fine and good!

I don't know how politics etc would work, it's so vague. Whose education and politics?? Satire of what??

Anything can sound good in a summary but seem bad in the real script, or vice versa. Ex. "This is about romance" well okay. "This is about a blind man who hits on a hermit" sounds a bit different.

Just remember that the viewers aren't going to come from one specific land/subculture for example, which can cause problems if you're not careful. Simple example, "PG-13? What does that mean?!".

Edit: I looked up money-making on YouTube, seems like it's a really bad deal unless you go viral (and even then you might not make much due to how they restrict it - hits from country A are worth less than country B etc).

...So, the best thing is, if you have an idea you really want to see done, write a script / storyboard (storyboard is best but for sample purposes a script is fine), then send it to me and I can give it to her.

Of course you can work together with other people to make one.

It seems to be easiest to start with the dialogue. That may depend on the person though. Just ignore "who's volunteered to voice-act" or "what similar things other people have done" and focus on what you want to do or what you think other people want to see instead. The rest can be worked out when it comes.

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I forgot this part:

"I'd have her draw the characters (or give me an idea of what the characters look like..."

She can try, but since you are the writer it's probably easier if you think up what your own characters look like. Because, she can literally draw anyone and say they are attached to that personality (an old man who wants to be a little girl), but maybe instead you had something else imagined (a mother who wants to be a little girl).