Friday, October 17, 2008

How to Make an El Tigre cartoon - part 1

I will now go through our usual process to make each El Tigre cartoon. I have broken it down to 10 steps and I'll be really condensing some parts so please bare with me.

Television budgets and schedules are very VERY demanding so we had to be very disciplined to make the best cartoons we could in the time allowed. I am extremely proud of the fact that we were always on time and on budget. It's to the credit of our amazing crew that we pulled this off!

As much as I loved how the show turned out, I can only dream of what it would have been like if we had more time.

These were rough guidelines and never a "formula". We weren't going to force anything in if it didn't feel organic.

Almost every single story was based on something that happened to someone on the crew. And it wasn't just Sandra and I, all the writers, directors (like Dave Thomas with Zebra Donkey) and board artists pitched in their childhood experiences. We had WAY more stories than we got to make!

All the "reality rules" of the Tigre universe were pretty clear. People, and especially El Tigre, could get hurt and even die. Throughout the series a lot of characters actually died, which I loved. Without this, there was no real threat and nothing was at stake. But we made sure the show had funny action instead of violence. Which was a lot harder than you think.

And this doesn't mean Tigre "won" in every episode. Doing the right thing wasn't always "legal" and vice versa. We loved exploring the moral grey areas in each of his conflicts. As you can imagine, my favorite episodes were the ones with the bittersweet endings.