Since this is my first post on this blog I think I'll bring you up to speed on what I've been doing, so you can have a little appreciation for the head honcho/behind the scenes guy who is largely responsible for making 3twins.net happen.
Well, maybe first first I should thank my wonderful partners: Steve Surine (best friend and the honorary 3rd twin) and Andy Kuder (twin brother and the real twin to me) whom without there work 3Twins wouldn't be nearly as good as it is. So thank you Andy and Steve.
That said, I'll get into what I do and mostly what I've been doing lately. My main "job" for the website is to make sure it happens. I make the phone calls and type the emails to the people that get the whole ball of wax start to get waxy. Then I'm the one who makes sure their making the wax (and by wax I mean the various shows/comics on www.3twins.net) and if there is a lack of said wax, I pick up the slack and fill in the gaps (which is most of what I do all the time). I'm also the guy who pushes and promotes and excites the workers (mostly just Andy, Steve and myself, with the exception of a few guest artists from time to time). You get the picture I think.
Up until about a month ago 3twins.net was only home to Hatman & Indigo and some random video clips from our friend Chris Secondi who drew the first Hatman issue. But that isn't how I've envisioned the site for longer than I knew it would take the form of a website. It actually started with Star Flick: The Motion Sickness, a movie script I wrote way back in 1999. It was a parody of various sci-fi movies more so Star Trek than anything else. Well, the movie turned out to be a lot more difficult to pull off than I had originally thought. So, one day my friend Chuck Bedard (you may know him as the voice of the Narrator in Hatman & Indigo) suggested that we pare down the script so it didn't have so many characters or special effects. Which I did in the form of making a pilot episode for Star Fetched a show based on the movie script (which would take place before the movie). And that begot several other scripts for more episodes that would lead us ultimately to the story for the movie. Well that also spun out of control with as many characters as the movie and then some. So, Andy and I sat down and decided to make a prequel show to the prequel show for the movie (I hope I haven't lost you yet). This actually seemed like it was going to work. We had pared down the cast to a mere 5 characters and after writing about 8 scripts we wondered how we were going to pull this off. It was still too much sci-fi for live action on a zero budget so we thought about trying our hand at a cartoon. Well, animation was something we knew nothing about. So we came up with the idea for shelving Star Fetched until we had access for the technology we would need to do it. And I remembered pretending with Andy when we were in early elementary about this guy who had a hat he could pull anything out of called Hatman and his sidekick named Indigo who was a weird jumble of animals. I asked Andy if he thought it would make a good cartoon and he said he thought it could be really funny and a lot of fun to revisit those characters we invented in our childhood. So, Andy and I sat down and hashed out the premise of the show and then I wrote the origin story for Hatman and Andy wrote the origin story for Indigo (which together became issue 1 of The Adventures of Hatman & Indigo). Not long after finishing the first couple of scripts, Andy came to me with the idea for Midieville and he mostly had the show planned out which I thought was really cool. And that gave way to a few more shows that we dreamed up. At the beginning we wanted to launch our website with one of every show (which we had 5 in the works) but after starting work on the first Hatman concepts and seeing how long it would actually take we decided to stagger them as we got better with the process and more efficient with our time. We also realized that traditional animation is a lot of drawing and way too much for any volunteers to pull off in a reasonable time. So we redeveloped Hatman into a comic book, which seemed fitting for the superhero story that it was; but in the spirit of a cartoon we would not have the text in bubbles on the page but rather act out the story in audio form. And in the process we invented a crossbreed of a comic and a cartoon.
All the previous ramblings took almost seven years before we finally put Hatman issue 1 on www.3twins.net. The ball was finally rolling, albiet ever so slowly. So around January we began work on Midieville and discovering shortcuts to make our characters move with the least amount of drawing. When we finally put out the first teaser (which is just a very short snip it to show our characters and still not exactly what the show will become) it seemed like it had taken a long time. But, right now that I think about how long it took us to get Hatman online I think we're doing alright.
As for what I've been doing this last month, I think I'll post a blog on that tomorrow because, man, this one is huge. Thank you for indulging me and taking the time to read it.
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