Cat Bird Dog was a pilot concept where we wanted to be able to have our own story, IP and eyes on our business but we didn’t have the big bucks for an animated show.
Instead we made episodic short form content. This worked great for us and within a year we amassed over 150,000 followers across our social media and were able to get contracted to produce episodes through Webtoons.
During my time working on Cat Bird Dog I was involved in every aspect of the process, from the writers room to background design to (my personal favourite) character design.
The characters were designed in a way that was easy and quick to draw so that we could make lot’s of content very quickly, but in a way that doesn’t lose it’s charm and make each character unique.
A key part of Cat Bird Dog was the backgrounds and their location. Because production turnaround was so quick, each of the backgrounds had to be made on the fly with little planning. Though, as always with Cat Bird Dog, it was imperative they were dripping with character.
Colours are a huge part of the Cat Bird Dog universe. Each character has their own set colour that they seldom deviate from. Can you guess who’s room is who’s?
We wanted the characters, though fingerless, anthropomorphic creatures, to feel alive and like they are real people. A part of this was making their clothes change per episode, which manifested into a HUGE wardrobe. Especially for the in-house fashionista, Cat.
The process for Cat Bird Dog was a lot like the animation process. We started off with bare bones, bullet point ideas for episodes. which then developed into very rough ‘storyboards’. The reason for them being so rough is because it was just needed to get down the vague idea and get feedback on dialogue, which I wrote as I went.
The rest is pretty self explanatory, it then goes from sketch, to line, to colour and then to formatting.
Alongside creating the actual comic, we had to create content for our social media. This ranged from story reels, to content that was easier to produce such as ‘How To Draws’ and character profiles. Some of our videos got over two million views and our early videos consistently got over one million views. Here is an example of one I animated to promote our move to Webtoons.