Reddit AMA Recap: Ed Skudder and Zack Keller producers of Dick Figures the Movie

 

It has been a busy, busy week for Ed Skudder and Zack Keller as they had SO much release this week. For starters they had Dick Figures the Movie with the corresponding movie soundtrack. And then Zack had a debut of his own for his brand-new series Duke of Fancy which is up now on Rug Burn. But, the guys are crazy nuts, too as anyone whom has seen any of the pictures of the guys burning the midnight oil producing the movie on Facebook can tell you, it’s a tough job…but someone’s gotta do it.

Thankfully the guys took some time out of their busy week to do a pretty rad Reddit AMA where the guys were able to answer a bunch of questions about the production of Dick Figures both the movie and the show. The dynamic 6PH duo were able to shed a little light on how they produced the movie in terms of animating, etc:

The film was drawn for the most part frame-by-frame. Our animators are all very very talented people and all trained in old-school 2D animation (a little over-kill for stick figures, we know haha). But because of that they could really bring all their talent and skill into creating the movie, and I couldn’t be more proud of the whole crew.

There are a couple parts that we use flash based puppets, or “Symbols”… namely the Raccoon (who is all symbols), Lord Takagami’s helmet, lots of the props, and sometimes the circles that make up the characters’ heads.

Any one who has seen Dick Figures the Movie (and yes the review is coming next week) might have thought it was interesting to see more of an origin story featuring lead characters Red and Blue voiced by creators Ed and Zack respectively. The guys were able to go into a little more detail as to why they went down this route:

Zack and I thought a lot about what a movie version of DF would be, knowing that in that world we could basically do anything! But every time we thought about it, we realized the only thing the show is really about is friendship. Red and Blue and their dumb adventures is at the heart of every episode so we wanted to show why they were even friends in the first place, since Red is always such a dick to poor Blue and we wanted to tell the story of why they have stuck together for so long, and why they would continue to be friends in the future. So glad you are enjoying it though!!

Ed would further talk a little bit about what were some of the challenges of making a feature-length film inspired by characters that typically only get three minutes of stream-time each.

The hardest part was definitely just the amount of data and files and animation to keep track of. The webseries episodes never got longer than 3 minutes so they were never that tricky to deal with, but with 73 minutes and more animators and special effects and compositing and everything we had a ton of new things to keep track of and pull together. Our producer Nick Butera did a phenomenal job of keeping us all on track and on time, and coffee did a phenomenal job of keeping us awake haha.

So as we all know, Dick Figures Season 5 started up earlier this month, but the guys are putting the new episodes on hold in lieu of the free chapters of the Dick Figures movie that will be posted each week on Mondo. An interesting point was brought up in how the actual Dick Figures the Movie will fit IN the web-verse of Dick Figures:

Season 5 has a super awesome episode coming up that directly relates to the movie. Make sure you watch the movie first!

That is a rather novel approach to story telling and one might wonder if future installments of Dick Figures could have some interesting story arcs for the future. Speaking OF the future, could Zack Keller and Ed Skudder be working on something special??

 

MORE MOVIES. We love making shorts for YouTube and will continue to do so, but the ability to tell longer stories is really where our hearts lay. We’ve got a new project coming up that we can’t talk about just yet but we’ll announce it soon. You can also check Remochoso.com or the DF facebook page to see what we’re up to.

The plot THICKENS! You can read more of the Reddit AMA chat here and be sure to download Dick Figures the Movie which is out EVERYWHERE online.