Home. Updates Synopsis Characters Script
 
 
 
     
  Background  
 

Years ago I was studying for an Environmental Science exam. A revision question concerning saving the whales inspired me to draw a cartoon whale. As the pencil whale drawn was shaded, I titled it “The Grey Whale”, though for some reason I had “Beluga” stuck in my head. Not knowing exactly what a “Beluga” was, I conducted research and discovered they were white fish or white whales. I revised the whale to appear whiter and retitled the character “The Beluga Whale”.

 
 

 

 
     
  Story  
 

A cartoon in which Beluga Whale and Bloomingdale Chicken meet for the first time. One morning the Beluga Whale awakes to discover Bloomingdale Chicken upon his head. The Beluga Whale must find a way to remove the annoying chicken before he is driven insane. The story is set in the ocean and revolves mostly around the dialogue between the two characters.

Due to time constraints this is only part of a much larger story, and there is a considerable amount of back-story to be told. The original version was deemed “too open ended” and modified for submission.

It can be viewed here.

 
 

 

 
     
  Analysis  
 


The narrative is driven mostly by the character's dialogue rather than their actions.

The drawing style is simple consisting mainly of lines, and gradients to depict shading. The details are kept to a minimum and there are no textures. The animation was inspired by the older sprite based computer games, rather than cell based animation. Like computer game “sprites”, the cartoon characters are built of several components which can be manipulated in various ways, including scaling, rotating, repositioning and skewing. Rather than redrawing the character each frame, the specific component is manipulated to simulate the animation requirement.

The audio consists mostly of speech with the occasional sound effect. The audio quality is rough and distorts in places, hence being recorded with a cheap microphone. Mouth to speech synchronisation was one of the most time consuming tasks in the animation. Had the speech been rerecorded, it would have been necessary to resynchronize the characters' mouths. Time constraints made this unfeasible.

The characters themselves are humorous to watch, although this is not intentional. They're not attempting to tell jokes nor even being sarcastic. This complies with “Camp” naivety in the sense the characters are serious yet funny to watch without trying to be.

 
 

 

 
     
  Programs Used  
 

Macromedia Flash MX
Ulead Audio Editor

 
 

 

 
     
  Credits  
 

Sound Effects from
www.flashkit.com & www.a1freesoundeffects.com