2021 Wrap Up (December Update)

Happy holidays, folks! Hope you’re all ready to over-indulge in your respective traditions this month. It’s hard to believe that we’ve come to the end of the year already; and what a year it’s been for us at Far-Fetched HQ! It’s crazy to look at just how far the development of this purple dog show has come from where we started over a year ago. We joke all the time about just how much everything about this show has changed from what it used to be, but that’s what makes “Far-Fetched” such a fitting series title!

(First pic of the Sesamoid gang together vs final show poster)

The big update of the month is that we’re currently in the process of putting the finishing touches on the teaser clip from our pilot. As of typing this, we’re fully in the clean-up / comp stage of the animation, and all of the music and sound design has been completed. We were planning to release it for Christmas, but due to the monotony of the holidays for our team, it’s looking like January will hopefully be the month we release it. So we’re VERY close to giving the public a real taste of this episode, we just need a little more time to make sure it’s perfect.

(First pilot idea written at 5AM when Ashley woke from a dead sleep vs final script)

We thought it would be fun for the last big post of the year to give you all a quick look back at the journey of the creation of Far-Fetched, mainly before we started this Patreon to let your faces behind-the-scenes. It was exactly a year ago at the end of December when we finalized our voice casting for the Sesamoid gang & a few other characters. We went through over 350 submissions from so many talented actors over the course of 4 days, and whittled them down to the select few that we felt truly fit the characters.

(Early storyboard thumbnails)

Back in January, co-creator Dave took the trek from the dirty south to move in, so our house turned into a big office space (outside of the actual office itself). We’ve thrown so many crazy ideas at each other and covered our office whiteboard from end to end with them. Everything from werewolves with guns for fingers to Grilk, you’d be amazed at the amount of things we have deemed “too stupid” for the show & what we’ve decided to keep in. It’s made the writing of the show so much easier & enjoyable to be together in person, and being able to compromise on ideas when necessary.

(Kira, God of the Far-Fetched office)

Another huge undertaking this year was putting the actual Far-Fetched production team together. Between hiring all different types of artists, animators, musicians, designers & voice actors, etc, we’ve ended up with a team of 70 awesome humans. It’s easy to forget just how many moving parts go into making an animated show like this, and none of our crazy visions would be possible without our amazing crew bringing them to life.

(The crew piling into the "HR Department")

Once the script for the pilot was finished & the character designs were all finalized, we got our two storyboard artists Amanda & Ky to board out the whole thing, with each one handling one half of the episode. Then we had all of the actors record their lines and effort sounds so we could build the audio skeleton for the whole project. Once both of those were done, it was straight into the full production of animation, music, backgrounds, props, sound design, and more! All in all, it’s just a ton of different pieces of a big production puzzle that we’ve been putting together over the past year & we can’t wait for you to see the full picture assembled.

(Thumbnail vs Storyboard vs Character Layout vs Color Concept)

We’ll be having our final Discord Q&A call of the year for all of our $5 & up patrons, this Sunday the 19th at 7:00 PM PST. As always, you can feel free to submit any questions beforehand into the server for us to answer! The Q&A won’t be focused on any particular topic this time, but we may have some special guests joining us to hang out. So cancel all those pesky plans of yours and we’ll see you there!

(Fun test animation using an early render of the Papa Swirl truck)

To close out this update, we just wanted to express how extremely thankful we are for all of your support over this year. None of this would be possible without you folks. One of the coolest things for us through all of 2021 has been seeing the community for our little show grow; between people anticipating it on social media, making amazing fan-art, hanging out in livestreams, meeting you guys at conventions, and more. We can’t wait for this Far-Fetched adventure to continue in 2022, because we’re just getting started & have such sights to show you. Hope you find lots of love under your tree this year!