Keaton's Cryptid Safari - "Keaton and the Mothman" [ANIMATIC]

Truthfully, I wanna do more with the Keaton characters that I used to focus on before Pikmin Bits blasted my accounts up to the thousands. So I shall!

There was always the challenge of how to introduce this idea, and still have audiences comprehend it, and this is my attempt. Start with a shot of a rundown RV filled with clip-outs of mothman illustrations, so you get this is a cryptid-obsessed person's RV. But that's no person-- that long ant-snatching tongue could only belong to a PANGOLIN, OH MAN I'M GOOD!

Then I had framed photos of him interacting with various cryptids, such as Cthulhu and a Grey Alien (which leaves space for a classy visual gag about probing.)

The clothing scene was the very first thing done for this project, since it was the first thing that came to mind as I was toying with Keaton's design.

Initially, Keaton the things Keaton was gonna pull out of the boxes were a rubber nipple (like in Ren & Stimpy), undies, and the camera. Then I figured the box gags would have been a good source of further exposition, so I put doodles of other cryptids on there to insinuate they're leavings/remains of those cryptids. So the rubber nipple was changed to a Jackalope skull with a spirit still inside it, the undies stayed and were on the Flatwoods Monster, and the camera stayed, since he was photographing the Dover Demon last. I'll probably be getting to those later.

Here's a little more that was made after the vid was encoded:

 The two cats at the bottom were based on pics of certain cat types posted to the Patreon Discord. I loved how cartoonish they looked by default, wanted to draw them at some point, and this was the perfect time!

The ostrich on the upper right of the tree is actually an OC I had since around 2020, and his name is Ethan. I imagined him having Marilyn Manson's voice and the personality of Tom Green. He was part of a concept I had called "Exiled", where animals that had their brains and bodies experimented on for science, and then had been thrown into a box, and then into a river as a way to ditch the evidence all end up on the same island and try to get along and build their own society.

I also was wanting to draw more man bods, so there was some focus on Vinny's chest in the snapshot marathon.

I'll update this later as the project goes on, but I've been enjoying this moreso than usual projects!

(11 7 2024)

It's basically done, I replaced the vid to this post, I just need to put together the ending tags with the portraits. There's gonna be a change that will hopefully be less taxing on my editor PC.