“This is what happens when you give a bunch of college students a budget, and a room in the back of the studio.” - Alec Soelle
Dead Moon Walking was pitched nearly a decade ago alongside Mechsplorers! Dead Moon Walking was completed fully in-house taking a mere three months of designing and one year in production to complete five shorts. As of late, we’ve picked up episodes that only made it to the preliminary stages and will be completed soon. In other words, we can continue to kill off Orion and Leo for as long as we want! ❤️
We pieced Dead Moon together under the notion of wanting to create animated pieces that felt like comic strips. We started to pitch stories that fit in a a bite sized 15 second format. Chang Dai first pitched Comet and had the whole team rolling on the floor. After that, we picked the ideas that made us laugh the hardest. We worked on episodes in short bursts between client projects. As to a why... the answer is simply because we could!
Dead Moon Walking Production Team:
- Production: MAKE
- Director: Danny Robashkin
- Writer: Chang Dai "Comet and Uplifted", Michelle Yoon "Bugged", Aaron Quist "Die-ving Board", Alec Soelle "Celebration"
- Lead designer: Chang Dai, Aaron Quist
- CG supervisor: Joe Kim
- Animation supervisor: Aaron Quist
- 2D artists: Chang Dai, Michelle Yoon, Justin Weber, Aaron Quist, Alec Soelle, Josh Schneider, Jacklyn Kim
- Comping/Backgrounds: Alec Soelle, Jacklyn Kim
- Music/sound design: Alec Soelle
-Title and Series Explanation-
Dead Man Walking - a person in a doomed or untenable situation.
Moonwalk - either a dance or a dangerous exploratory walk by an astronaut on the surface of the moon.
As we developed the series, we realized that this was about two characters, facing death and personal injury while doing mundane and simple things in space. The Darwin Awards were popular at this time; where people get awarded for the dumbest ways to die and take their own stupidity out of the gene pool. Also, a popular video called "Dumb Ways to Die" came out. While these weren't a direct influence, this kind of thing was prevalent across the internet at the time we were in production.
Dead Moon Walking will forever be in our hearts as one of the silliest and most fun projects we have ever produced. Not to mention, the production of Dead Moon became the progenitor and case study that inspired as well as catapulted Make Originals Content many years later. Now, GO WATCH Episode 1!
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