Hey, Frank Bottom! is an original queer sci-fi cartoon about two queer friends fleeing persecution, accidentally launching a living spaceship and riding it to a new world.
It’s a road trip comedy celebrating queer joy, examining concepts of home and belonging, and the value of human life.
The Setting
The series takes place in dystopian sci-fi future where humans live on moon bases and space stations, controlled by a small group of powerful technocrats, while queers and sex-workers are branded criminals.
Our Heroes
Best friends Frank Bottom and Barb A. Fella, a happy-go-lucky trans man and his drag queen roommate, struggle to make ends meet working shifts at a nightclub and turning tricks.
The Story
When a new law orders queer people and sex-workers arrested and thrown into gulags, Frank and Barb decide to make a run for it.
Now wanted fugitives, Frank and Barb seek shelter inside an empty spaceship, accidentally triggering its launch into deep space. Trapped and scared, with the law hot on their heels, things suddenly take a turn for the worse: they discover they're heading straight into a wormhole… and the ship itself is alive!
Can they get off the ship in time? But go where? Maybe they can talk the ship into changing course? But then how do they dodge the space-cops? What about their friends back home? And… they're not alone onboard!
Themes
We live in a time of growing fascism, vast social injustices, live-streamed genocides, techno-feudalism, hyper-capitalism, climate crises, and having AI-everything crammed into… everything. It's a lot! My series hopes to explore those themes through a queer lens, and balance it with dark humour.
It's a tall order, but cartoons, comics, and science fiction have always been great mediums through which to examine and discuss serious social topics. Plus cartoons can exaggerate reality with ease.
The Project
When complete, this will represent the equivalent of a feature length movie running over two hours long. This will take me about 3-5 years to complete because I'll mostly be doing it by myself. This will be a huge undertaking!
The story I have in mind currently has five parts, or chapters, with room to add more in between each of those, plus more at the end if I choose to keep the story going!
How will I do this?
Same as with everything in life: time, money, and a solid plan. This will be my full-time job for the next few years.
My mantras are: "Keep it simple, stupid," and the advice of my Layout Supervisor back in 1991: "Just make it work."
As the volume of work is essentially equivalent to that of a feature-length movie, I'm dividing the entire project into several smaller parts I'm calling chapters. Each of these chapters will themselves be composed of a dozen or more short episodes, each between 1-5 minutes in length. I'll release each episode every 4-6 weeks. That's roughly a dozen episodes per year, or about 30-40 minutes of animation. If I can do more, I definitely will.
I'm confident I can make this work based on my years of experience and how I'm breaking down my pipeline.
The Look
As a 2D-animation production, Hey, Frank Bottom! will use the technique of "limited animation" familiar to most TV audiences, where we use what my friend Hobo Divine calls "sophisticated shortcuts" to do more with less.
The project's look is deeply influenced by the methods and art direction of UPA cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s. More specifically, I'm taking inspiration from a show called Roger Ramjet which ran from 1965 to 1969 with over 150 five-minute episodes (most of them are here on YouTube). Creator and director Fred Crippen kept the animation downright minimalist, which often made gags even funnier and punchier, yet he never sacrificed story or comedy.
The Production
My pipeline will consist of using Blender, DaVinci Resolve, and Audacity. Each is professional-grade software, and completely free!
- Blender for storyboards, animatics, layouts, and animation;
- Audacity for sound design;
- DaVinci Resolve for editing and compositing.
To start, I'll be doing everything myself, including the voices. That's a lot, so the first few episodes may be a bit slow as I build momentum and the show's asset library. I'll be sharing sneak peeks, work-in-progress, and other updates by email and on social media.
As the project grows and my budget permits (this is where you come in!), I'll be able to hire a few artists, voice actors, and production engineers to help out. And I plan to pay union wages because I'm a proud member of IATSE local 938, the Canadian Animation Guild!
Frank & Barb are Canadian! Your support funds an original queer Canadian production!
Sadly, Canada struggles at supporting our own TV and film productions. Culturally we are almost trained to look away from Canada and instead towards the US entertainment industry. The animation industry for example relies far too heavily on US studios sending work up here to be completed by subcontractor "service studios." (That's what all the big Canadian studios are called.) It's time we make our own stuff, and that's how you can help contribute!
Follow Frank
You can subscribe to the Frank Bottom newsletter for updates and sneak peeks, and connect with us online here:
InstagramBlueskyTumblrYouTubeMastodonDiscordSignal
And thank you!
FAQ
1. Can I cancel or edit my pledge?
No, that's not possible. Hey, Frank Bottom! is set up as "keep it all" campaign, which means once you've pledged, your funds are immediately collected.
2. When will I be charged?
Funds will be collected immediately at the time of your pledge.
3. I'm in the EU. Do you collect VAT?
No, Crowdfundr does not have the ability to collect VAT.
4. Where can I find my contribution?
You should see your contributions in your Crowdfundr account under Contributions. If you weren't signed in to Crowdfundr when you made a contribution, it won't appear in your account.
To show a missing contribution:
- In your email inbox, find the confirmation email from Crowdfundr for the contribution.
- In the email, locate and click the edit link for the contribution.
- Make sure that you are signed in to Crowdfundr.
- Update your contribution details.
- Save your changes.
The missing contribution should then appear in your account.
The Director
 | Over 35 years in the industryMy animation career began in 1990 when, still in college, I got hired as an inbetweener on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Soon after I found work as a layout artist on Beetlejuice, and Eek! The Cat, and then as a storyboard artist on Bob and Margaret, and Courage the Cowardly Dog. More recently I was a layout supervisor on Netflix's The Mr Peabody & Sherman Show, a key pose artist on The Adventures of Rock & Bullwinkle, a series director on Rhyme Time Town, and senior storyboard artist on Nickelodeon's Middlemost Post. In all, I've counted contributing to over 300 individual movies, episodes, shorts, ads, and PSAs over my career. I've worked in every stage of animation production from assistant to senior artist, from supervisor to director to producer. However this is my first independent animation project and I'm very excited about it! Why a solo project now?Three reasons: time, timing, and resources. I've been wanting to do this for years but never had the time because I was always neck-deep in work. If you're familiar with the animation industry you know how gruelling the production schedules can be. Plus, Canada's animation industry had no union protections until just a few years ago when the Canadian Animation Guild formed in 2020 (I'm a proud member!), which meant that long days of unpaid overtime were the norm. Also, in 2023 the animation industry took a nosedive and has not bounced back. Studios had oversaturated the market with content during the 2010s. Then streaming services multiplied to compete against each other, burning through tons of cash with no profit model in sight (at least cable TV had ads). Throw in the new threat that generative-AI poses to filmmaking and art forms in general and, well, here we are. When I started out, doing animation was very expensive, very time-consuming, and very messy. You needed mountains of specialized paper and cells, gallons of paint, a specialized animation table, an even more specialized and insanely expensive camera, not to mention the cost of film developing and audio tape, and then having to manually splice all that together! But things are different today. The gatekeeping of software by greedy giants like Adobe is being offset dramatically far better options (many of them free!), plus solutions like crowdfunding, and the fact that every animation artist has the entire means of production right on their desktop. In addition, you don't need to worry about finding a broadcaster now because you can just stream your projects yourself on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, TikTok, etc… With no stable work in nearly 3 years, complete disenchantment with the industry, decades of experience, free software and a robust computer setup, and enough talent and skills… honestly the timing couldn't be better to make my own cartoon. Cartoons that inspire meI mostly love what you might call "old timey" cartoons, specifically the early work from the 1940s through to the 1960s. (The less we say about American cartoons of the 70s and 80s the better.) Things like early Warner Bros shorts, UPA-era shows like Roger Ramjet, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and The Flintstones and Yogi Bear from Hanna-Barbera. Early anime shows like Astro-Boy, Speed Racer, and Goldorak (you'd know it as UFO Robot Grendizer, but I watched it in French!) are all influences on me too. I love their simplicity, the bold graphics, the comic book colour palettes, and above all the goofy absurdity of shows from those years. None of them were grounded in realism, but rather were complete fantasy. They were colourful and hopeful and idealistic, very much like all the sci-fi of the 1950s and 1960s (another big influence). They were light and goofy, and if feels like we need some of that today. You can see more of my work at my website luclatulippe.com
|
