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Spinning Egg Zone -- An Animated Sonic Satire Series


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UPDATED: 4/26/ 2020

EPISODE 5 RELEASED ON 4/25/2020


Hey, guys.

So, I have a series animated in SFM that I am actually very proud to create and love to be a part of. I have made friends with several talented voice actors and we have a really great time when recording the lines.

There is a SEVERE amount of work that goes into this: writing the script, recording the lines, animating the main parts, animating the secondary bits and refining main animation, fixing or hiding mistakes, choosing what to cut and what to change, exporting the files and then putting them together in a video editor -- fight with the video editor because it wants to glitch out. Finally, exporting and putting up closed captioning.

My series is... different. Very different than most Sonic parodies and fan made:

Spinning Egg Zone is a series that focuses on the "real life" of cast of Sonic the Hedgehog. The characters are merely actors. As such, their personality doesn't always, if ever, match up to the character they play. Here, for instance, Eggman is not evil, he's simply an actor. Friendships that exist in the game series may not exist in reality.

Spinning Egg Zone characters have issues, a lot of them. They struggle with their jobs, often being pushed down by Iizuka's thumb, have to deal with the riff raff of the fans, and just have to deal with each other. In short, they're broken.

The series a bit more meta, in that sense.

When I made the series, I expected that it would be met with controversy, but honestly, reception has been VERY positive. Yes, I had met one or two people who were legitmately offended by it, but all in all, most have found the humor in and I'm quite happy to see that.

 

Warning: Language. Episode 2 has audible sex (no nudity, all audio).

 

Latest Episode (Highest Quality to date/Update As Time Goes On):

 

Episode list:

Ep. 1: Tears

Iizuka demands Sonic and Ivo to collect tears of the Sonic fans.

The first episode is a little different than the others. The personalities of some characters are a bit different than the other episodes -- Sonic is more humble, for instance. Iizuka remains the same. It was a test and worked out fairly well, but there's more to improve. After speaking with Martin, who has been a great deal of help, we worked together to really fix things up and change the format a bit. So, in a way to introduce the other character to the series, we developed...

 

Ep. 2: Interview

Sonic's 25th coming up and a documentary was developed for him and all his... "friends."

The second episode's documentary style, and a lot more stiff in animation. It was designed to introduce the personalities of the other characters (bar the Chaotix and a few others) and allowed for ideas to flesh out a little.  Up until the fourth episode, this was my favorite. It was a really great time recording this and even better watching it with the crew. There's no plotline here, just exploration. Some ideas were tact on after the recording, but all in all, it worked well.

 

Ep 3: Stand-Up

Vector does stand-up  comedy.

A black sheep, this episode was meant to originally be a short (Spinning Egg Short, which I'll post later), but animation takes FOREVER so even this took too long. We changed the formula, but work was already being done on this, so it was wrapped up and posted as SEZ 3. It is what it is, and while I'm not proud of it, it does some good things, like introduce Vector, Espio and Robotnik Sr (Ivo's dad). The poor quality was channeled into improving this series ten fold with...

 

Ep. 4: The Fanboy

A Sonic fanboy gets to meet his hero and is challenged when Sonic and the gang prove they're far from what he expected.

The quality of animation, focus on vocals and general writing is much, much better. It's the first with a real narrative since episode 1 and wrapped up with the characters of 2. It has 3's... Ivo in a hoodie model? I'm proud of this one. It took months of work to make.

 

Ep. 5: Sally's Day

We take a long look at the day in the life of Sally Acorn, the company's  General Manager, Lord Secretary, Assistant Director, Head of Finance, and Corporate Babysitter.

This is the first copyrighted music-free episode in the series, fun fact. While a bit less narrative-focused in than SEZ 4, it does wrap things up kinda nicely. It had a rocky start but wound up coming together nicely. A lot of lines were slapped with improv. We feel this is the episode that can make many say "It's me" as they watch Sally an exhausting position that channel's anybody in a service industry.

 

 

Spinning Egg Shorts

One episode in this, so far, but I wanted to include it for later. SES shorts are smaller, non-animated character driven stories. Stand-Up was originally meant to go in here, but was fitted into Episode 3 of SEZ, so it's generally worse.

Episode List

Ep. 1: The Trash

Rouge demands Big to take out the trash.

A fun quickie that a lot seem to like.

 

Ep. 2: Tails Wins High School

Vector reads you a story he found on fanfiction.net.

 

---

Anyway, if you have some quick questions, comments, concerns, general confusion, or critiques, post below.

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Awesome voice acting, most characters are straight on. Good acting too. I wish Eggman had more of his trollish theatrical side. But then again, I suppose this show doesn't really put him into a position to be anything but beat down and depressed.

Impressive animation too. Must take a lot of time.

But man, with the Sonic series itself already becoming so meta and so dry with it's staging, watching these video's of Sonic and friends sitting around a table chatting about production is hitting a little too close to what I'm practically expecting the real Sonic series to look like in a few years if it keeps going like it is.
This is almost just a few small steps away from what Sonic Boom is, minus the sex and drugs jokes.

Not my style of comedy. Would prefer the punchlines to be more snappy, this is dragging a bit.
But then again, I suppose the slower pace better with the format you're going for, so never mind.
You do you.

Lot's of pain and effort went into these videos, so well done.

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4 hours ago, Roger_van_der_weide said:

Awesome voice acting, most characters are straight on. Good acting too.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to check out the series, Roger. That certainly means a lot, coming from you -- even if it's not your preferred type of comedy. I'm glad you reviewed it. I'm sure the VAs would love for me to relay the message to them.

I would like to address some points, although being a little cryptic in doing so, as to not release too much (plans can change)

 

On Eggman being more of a troll:

There are actually some plans to later evolve him into more of one a bit later -- obviously not to the bombastic evil genius that SEGA represents, as it's a bit more ingrained into the idea of reality -- but probably closer to say... Scrubs' Dr. Cox? For now, we're beating him up left and right since that's how we view Sonic Team's actions as doing. This does make him the depressed whipping boy. But we want to develop him to become more confident and influential into the community wrapped up in a snarky attitude. The method of how won't be revealed yet (once more, this can change) but there's plans to do so.

 

Boom Closeness and Meta

lol, does it? I haven't watched  more than the first 8 episodes. I do know Sonic's a bit of a dick in both, although, here, he has almost no redeeming qualities.  Although, with the Sonic series taking some shots of "copyright laws" and "It's our job to stop Eggman" I do suppose there's a touch of meta to it.

 

But thanks, all in all. Would you have some advice on how to improve the series while staying true to the current theme I'm using?

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12 hours ago, WittyUsername said:

 but probably closer to say... Scrubs' Dr. Cox? For now, we're beating him up left and right since that's how we view Sonic Team's actions as doing.

On one hand, that's fun. Dr. Cox is a great character. On the other hand, Eggman seems to be the heart of your series now.
I kinda liked you have some heart and positive connections trough the show and it isn't just entirely that everyone hates each other, that would make the show a little too shallow and mean spirited. Keeping a little heart can keep the jokes together and contextualized, even tough I know it's often very tempting for a comedy writer to just turn everyone into a raging psychopath. They're the most fun to write.
But yeah, so far I'm impressed you keep some positivity in the show, like Big, Rouge and Tails...Provided Tails isn't talking about Sonic.. Creates more contrast with the true psychopatic characters, not to mention give them more of a structure to break apart.

So yeah, good idea, but try and not turn all the characters into Dr. Cox'es and the mystery janitor type characters. You need (boring) nice straight people too, if only as victims.

 

 

12 hours ago, WittyUsername said:

 Although, with the Sonic series taking some shots of "copyright laws" and "It's our job to stop Eggman" I do suppose there's a touch of meta to it.

The games are reaching the border of Meta, especially with most recent games being mostly museum pieces of the past. But the Sonic Boom show is full on meta. Let's just say let's hope for our sakes that Stan Everyfan never watches Sonic Boom (If he survived his accident, anyway) because Sonic and Eggman are best buddies in practically every episode.
That's not the meta part tough, but pretty much every episode has the characters make references to the fanbase, reading a script, adressin their own voice actors, etcetera.
But hey, a lot of people love that show, so there's an audience to this meta aproach, so your series has potential to become popular too.
And your show is the complete evil dark twin of Sonic Boom, there everyone is best friends, with you most are enemies.
 

 

12 hours ago, WittyUsername said:

But thanks, all in all. Would you have some advice on how to improve the series while staying true to the current theme I'm using?

Not much. Keep a little heart. The more practical moments were nice, I liked the tension building with episode 4's climax. That was a nice change of pace.

As for animation, one thing that irritated me in episode 2... There's a joke when Blaze tells Silver to get her a sandwich and Silver starts freaking out.
Thing that irritated me was that Silver keeps standing still while talking. As animator I constantly wanted to see him start running offscreen as soon as Blaze demands her sandwich, and then only awkwardly shuffling back on screen when he can't remember the exact ingriedients. The sell the joke and his emotions more. Now seeing him so terrified at Blaze yet remain absolutely still fights against what his emotions are conveying and the joke relies almost exclusivly on the skills of the (admittingly very excellent) voice actors while the animation doesn't really help.

But that was the only big thing I noticed, for the rest it's pretty good. And episode 4 is a lot more visual, so I can see you're improving in terms of staging and movement.

Don't really have good advice. Only tip I can give is that it might perhaps be a good idea to do more smaller quick episodes. Like the third episode. Despite you hating it.
I can imagine making 15 minute epics can be draining, doing a quick cartoon can raise your morale a bit. Not to mention Patience is a virtue you need to earn on the internet, you have to gain a loyal and trusting audience before they're willign to sit trough big video's, so quick video's can be a way to accumulate more casual fans, who can start to grow into your bigger video's.

That said, it does seem bigger video's do have the potential to be the most succesful and popular. As some SFM video's can attest too, and even for me it's my longest in minutes, Sonic adventure, that has the most succes. Strange. Oh well. But still, for the sake of practise, increase in morale, and perhaps keeping your bigger episodes more tight and focused by using the jokes you like but don't really fit in their own self contained cartons, doing the occasional shorter episodes can be some help.
I know I sure as heck need to make some extra crappy cheap short cartoons here and there just to keep my sanity for the big projects that go on and on and on forever.
 

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So, I've been meaning to get back to you on your replies, but either been busy or just generally forgot since I don't visit SSMB as much as I used to. Apologies for the delay, but I did want to speak to you because you give some very good input.

 

On 8/21/2017 at 6:30 AM, Roger_van_der_weide said:

On one hand, that's fun. Dr. Cox is a great character. On the other hand, Eggman seems to be the heart of your series now.
I kinda liked you have some heart and positive connections trough the show and it isn't just entirely that everyone hates each other, that would make the show a little too shallow and mean spirited. Keeping a little heart can keep the jokes together and contextualized, even tough I know it's often very tempting for a comedy writer to just turn everyone into a raging psychopath. They're the most fun to write.
But yeah, so far I'm impressed you keep some positivity in the show, like Big, Rouge and Tails...Provided Tails isn't talking about Sonic.. Creates more contrast with the true psychopatic characters, not to mention give them more of a structure to break apart.


So yeah, good idea, but try and not turn all the characters into Dr. Cox'es and the mystery janitor type characters. You need (boring) nice straight people too, if only as victims.

Yeah, with Ivo, we wanted to really throw the idea that he's just the average guy who's trying to get by in this zany world that likes to step on him. But we wanted to also gave some well intentioned types with Big and Rouge, as well as Vector. Although Vector's a little more of an oaf -- Michael Scott from the Office probably fits him well. Sally probably has some heart to her, too, but she's just "done with everything" at this point.

But we knew that making a show where everyone's at each other's throats, you really couldn't like the characters much, if that were the case.

Although, for what it's worth, Dr. Cox does have a lot of heart, he's just a jerk about the way he does things.

 

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the characters make references to the fanbase, reading a script, adressin their own voice actors, etcetera.
But hey, a lot of people love that show, so there's an audience to this meta aproach, so your series has potential to become popular too.
And your show is the complete evil dark twin of Sonic Boom, there everyone is best friends, with you most are enemies.

Huh, maybe I should check out some of the later episodes. The show wasn't really for me, so I kinda dropped out, but I guess for more source material, I should look around.

As for it SEZ getting popular, I dunno. I defintely see I have a growing niche of an audience, but I don't feel like it's going to expand beyond a few hundred people. But who knows? I like the way you describe, "evil dark twin of Sonic Boom" it does describe it in a way.

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The more practical moments were nice, I liked the tension building with episode 4's climax. That was a nice change of pace.

When writing the script for SEZ 4, I was thinking about "how could I build up on this to make it feel like a story vs a random sequence of events?" SEZ 2 suffered from that and SEZ 1, while was a story, didn't really feel like it built on things.

I feel like I learned from 4, and will build upon 4's structure. I see you definitely felt like it helped, so I feel like I'm on the right path.

 

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But that was the only big thing I noticed, for the rest it's pretty good. And episode 4 is a lot more visual, so I can see you're improving in terms of staging and movement.

Yeah, I wanted 4 to also feature more animation. 2 suffered from the problem for two reasons, 1 -- I wanted to most focus on personality and I chose the interview segments as a way to do that. 2, I felt really intimidated by the long drawn out animation process and by the time I started finishing, I was drained. I don't think I would have animated Silver running off, regardless, but throughout the animation, every time I watch it, I still see spots where it looks incredibly stagnant.

 

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Smaller episodes. But still, for the sake of practise, increase in morale, and perhaps keeping your bigger episodes more tight and focused by using the jokes you like but don't really fit in their own self contained cartons, doing the occasional shorter episodes can be some help.
I know I sure as heck need to make some extra crappy cheap short cartoons here and there just to keep my sanity for the big projects that go on and on and on forever.

Yeah, honestly this is why Spinning Egg Shorts were created. They're not SFM related, but I do think they're designed for more self contained joke. However, we haven't done an SES since the first one, really gotta get on that.

Huh, maybe I should open up Flash again and do SES from there? Been a long while since I used it to any meaningful purpose.

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So, I didn't see anything in the rules about bumping really old topics in Showcase if you have new content. So, here we go. After a two long month hiatus, Spinning Egg Zone Ep. 5 - Sally's Day

 

 

And man!

The reception from my very, VERY small fanbase for this series has been so damn heartwarming.  Like, this comment:

 

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It's like I've died & literally gone to heaven. Wittyanimations we don't deserve you. I'm very pleased & grateful that we actually got this series back for a fifth episode. I can't thank you enough. I'm going through some real emotions & feelings right now.i know this is just a series but the spinning egg zone series means alot to me. Thank you so much Witty, I was waiting for this episode from the start I never left. Now just finished watching the whole videos & the credits/bloopers I could definitely tell you guys had a whole lot of making this. This puts a smile on my face.

Man... I never felt like I had any kind of impact of anyone's life with this series.

Anyway,

SEZ 5 focuses this time on Sally Acorn, who is the most overworked individual in this series. She channels anyone that has to work in the service industry, where it feels like they're soul is being crushed for peanuts.

This is the first copyrighted music-free episode in the series, fun fact. While a bit less narrative-focused in than SEZ 4, it does wrap things up kinda nicely. It had a rocky start but wound up coming together nicely. A lot of lines were slapped with improv. We feel this is the episode that can make many say "It's me."

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Watched episode 5 after seeing it in your sig. Thought it was pretty funny. Good job on it.

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2 hours ago, Tornado said:

Watched episode 5 after seeing it in your sig. Thought it was pretty funny. Good job on it.

Thank you very much.

Sounds like I did a pretty decent job of making an appealing looking icon/sig. Not so much "clickbait" but... well, click-worthy? I dunno.

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