How we made animated comedy New Eden

Hi! I'm writer/producer Brett Snelgrove, here to talk to you about the animated web comedy I co-created called New Eden. In the space of a year, New Eden went from a small indie project on the brink of crashing and burning to being re-launched by ChannelFlip for their YouTube comedy channel HuHa!

Last year, together with my co-creator Freek van Haagen (animator and director) we released a pilot episode and series shorts online with the goal of attracting funding for a series.

We hustled our butts off to get New Eden in front of as many people as possible but by the end of the year we had very little luck. As well as chasing down our own leads, we were also working with an agency that specialised in matching brands with producers of television and online content for sponsorship and partnership deals. Despite our best efforts, we unfortunately hadn't generated a big enough audience base to entice a brand to get involved, but we did get a greater understand of the branded content landscape and respect for those who manage to succeed in this endeavour. By the end of the year we were starting to think New Eden was done and dusted.

That was until December 2012, when purely by chance I met up with ChannelFlip's James Mark at an Indiegogo crowdfunding event. We got to chatting and before I knew it I found myself in ChannelFlip's offices talking about bringing New Eden to ChannelFlip's new animated comedy YouTube channel HuHa!

For us, ChannelFlip was exactly the partner we were looking for. They've helped us introduce New Eden to a wider audience and provided us with support and guidance during our re-launch. They also advised us to focus more on stand-alone episodes that would grab the attention of the YouTube audience rather than trying to tell a serialised narrative. Plus they also take care of optimising, uploading and promoting our videos, and throughout the process have acted as brilliant sounding boards for our scripts and edits. I can honestly say that New Eden is all the better since we partnered with ChannelFlip.

Unlike most web creators, Freek and I are not one-man-bands who can write, animate, act, score and do sound all by ourselves. The truth is we wouldn't be able to deliver New Eden without the hard-work of a whole bunch of talented people and so it would be remiss of me to talk about New Eden without throwing a spotlight on them and our production process. As with most things, we start with the script...

Freek and I have been big fans of the work of animator Lee Daniels for a long while and so were ecstatic to bring him on board when we knew we were expanding to a full series. Both he and our other guest animators Levi George and Ben Tobitt have been big assets, as we needed animators who could work within our somewhat unique After Effects production pipeline.

When it came to casting New Eden we always had an idea of what we wanted the characters to sound like. I can honestly say though that we cast Jonathan Rhodes (Hamilton), Kevin Shen (Murray), Jo Bowis (Ivana) and Scott Christie (Keith) because they were the ones who surprised us by bringing a little something extra to their roles. My approach to voice direction is to provide the actors with clear guidance on what is needed for each moment or episode and then to get the hell out of the way to let them do their job.

We play a pretty straight bat when it comes to sound design on New Eden and focus more on bringing the world and creatures alive, rather than employing 'wacky' sound effects. We're therefore lucky to have on our team Justin Bryant, Daniel Kleczynski and Robert Slump who all have impressive credits in television, game and online sound work to help us complete the final piece of the New Eden production puzzle for us.

So there you go. That is not just how New Eden got to where it is today but also who helped us get there. If you've enjoyed reading about our merry little band of misfits then please check out our website at www.NewEdenSeries.com where you can find all our episodes, behind the scenes extras and our blog.

Cheers!

Brett Snelgrove
New Eden Co-Creator