Bunny & Bob and a bit of WIP

A short animated bit for Tali Shalom Ezer's film "Princess".

The movie itself is a live action feature, this is just something the main characters watch on TV.

A few months ago the movie's supervising sound editor,  Aviv Aldema, who also did the  sound editing for "the Congress" and "Waltz with Bashir", hooked me up with Tali, the film's director. 

She showed me an incredible scene from her movie where two teenagers lie in bed and watch a cartoon on TV (it was a placeholder of a very famous cartoon) while blowing bubbles from their mouth. Without giving too much away- what starts as a very innocent "first love" situation becomes, by the end of it, rather dark and freightning  

In the scene itself the animation only stays for a  few seconds, but the background sound of the entire scene is built up from these characters. 

Tali, being the wonderful person she is, gave me freedom on the subject of the cartoon. I decided to match the scene's narrative by creating a very "funny" oldschool cartoon scenario that also has a bit of a dark twist into it. (and the bubble bath also connects to the scene's bubbles.

I started out very very quickly with these two sketches, just to show the concept

The director's main comment that it was too "slick"- she asked me to make it a bit more dark and sleazy

it came out too sleazy- the demon/zombie/dracula character (later named "Bob") was too evil and the rabbit, which I gave more "mad" attributes lost all of her "cute" elements

The third version was the final design-both characters, even Bob, have a bit of a funny and loveable element to them, but also a bit of a dark and sleazy.

This is the linetest for the scene- (all done in Toonboom Harmony)

As I mentioned before- one of the main goals of this project is to set the musical tone for the TV background noises in the scene.

After the animation was done, Tali wrote an 8 minute script based on the 4 seconds, and it was completely dubbed and sound mixed by Aviv's team.
Here's a sample of how it came out:

The end result was so great I just quickly had to do this one final frame- based on this bit of soundtrack