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Hunted- Beginnings: Part 2

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Here's the second part of the Hunted: Beginning article series written by Bradley Ramsey. These articles reveal a bit of the back-story behind our newest live-action thriller: Hunted, directed by Mark Niedermann, written by Bradley Ramsey, and starring Bradley Ramsey and Ed Faria.

Hope you enjoy and will watch the film when it comes out!

We got a good chunk shot today and it's looking amazing. This is the first film where I have very little involvement. I'm acting as a sort of "executive producer" and it's actually quite nice as I'm spending most of my time supervising the animation on Average Joe's Great Escape, our first animated feature.

-James N.

Hunted- Beginnings: Part 2

Exhibit B: Article taken from a local newspaper

“Hospital patients continue to disappear as death toll rises.”

- Michael Lane reporting

September 21, 2010

Doctors have been baffled the past few weeks as terminally ill patients continue to seemingly disappear from their rooms.

“They are there one day and gone the next,” said Emily Rivera, a nurse at the local hospital. What’s even more haunting is that the very same patients have been turning up dead, seemingly murdered after having disappeared just days before. Many of the patients are too ill to walk or move, leading police to believe that these may be serial kidnappings.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before, I don’t know who could do this,” said police Chief Samuel Barnes.

The phenomenon has been going on for several weeks now, causing concern amongst the other patients and their families. Despite tightened security and regular patrols from the local police, patients continue to disappear, only to show up again days later. Preliminary autopsies show that the victims have each been killed by an overdose of an as of yet unidentified drug.

The most recent victim was one Markus Wright found just this morning; the death toll has now reached fifteen.

Despite the growing unrest from the public, police Chief Samuel Barnes seems optimistic,

“We’re going to catch this guy; it’s only a matter of time. The families and their loved ones have nothing to fear.”

END OF ARTICLE

HUNTED: The Beginning- Part 1

To get you all super-excited about our new upcoming live-action film, Hunted, here's the first in a series of articles and interviews pertaining to some very important plot-points within the film. They provides some backstory to the film and, hopefully, they'll make you want to see the completed film!

Exhibit A: Article from “Health News Monthly”

“New Drug promises Miracles”

Interview conducted by James Matheson

We’ve all seen pharmaceutical companies come and go, all of them promise to deliver new and exciting innovations in medical research. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Ronald Myers, the CEO of the up and coming Eden Pharmaceuticals. Many rumors have been spreading about the controversial research that Eden conducts in their private labs; I decided to set those and all other rumors to rest once and for all. Below is our interview.

JAMES MATHESON: So, tell us, how did you manage to become CEO at such a young age?

RONALD MYERS: [laughs] I hardly think thirty five is a young age, but the truth is, I had big ideas, and this company saw that.

MATHESON: And what ideas would those be?

MYERS: Well, I can’t just come right out and tell you, now can I; my competitors would have me for breakfast!

MATHESON: I suppose that’s true, so tell us a little bit about your company’s research in pharmaceuticals.

MYERS: Certainly, our company deals in cutting edge genetic and medical research. We don’t ask what is possible; we simply ask how to make the impossible come to life.

MATHESON: What kind of innovations have you pioneered thus far?

MYERS: Well of course, our breakthrough product was the age defying skin crème we recently produced.

MATHESON: Ah yes, The Fountain of Youth I believe it was called?

MYERS: That is correct, and despite our competitor’s desperate attempts to discover the secret ingredient, our product is still the number one selling topical skin crème on the market.

MATHESON: But now it seems your company has its sights set on something much more influential than skin crème.

MYERS: That is correct, our newest product is set to revolutionize the way we perceive diseases such as Cancer and HIV.

MATHESON: And how exactly will it do that?

MYERS: By eliminating them.

MATHESON: Those are bold word’s Mr. Myers; do you mean to say that your product will cure terminal illnesses such as Cancer and HIV?

MYERS: It won’t just cure those, it will cure all disease. No longer will Cancer be a death sentence, AIDS will be stopped in its tracks! We will usher in a new Era of human health and livelihood, and Eden Pharmaceuticals will be at the forefront of that progress.

MATHESON: This is truly incredible; we can expect this miracle drug to be implemented?

MYERS: Soon, very soon. We are currently in the middle of running our final tests.

MATHESON: So you have tested it on human patients then?

MYERS: I’m sorry, that information is classified. I can tell you that it will be released very soon to the public.

MATHESON: Well, it’s certainly been an honor Mr. Myers; I look forward to future interviews with you and future endeavors from Eden Pharmaceuticals.

MYERS: Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW

More "Average Joe" and our FEATURE!!

It's been a slow couple of months here at Nethery-Ramsey as we've been mostly developing stuff and not animating a lot. But the good news is, MORE AVERAGE JOE is on the way! We plan to really start animating and getting the third season done. The first new episode is Chinatown Buffet that we just got done last week:



My hat's off to my friend and collegue, Mr. Mark Niedermann, who animated about half this episode himself!

Here is the Average Joe lineup:

Crappy Days (Episode 16)
Joe needs to find a bathroom... FAST... before he explodes. No bueno!
Director: James Nethery
Writer Brad Ramsey

Making a Cancer out of a Cold (Episode 17)
Joe gets a case of the common cold but thinks it's something worse... much worse... like worst of the worst of the worst...
Brittany Spears baldness worst...
Writer/Director: Brad Ramsey

Average Joe: Needs a Car! (Episode 18)
Joe needs a new car.
Writer/Director: Brad Ramsey

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After the third season is all done... WE START ON OUR FIRST FEATURE-LENGTH ANIMATED FILM!

The film is called Average Joe's Great Escape and we plan for it to be up on the web and available on DVD by sometime next year.

Ralph Bakshi would be proud.

Brad Ramsey has penned the script himself, and it is EPIC. Seriously, it's the best thing he's ever written and it's going to beat our best stuff into the ground!

More on that coming later!

John K + Howard Stern

Wow... just... wow...

I'm no fan of John K's work but seriously, I feel sorry for the guy in this interview with Howard Stern and Billy West:



I haven't seen the whole interview so maybe my sorrow for John K will lessen after seeing the rest but Stern and the other chick just seem so ignorant about the animation process it kills me... and I bet it was killing John too. They hardly let him speak about his experiences because they kept interrupting him while making smart remarks and all John could do was just kind of smile and nod uncomfortably. Billy tried to help him out a bit but Stern just kept flapping his mouth so much that he couldn't speak more then a sentence or two.

Weird stuff. I don't even know if I want to watch the rest. Anyone know if John finally manages to speak his opinion?

What's New

Man, I haven't posted on this blog in a while... mostly because I've been super busy over the last few months.

So... what's new right now with us? Well, we just finished up our second web-series The Ultimate Warrior at the beginning of the month which is more of a big experiment of anything. We were experimenting with some new rigs that don't work very well and we were also experimenting with short-format episodes for series, like this one and a few of our upcoming ones, with some form of continuity between episodes. This allowed us to get the episodes out quicker then we usually do because the episode scripts are between 3 and 4 pages in length.
With Average Joe, each episode is basically it's own thing and has little to no continuity between episodes.

For what it accomplished, I think Ultimate Warrior served it's purpose. It's extremely cheesy and the animation is pretty crappy because I was doing it so fast (and I was dying to get back to animating cartoony stuff again with Average Joe).

Now that that's over, we're working on finishing up season three of Average Joe. The next episode is called Chinatown Buffet which is based on our experiences at our local Chinese Buffet which we frequented for lunch quite often.
Mark is animating A TON on this one and it's getting hard to tell our animation apart now! I'm hoping to get this one done soon. It's a pretty long one.

Well, that's all for now! I'll post more updates as time goes on.

Disney- Return to Hand-drawn animation?

The princess says: "Hmmm..."

Disney wants a Hand-Drawn feature film every two years.

Let's hope Princess and the Frog does well and that Disney will follow up on this. This shall be a very interesting year for animation!