2025 Animation Roster

Hello all!

Here's an update of the projects we're focused on! For those that missed the announcement- The TIE Fighter animation is, as you can see above, all done visually and the music and SFX are now being worked on by the erstwhile Randy of Scary Good Studio (who did the music and sound for Alien: MONDAY).

The mech film has been our main priority, and is in the writing, scripting & concept design stage. Maki has been doing a ton of writing as story telling is pretty new to both of us. We have the elements, but now it's about balancing personalities, plots and motives.

Because the mech project is mostly writing at this point, and in Maki's hands, I'm on standby working on a little side animation and coming in as needed to provide schematics or opinions concerning the mechs and world building until I have a script. In the meantime allow me to explain!
(Please bear with me as I go off on a tangent.)

So, I'm a huge fan of classic Doctor Who (1963-1989).
My first big Youtube animation was a Doctor Who anime (2011):
https://youtu.be/kt3qZYUPi2Y?si=PwpIslMHYmfbNkNM

But many of the old Doctor Who TV stories are lost or missing, because in the 60s the BBC used to literally tape over them (film was expensive, so they'd just show them once on TV and record over them. They never expected people to be watching these stories again, as VCRs weren't a thing yet). An absolutely insane state of affairs.
Some of the really famous missing stories have been officially released as animated reconstructions by the BBC. In fact, I was one of the animators that worked on a few of them in Australia around 2013. A couple of my shots below:

I've been watching some of the newer animations made by the BBC, and it made me think on what if I could give one of them some special OVA treatment, like a high budget short trailer.

So while waiting for the Mech project story to be developed, I selected 4 minutes from one of my favourite stories, Death to the Daleks (1974), and I'm animating over it in a classic 1980s anime OVA style. As though studio ARTMIC or Madhouse or someone took the audio from the TV serial and animated it with that sweet Japan bubble economy money in 1988. The reason I'm doing this instead of jumping into the Street Fighter project is because I can easily jump out of it when needed, and it doesn't require commitment and resources like a full project does.

Death to the Daleks is really good, but Doctor Who never really had a high budget so they just filmed in a gravel quarry and couldn't quite get the majesty of the ideas and the script across. So I've been re-imagining it to make everything bigger and grander. Many old 60s and 70s Doctor Who stories were written by absolute top tier British talent like Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), but just didn't have to money to properly show the concepts and locations they were going for. In this four-minute animation, I'm animating it with no restrictions in mind.
Which I can afford to do because of BURNING PASSION.

For instance, it mentions a galactic plague. This is what I imagine it might look like:
Now with Stellaris-style orbital rings!

The TV story was filmed in a dingy local quarry, but I can try and get the big mountains and valleys of the originally intended alien planet in there:
I also wanted to show establishing shots of the planet not in the TV version.

Oh, and we can see the crashed Earth ship this time. It was fun designing that, as we never see it in the original story. Looks like someone did a terrible job of "landing" it.
But then again, I'm not much better landing my ships in Kerbal Space Program.

I detailed the Earth crew's makeshift shelter like a bigger base of operations, with maps, excavation tools, boxes of rations etc. A real thrown-together emergency base camp. Kind of what I imagine the expedition camp might be like in "At the Mountains of Madness."

I've attempted to make the characters look "anime," whilst still being recognisable as the actors who played them.

I particularly like the Forbidden City that's alive in the story and turned against it's builders. The concept felt pioneering at the time for being about sentient technology a decade before Terminator (1984). And I think the model work in the TV story is great, especially for early 70s chroma keying/greenscreen:
I've tried to push the scale and make it more imposing .

In the original the Dalek ship was a very obvious miniature model.

Here's my redesign to bring it more in line with a Dalek's aesthetic, and I had it crash into some mountains:

Of course, the most fun part is going to be animating the Daleks. In the story, their guns don't work, so they install some primitive machine guns instead. Basically, the crew is limited to bows and arrows because anything that uses electricity is immediately drained by the sentient city, so the Daleks immediately go all Dr Stone and leap ahead in the tech race with full-auto weapons.
So expect Robocop levels of violence, hahaha!
1974 Dalek Design ↑

2025 Johnson custom! 3D modeled by myself, no less. ↑

Anyway, that's what I'm up to as a little bonus while Maki is writing away. Even if you're not into old British sci fi shows, I hope this little project will be interesting to you as a "oh, I guess that's what things would look like as an 80s anime" thought experiment. Just imagine the possibilities with your own niche hobbies!

-Paul