The story behind this Infinight animation (and why we only made one of them).

In August of 2022, Stinky Dragon was on the verge of being cancelled by our former parent company, Rooster Teeth. While the show had passionate listeners who came back every week, the fanbase was small and not growing. But we KNEW our show was good and COULD be successful — it just needed better marketing. So, we hunkered down and came up with ideas like:

• A music video for the Kyborg theme song. We location scouted, started on costumes, and made shot lists... but the Rooster Teeth Marketing Department was supposed to produce this one. So... it never happened.

• Create short form vertical videos of the drinks from the show opening as real cocktail recipes. Griff Milton (the voice actor for Meld in Campaign 01) produced several of these. They turned out really well and performed decently on social media but didn't really convert viewers into podcast listeners so we eventually retired the format.

• Shoot cinematic shorts using audio from the podcast by puppeteering the character dolls that Jon & Micah's mom made for us. I'd say this idea worked out pretty well.

• Produce animated recaps for the podcast so that new listeners could easily catch up to the most recent episode. We made only one of these

To produce the recap, I wrote a loose script to summarize the first arc of Campaign 01 (Episodes 1-8) and came up with the bed-time story framing device to make it engaging to people unfamiliar with the show. After recording the audio and editing it all together, I worked with Andrew Douglas, the talented artist who draws most of our thumbnails, to animate it. The end product turned out great! But... here's why we only made this one:

• It's really challenging to condense 10+ hours of story into five minutes of animation AND make it entertaining.

• This video was a LOT of work. It had to be scripted, recorded, animated, and sound designed... and it still only recapped 8 episodes (out of the fifty or so we'd released). To do the entire show would be prohibitively time consuming and very expensive.

• At that time, we didn't have a Stinky Dragon YouTube Channel, IG Reels were limited to 90 seconds, and Tik Tok videos were limited to 3 minutes. So, we could only release a cut-down version of the recap on Tik Tok, and the only place we could post the full video was on The Rooster Teeth website... which meant not a lot of people even saw it.

• By the time this animation was completed, we'd already produced a few puppet videos and they were starting to blow up on social media. This boosted the popularity of the podcast almost overnight. Yay, one of our ideas was actually working! So, we redirected our resources into making more puppet videos!

Thus, this is the only animated recap ever produced and we have no plans of making more, but we hope you enjoy it! What do you think?

XOXO,
Chris