ORIGIN:
Okay, so what is Barbaric Melons? Honestly? It was just a stupid name that I came up with a long time ago. When I used to design educational video games we were considering rebranding our company name and so the director was taking in suggestions. Most of our ideas were pretty stupid, and I was no exception to that. Needless to say my suggestion was not picked, but I decided to keep the name on the back burner for whatever it is I was doing.
in 2017 I’d been getting back into 2D animation. I was trying to come up with some simple character ideas where I wouldn’t have to animate so much complexity every time I wanted to create something animated and convey a joke. So what’s something that doesn’t need arms, legs, and a myriad of other drawn assets?
Think…
Watermelons…
Barbaric Melons…
DESIGN:
As I made mention to you earlier, I was really focused on creating characters that we didn’t specifically need a lot of animation. And by that I mean as much as I like movement, the type of interactions I like are mostly dialogue-driven. So that’s why most of my characters, being watermelon of course, are specifically without arms and legs so I can focus on the mouth and the facial features. Additionally I can work on giving him props like hats, helmets, and anything else that would look goofy but accentuate their character slightly.
I’ve used three separate programs for animated watermelons. They started out in Adobe After Effects, I switched to Toon Boom to try that out for a little bit, but eventually settled with Adobe Animate since the complexity is rather minimal.
EPISODES: