Billed as a ‘journey beyond the threshold of sanity’ featuring Hap, a mad scientist and his cat Mello, the new animated short from Burnt Toast and his company Doodles brings together the music of stars like Pharrell Williams and Lil Wayne with hand-drawn and CG animation that required all new pipelines, processes, and the tightest of schedules.
Part of the movement to establish an Internet that utilizes blockchain technology and is communally controlled by users is Web3 and NFT company Doodles, which was established by Canadian illustrator Burnt Toast (Scott Martin) in 2021 to create a series of digital collectibles based upon his characters.Since its launch, Doodles has expanded into animation, gaming, merchandise, music, and live events.
Its latest effort is the 20-minute animated short film , which was part of the marketing screenings at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival and is currently available to stream on the Doodles App. The story centers around a mad scientist known as Hap, who has a series of adventures in Dullsville with his cat companion Mello. The project, which features music from Pharrell Williams, Lil Wayne, Lily Yachty, Swae Lee, and Coi Leray, came about because of Doodles acquiring Emmy-nominated creative studio Golden Wolf in 2023.Golden Wolf has previously collaborated with Disney, Nike, Netflix, Nickelodeon, Epic Games, and the NBA.Before joining Doodles as CEO, Julian Holguin was the President of Billboard, which makes him no stranger to the music industry.
“Music was always a pilar that we wanted to dive into when developing the Doodles brand and IP,” explains Holguin.“That’s why it made so much sense for us to partner with Pharrell Williams on the company in the first place because he’s one of those rare creators who has been able to navigate fashion, film, and music, and bring them all together to creature culture around entertainment products like with Illumination on and .The core thing that we wanted to identify was how to bring an audio signature to Doodles and make music a part of the brand? We put the story together, presented that to Pharrell and said, ‘We want this song to represent Dullsville [the setting where a lot of the film takes place] and that song represent the Doodleverse [the polar opposite of Dullsville].’ He listened, read the script, watched the animatic, and went back into the studio and actually started putting that stuff together. It was a remarkable thing to witness.
Music was always meant to be a character in the film just as much as our main characters.” Enjoy the trailer: Driving the design language are the illustrations of Scott Martin. “Scott has been fine tuning his craft over the last decade and his IP ultimately gave birth to the Doodles brand, an Internet creator’s brand with most of the content being illustration-based as well as some merchandise and collectibles,” remarks Holguin.“It wasn’t until we were coming out with a new digital product that we began to think about making a short film to promote this cool experience. We always knew that we wanted to be in this space, but didn’t know exactly the best way to do it. Are you going to build your own animation team and start from the ground up or are there opportunities to potentially merge and acquire business that know how to build these pipelines or have them built out already. We had worked together with Golden Wolf [on a commercial basis] and the experience was fantastic; they had wanted to get into more IP development, and we needed a team, so it was a match made in heaven.” “The final film feels like a music video,” notes Dotti Sinnott, Head of Content, Doodles and Managing Director, Golden Wolf. “I’ve never heard an animation project that sounds this way. It’s both this visual and auditory sensory experience.” Sinnott, noting the learning curve in adding motion to the 2D characters, explains, “Our first engagement with Doodles was for a short commercial project where we produced a 45 second animation, where we began to bring motion to these characters. They have a floating eye that is distinctive but makes the animation more complicated to figure out. We have these characters called Doobies which are Jell-O, flubber-like mysterious aliens and one of them had extra eyes. We realized that it didn’t read at all. Ultimately, we decided to simplify it and that’s been a big part of the process. It’s pulling things back and entrusting the simplicity and clarity of Scott’s style and how iconic that is without overcomplicating things.” Going from a 45 second commercial to three social channel postings a week and then a short film has opened up the world building. Sinnott continues, “We wanted to take it to the next level to build upon what was done for the socials and exists in this graphic space with colored backgrounds and character focused on a much richer environment, where we buildout what the Doodles universe feels like. We explored both Dullsville and the Doodleverse with a deep color theory that reflects a lot of the narrative elements.” Selling an original IP in a time where remakes and established franchises are favored to minimize financial risk is not an easy feat. “We look at ourselves as the future of how a lot of independent franchise owners can bring IP and stories to market,” observes Holguin.
“We start on YouTube and via our own platform called DoodlesTV. We do everything from six seconds shorts, which are the most consumed content format in the world, to short films around partnerships that we do or big moments for the brand. Storytelling doesn’t have to be linear, or movie to sequel to sequel. We could put out a one-minute video on YouTube and that could deliver storytelling in the same universe that comes off this 20-minute special that we’re doing here. And if we end up developing a 90-minute film that would go to theaters, it could be its own story or a continuation of something that happened on social media. We also have user generated content [UGC] as a major part of our brand. What keeps the IP pumping every year is all the fan theories and speculation on what’s going to happen in the next season.Yes, the film is the event that galvanizes the entire community; however, it is not all of what defines the entertainment brand.Distribution models and consumer behaviors are changing.
Our daily social posts are as much a focus for us as the long-form we spent months and months developing.The thing that is going to be special about brands in the future is how they stay on all the time and not to a point where you’re exhausting your audience.” Transitioning from a 45 second short to one that plays for 20 minutes required the animation process to be modified by Golden Wolf. “It takes a lot longer to make!” laughs Sinnott. “We ran from January 2024 to August 2024, relatively quick for this kind of content. Coming from our background at Golden Wolf, where we focused on short form content of like 30 seconds or less, even a five-minute piece is long for us. Going into a 20-minute film forced us to think about how you tell stories and continue to build without giving everything away in the first moment. We wanted to capture these worlds and develop this space but not go so overboard that your senses were assaulted.A lot of our work went into the early stage of visual development, so there was this richness and texture in the environments and characters.
We could then take our time telling the story itself, let the visuals speak for themselves, and give our community things to find within the creative.” An entirely new pipeline had to be constructed. “A lot of our standard productions run a maximum of two to three months, while this project was eight months of development working with a global team,” explains Sinnott. “We had to invest in our technical pipeline of how we’re storing and managing this level of files as well as keeping track of all the artists working, task assignments, and deadlines.We also had to look at how we were managing the feedback pipeline between our creatives and the teams working on the project. We did what we’ve always done, which is leaning on letting experts be experts in their fields.We had wonderful partners at Bigmouth Audio who helped us with the voiceover recording and direction of the cast. We worked with an animation studio called Mighty out of Mexico that pipelined some of the animation for us. We also did some inhouse with our own artists and brought on players who had a lot of experience in this space, from our writer Jesse Moynihan who has worked on to our art director Andy Garner-Flexner who came from . We pulled in people who have experience and gave them the space to bring their perspective to it with our overarching understanding of the IP and the overall goals of the film that we wanted to capture.” In discussing how deliverables are important for marketing purposes but should not drive the creative development, Holguin notes, “It's definitely something that could dilute the product if you think, ‘How is this going to live on Tik Tok?’ before you actually make the thing.
If marketing the project is the thing that ultimately drives how it’s made you lose some of the integrity right off the bat. We were inspired by how directors are minted at Pixar.They’re selected to do shorts and then can potentially graduate into directing a feature length film. We thought that the short film format was such a good place for us to test our capability as an up-and-coming studio. We wanted to have nothing mess with the sanctity of that. How could this be the best animated short we could possibly make? There was a lot of stuff that we needed to get in there to represent the foundation of where our brand and these characters could go. Any of the deliverables that drove the creative were how much of the story or the development should we get in 20 minutes versus how is this going to be marketed and deliver partnerships around it? We focused first and foremost on the creative this time around.” Much of the development phases were happening in tandem because of the expedited timeline. “We were working on animatics as we were doing the visual development,” reveals Sinnott. “We were figuring out what is the architectural style of Dullsville. We were leaning into influences, like Brutalist architecture for these efficiency-focused stripped back commercial spaces.We were figuring out how to make the action flow and what type of animation we were going to use.
We did a combination of rigged and hand-drawn animation so we could move between fluid action pace moments and the more efficient workflow of rigged animation. Planning for all of that at the same time was definitely a challenge. When we go back to do our next version, we’re going to give ourselves more time.But, working within those tight parameters, creativity does well when there are challenges to it. We had to make decisions quickly and come to alignment on what felt right to create this short in the best possible way without wobbling.” One of the most complicated shots was the introduction of the Doodleverse. “This one we actually produced inhouse with some of the team from Golden Wolf because it’s a big moment,” remarks Sinnott. “It’s the first time that they fall into this new universe, and we wanted it to have the fluidity of action and wonder of what’s happening as the characters come into this space. It was a challenge to integrate that into the other pipeline we were using with Mighty. We needed to correctly lineup our hookups between the studios working on those shots.We had to incorporate the music that was coming from the artists, so we were reflecting the pacing and tone of the Pharrell tracks.
And it needed to be this beautiful wonderous moment. That was definitely a challenge to work through. In terms of the overall pipeline and what we were working through, the largest piece of this was developing the visual direction for these environments because while we have the characters, we didn’t have the environments in this way. We had to spend a lot of time working out the basic physics of this environment.How does gravity work in the Doodleverse versus the Dullsville space? Even working out those basics within a short timeframe was challenging but was also an exciting part of the process because there was nothing and now there are two whole worlds.” “We couldn’t be happier with the end result,” states Holguin.“ is a beautiful piece of art.
We built a whole campaign around it that has been the most exciting time for our brand and company.We commercialized and marketed a short that in a way I don’t think the entertainment industry has ever done before. We had partnerships with Adidas and Arizona Iced Tea which were done in a tasteful way; they extended the storytelling of the short. As much as the short has its own story of 20 minutes, we were able to do some ancillary storytelling through these partnerships.We launched a direct consumer platform and distributed it there before going to wide streaming distribution.” Holguin concludes that invaluable lessons were learned over the course of the project.
“We found ourselves as a company and are hoping that partners and distributors in the entertainment space see what we’re after and see the value, and we can create interesting opportunities to work with them,” he shares.“The idea that we are optimizing our entire business for one format is ill advised and going through this process taught us about that concept even more.What our core community is going to be asking for is, ‘That was amazing but what else? We need more now.’ We’re already in development on our slate for 2025 and we’re having a lot of conversations right now with studios about bringing this to bigger formats. It has been exciting.
We’ve learned a ton which was the main thing we were trying to get out of this.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for , , and .
