Celtx Project of the Week goes to... 'The Angry Trumpeter'

'The Angry Trumpeter' is... 'An animated comedy series chronicling the daily happenings of a completely worthless newspaper, its equally worthless staff, and the nonevents they cover.'

Co-created over the internets by Alex Richardson of Little Rock, Arkansas and Andrew West of La Porte, Indiana, this episodic work-in-progress incorporates a fun and entertaining writing style and great character development, accompanied with animated sketches that further bring these characters to life.

This young and talented duo met a few years ago through various online forums and have been friends and collaborators ever since. Alex is a student at Central High School, and actually works on the school newspaper, while Andrew is a recording musician and photographer, who operates an experimental music blog at escapology.org, where Alex also happens to be a contributor. Read on as the guys share details of their collaborative and creative process and what factors continue to inspire the making of 'The Angry Trumpeter'...

Alex Richardson:

"...Andrew showed me Celtx a while back, and I fooled around with it a bit. We used it mostly because of the ability to collaborate on a project, and the script was kind of secondary. I do a lot of the writing. We toss around ideas, and then generally switch off, scene to scene.... I'm in newspaper at my school, and I think we decided to integrate ourselves into it at some point with Andrew's guy being the photographer, and my guy as the writer, then he suggested a bunch of characters. ...Then, suddenly, they were actual people, and Chuck had a girlfriend and Donny was Donny and Meg was there, and Hank and Louis and Jerry and Doog. It was really exciting.

Andrew has a lot of the funnier ideas that I end up implementing (more than him, at least). He also does the character sketches and, originally, stock-photo-finding, back before we had the good idea of treating it as a cartoon--and this is advantageous for a lot of reasons, mostly because it lets us go hog-wild with settings and characters and plots. Andrew's been really helpful to the project, between ideas and the character sketches and the editing. He's come up with some great stuff, and he's been really encouraging."

Andrew West:

"The episodes are written starting with some throwing around of ideas over AIM. Once we have the makings of a plot, Alex lays it out into a timeline and we take turns writing scenes, usually consulting each other over AIM in the process.  Believe me though, it sounds far more organized than it really is. 

We've taken a lot of inspiration from a short lived cartoon called Mission Hill. Venture Bros, Seinfeld, and the whole gamut of British comedy has been a big influence as well.

None of the scripts are quite ready yet for filming (or animating, as the case may be), but the grand scheme is to collaborate with desperate//interested animation students to get the show into a watchable form, record the voice overs in my home studio, and present it in a traditional episodic format through a Tumblr-hosted website I'll probably design and code myself.

In short, our goal is to write, animate, and broadcast an animated series for next to nothing. I've used both Movie Magic and Final Draft. In my humble opinion, Celtx is not only on a level playing field, but it has the potential to completely blow away the overpriced (relative to free, everything is overpriced) competition. I really think Celtx is an incredible thing. Not only fantastic software, but the whole community behind it. Project Central, the forums (where the staff are even active contributors)... it all goes to show that not everything, maybe most things, but not everything has a catch. "

Thanks for the good vibes, Guys. We'll wait with great anticipation for future episodes of.... 'The Angry Trumpeter'!!

All the best,

Sheila and The C-Team

Comments

[Deborah Engle]

I just want to thank you for the free download for my first script. It WAS AMAZING! My crummily organized, non-formatted WRITE copy was formatted right into CELTX with no further work!!! dgengle