So in the past year, I’ve been talking to artists to help make SCRAMBLE into an animation. That had a couple of steps. The first was character designs, which the talented Myke Guisinga, a professional and freelance comic book artist, readily crafted while I searched high and low for an animator.
When Myke was done making the character designs, he surprised me with this – a poster featuring all the main characters of SCRAMBLE. I was beyond delighted. With a few tweaks, he put Memphis in the background – an iconic bridge that crosses the Mississippi River, and Beale Street – two images that greeted me when I first moved to Memphis in 2000. Again, seeing the finished poster caused me great delight. It was as if my long-lost gang of high school friends, my barkada, had been reunited despite the vastness of time and distance between us now. The guys who inspired these various characters, like Grattan Sargent and Danny Kunz, I have no idea how to find anymore.
And the costumes! I sewed each of five unique trench coats in the summer of 2005. A red kimono-sleeved one for me, a blue one for Grattan, black with silver lining for the tall and skinny Danny, and more. Each of the six of us were supposed to write an episode, but in the end I wrote all of them and even made props too, like Ames’ rocket launcher out of pineapple cans and duct tape. A friend later mistook that for a real spud cannon, too! I was proud of my creations, even my early attempts at designing the mechanisms for Bonni’s mechanical and bladed umbrella, with a sword too.
Anyways, Myke’s professional designs will still need to be simplified for the actual animation. And that’s gonna require funding… somehow or other. Roughly $1,000 USD per minute for a finished work with voice and sound effects based on my research so far.
If you want to help bring SCRAMBLE to life, check out https://ko-fi.com/isabelrisone
Thanks, y’all.