Recently, I have been looking for new and creative animated projects to watch. Something like the brilliant Love, Death & Robots. Particularly the “Kill Team Kill” and “The Dump” episodes, which are dark but also hilarious. I then stumbled upon MAKE Originals. This super-talented animation studio produces some really cool – and some pretty dark but funny – animated Micro-shorts, which are as wholesome as they are ridiculously funny. We had the opportunity to sit down with these awesome people for an interview and talk about what inspires them, how they got started, and just how far their dark sense of humor stretches. From their series Dead Moon Walking, which is about some astronauts who meet some untimely ends in space, to the similar Brave Hurts series, about some Robin Hood-esque characters who get up to some wacky medieval shenanigans, all the way around to the more wholesome Mechsplorers series, focusing on a family exploring an alien planet, these shorts are an absolute joy to watch. Joining me from MAKE Originals are Alec Mueller (Art Director), Danny Robashkin (Executive Creative Director), and Natalia Poteryakhin (Writer and Storyboard Artist).
Nick McKay: Hey there, guys! I just want to say thanks for giving up some of your time today to do this. So, to start off, can you tell us a little bit about MAKE Originals and what you guys do?
Alec Mueller: MAKE Originals actually started with Dead Moon Walking, which is a series we released on YouTube this year. How it began was, we were thinking a lot about comic strips and how they operate, like the Sunday News comic strip, where it’s a full story in a concise format. You have one, two, maybe three compositions and a story that happens or point or an idea and so from there, with the success of Dead Moon, we were kind of thinking we could start doing these very short pieces for a whole bunch of different stories, and we started doing that format. And so, it kind of snowballed from there, and that’s how we came up with the idea for MAKE Originals, where we were gonna focus on these micro shorts; these bite-sized stories, and they always present really interesting design challenges. We get to dabble in a whole bunch of worlds and stories at once. It’s a huge commitment to do a series, and we have lots of different ideas that we want to get off the ground, these micro shorts were a way of exploring that more broadly and getting that in front of our audience.
Danny Robashkin: Yeah, a really cool thing is that MAKE is like the Swiss Army Knife of production studios. Starting out in commercial and brand film production, the work that we have always done for our clients is 10 seconds or 6 seconds, really short format stuff. So, we already think, in our gear towards creating that kind of content, basically it was just natural for us to then extend that. If we’re going to create our own original stories, our own characters, and worlds, our own IPs, to start in a format that is somewhat similar to the work that we’ve always created.
NM: I wanted to dive into the series that we’ve seen on YouTube. I went over to your YouTube channel to check them out and absolutely loved the shorts and I wanted to start off with two specifically. So, Dead Moon Walking and Brave Hurts are these hilarious little shorts, but they’re also kind of dark in a few ways. So I wanted to ask, what made you get into doing dark-humor animated shorts? Was there anything that inspired that decision? Was it just kind of like, we think this is funny, let’s roll with it.
Danny Robashkin: I think as a studio, that is what we kind of naturally gravitated towards. I mean, we’ve always had kind of a slightly twisted sense of humor, so we wanted to create something that felt approachable, familiar, and comfortable, but then we do things and what ends up happening is a little disconnected. You don’t necessarily expect it to end that way, and that kind of juxtaposing those things together is very satisfying.
Natalia Poteryakhin: Every time I’m scripting something out. It’s just like, “God damn it. We’re killing the character in this again.”
NM: How many of these ideas would you guys throw around in terms of the funny deaths and things like that before you find one that works?
Alec Mueller: I would say it’s about a three-to-one, four-to-one. There are three or four ideas for every one that got made, so it isn’t an obscene number of evolving ideas, but there were ones that we thought were funny but didn’t necessarily play with expectations enough or the punchline was a bit too obvious or gave it away too soon. And so we are really looking at how the audience has fun watching it.
NM: Something that really impressed me about something like Dead Moon Walking, you’re able to tell this whole story, and get to the setup and the punchline of everything all in that short time. I think that is really cool.
Danny Robashkin: Yeah, they’re technically not even 20 seconds because that 20 includes the end card which is five seconds. They’re really meant to be 15.
Alec Mueller: I would point out too that we also do spend a lot of time in the earlier episodes designing the backgrounds and the world around them, and in every episode, it’s not just the staging but the backgrounds that help tell the story, and they’re very much a part of that story. So it is a short story, but we’re trying to get as much information about what’s going on to the viewer. Like in the diving board episode, the diving board is made out of debris, suggesting that they’ve landed on it somehow, and the setup is that Orion, the shorter ‘stached one, is cleaning up the mess while Leo is playing around and he ends up launching himself into zero gravity with the diving board. So, that’s the setup for that, and there’s a lot more implied in the story, given the shortness of the format. You don’t necessarily get a chance to roll it out before the viewer, but it is there. And so, we really try to make sure that not only the compositions are pointing you in the right direction and making your eyes look at what they’re supposed to look at and set you up the way you want it to, but the character performance is and we focus a lot on that subtlety.
NM: Where did the idea of creating this short series of putting Astronauts in space that die in funny and creative ways come from?
Alec Mueller: I believe that it was so immediately readable. It’s just two characters and consequences. Their struggle is relatable, and the other ideas we came up with required a bit more exposition. We had a grandpa and a fantasyland where his house was, and it was terrorized by different toon elements, and it was going to be more of a Fleischmann-style character. The guy who came up with it – Justin Weber – he does that kind of style really well. Then I pitched two ideas: one where these three characters are trying to escape from this insane asylum, and if you think Dead Moon is dark, that was black. Then the other one I remember pitching was two people competing to apply for the same job. So, the gag was always about how they got the job or how they didn’t get the job. So, we found the common thread through the stuff that worked the most was the characters doing something and then having immediate consequences, and we were all drifting towards it at that time. So, Dead Moon was definitely our favorite of the ideas, and it was lighthearted in a way that others were not.
NM: Was that the same sort of process for Brave Hurts? That it was an idea, and you gravitated towards that and enjoyed going with it.
Danny Robashkin: So, Brave Hurts, there were multiple ideas for that one, but they all came from one artist at that time. I was basically like, hey, “We need to start making our next one,” and it was the same thing: short five-frame ideas, unexpected endings, preferably something a little twisted and funny about what’s going on. So, what is Dead Moon doing? Let’s be in that same world, but now let’s move it into something else. Because our commitment is to doing fantasy and sci-fi content, and Dead Moon is a 2D animated sci-fi. What would be the 3D animated fantasy version of Dead Moon? And that’s how we ended up targeting Brave Hurts. Can you rip yourself off? Is that possible? I don’t know. But if it is, we did that.
Alec Mueller: I always get some Looney Tunes vibes from Brave Hurts. They’re always trying to get into the castle and are always trying to be like Wile E Coyote, so I think that’s been ingrained from what we grew up watching. Josh is the artist who did the character designs and story ideas for Brave Hurts, and once we had the structure of what they’re going through, it became about medieval references and what else we could explore. And so, of course, there has to be a trebuchet, and there are some iconic things that we pick up on, but then we’re playing with the expectations that those medieval symbols provide.
NM: I was watching a Brave Hurts episode earlier, and it had me rolling where the hero shoots a hook with a rope into the princess’s castle to rescue her and then climbs his way slowly over and then sees that the hook has gone straight through the princess’s head and immediately you see him climbing back. I loved that! It’s, like you said, that sort of comedic timing of Looney Tunes. I think it’s really great.
Alec Mueller: And the Huntsman, it’s the way we think about him. He’s definitely like a himbo who avoids responsibility. So that’s his character, a lot.
NM: So, talking about the darker ideas, who on the team is the sadistic one who comes up with the craziest ideas for killing off your characters? Who’s the most evil?
Alec Mueller: I think it’s Josh.
Natalia Poteryakhin: I think it’s Josh, too. He’s putting the hook through the princesses.
Alec Mueller: That was his idea, and that even shocked us early. It was one of those things where it is just playful enough to where the shock value of it wasn’t so overwhelming that we decided not to do it, but it’s definitely one of those things where you’re watching it with your hand over your mouth at the end.
Danny Robashkin: But that’s the beauty of this, right? It’s that – I don’t know if this is necessarily appropriate for kids, but kids will watch Dead Moon and Brave Hurts. I know kids in my family and friends that do watch them, and they know that they’re seeing something naughty a little bit, but it’s like, everything is so cute and so bubbly. It’s just that everything is so soft and cuddly that it doesn’t get into gore, right? One of the Dead Moons did get a YouTube explicit content warning.
NM: No.
Danny Robashkin: It was the one where Shoggoth slams down, and they just splash into blood and bones.
Alec Mueller: The percentage of blood on the frame is just more in that one.
Danny Robashkin: Yeah, it was too much blood. If one of them lost an arm in that event, maybe it would have been okay, but because there was a whole splash and there were skeletons and blood or whatever, I think that maybe went too far. But like I said, kids see them and just laugh at it, so to them, it’s just funny. We’re not showing you anatomically accurate gore. We’re showing you the part you need, the funny version of it. It still makes it disturbing, but it makes it so that we’re not so focused on man; this is violent, but really to hammer home just how severe the consequences are for these characters.
NM: It’s not quite at the level of a Mortal Kombat fatality, but it gets the point across.
Alec Mueller: Correct. Yeah, but it definitely scratches the same itches of Mortal Kombat.
Natalia Poteryakhin: I was gonna say, if Josh is the dark one, I’m excited for people to see his upcoming series, House On The Outlands. If Brave Hurts and Dead Moon Walking had more blood and guts horror. That balance is what Josh is getting it to be.
NM: So, switching things up for a little bit from the dark shorts to one that was my personal favorite, the Mechsplorers series. I am a big sucker for that family-friendly kind of animation. What inspired that change to go from something like Dead Moon to Mechsplorers?
Danny Robashkin: So, Mechsplorers was a little bit different from Dead Moon. It was like, can we create something that looks like a movie or a TV show, and then will somebody potentially want to pick that up and turn that into a movie or a TV show? To explicitly create characters and a world that is a proof of concept, then somebody could take it and run with it further. So, that one is meant to appeal to kids but is still like the better Pixar movies where you’re there for the kids, but the adults also enjoy them.
Danny Robashkin: That was the directive – can we create something that is not super commercial TV animation and do something that is really awesome and can push our capabilities forward and then see if somebody wants to purchase it from us? That part hasn’t happened yet.
NM: It needs to get picked up. I need to see more. It’s really cool. I really like that series.
Danny Robashkin: Yeah, we’re working on it. We’re talking to a few people. We’ll see what happens. I’m optimistic.
Alec Mueller: Mechsplorers was similar; we had this project brewing for a while, and it had various iterations over the years and was developed in tandem with Dead Moon, so they straddled the same time frame. We had our 2D team working on Dead Moon, and we had our 3D teams working on Mechsplorers, and there’s a certain amount of cross-pollination between the 2D and 3D teams, something like matte painting stuff for 3D and then needing some CG assets like the spaceship. So, there’s some cross-pollination there, but each team had something they were moving head-on with, and to think Dead Moon was so dark and right next door to Mechsplorers is also funny.
NM: What is the creation process for something like Mechsplorers that is in 3D and something like Dead Moon that’s in 2D? How is that different? And how long would it take to make one of those episodes?
Danny Robashkin: So, now we’re giving both 2D and 3D the same kind of production timeline. We want to make a series in about a year. It’s an interesting thing because 3D has a pipeline that is production-heavy. If you count pre-production, building environments, and building sets. All that takes a lot more time, but then the time it takes to do the animation ends up being quicker than it is when you’re doing 2D animation. You can get to the actual production quicker if you consider animation production, but then that part takes a little bit longer because now you’re drawing. The way that we do it is traditional, so you’re drawing it frame by frame. We don’t generally use puppets or anything like that. 3D would start to become a lot more efficient because now you’re using the same characters, the same sets, and the same tools, but if you have to do it as 2D animation, you’re still drawing every frame. So, if we have to make episodes of Dead Moon now, we can make them in a few weeks. We have a year to do the production for the whole season, but that’s because we’re working on commercials or multiple properties at the same time at any given moment. We’re working on at least four different ideas right now and are trying to release three of them a year.
NM: The next question I wanted to ask, I suppose I can open it up to each of you to answer it if you’d like, is there an animator or an animation or a character that’s inspired these series or inspired you to get into animation?
Natalia Poteryakhin: I’m Russian and come from a Russian immigrant family, so I grew up on a lot of Soviet animation that I love, which hits on the dark and light thing, which is why I love it. It would tackle things for kids but treat it with respect, because they are mature and can understand that bad things happen, but still be lighthearted, warm, and comforting. So, I love the Russian version of Winnie the Pooh. I love Hedgehog In The Fog, which is a classic short animated piece by Yuri Norstein. So yeah, I’d say that’s what brought me into all this mess and makes my parents wish I could have been a computer programmer instead. But here I am.
Danny Robashkin: My answer is not an answer actually in that I’m not really inspired by a single animator. But if I could say that there’s someone who I will use as a role model, it’s Tim Miller from Blur Studio. They created a lot of video game cinematics, but more importantly, they created a lot of shorts when they started the studio, and that’s something that inspired MAKE to do shorts as well. I think it’s been a long time now, but I feel like they were both inspirations to us in that they sometimes use their shorts to practice storytelling and to tell stories that were different from what the clients asked them to do. They would do something like World of Warcraft cinematics like Orcs and Robots and things blowing each other up, and then they would do shorts that were sometimes fun and whimsical just to show something different, and sometimes they would do something that would perfectly line up with the kind of things that they were doing as client work, but they got to try some other kinds of technical things and essentially used the projects as R&D. I think that if you look at those projects and now MAKE Originals, that’s how we’re using our original projects as well. We use them to do the types of projects that clients don’t quite ask us to do and then the kinds of projects that clients ask us to do, we can use as R&D in order to develop something. So I think it’s more of a mechanical inspiration, perhaps than an animation-specific one.
Alec Mueller: So, in having time to think about my answer, I’m not sure if this is a non-answer or not. But I would say the person who really inspired me in storytelling is Hayao Miyazaki. I love his films, and I love all of them for really different reasons. So, I really thought he had that for storytelling on what matters and making you care, and that always inspired me. I’ve been here for a while. At first, it was my upperclassmen, to name a few: Justin Weber, who works at Disney now, and then there’s Andrew Chesworth, who worked on One Small Step and was a character designer on My Dad The Bounty Hunter. What I find inspiring is that each person has their own little corner thing that they want to accomplish, and I feel a lot of camaraderie and admiration for people taking on projects that feel much larger than themselves. Josh has been working on a film for a while, and it’s going to be really cool when it comes out. Watching people sit there and accomplish that every day gives me fuel. Pursuing projects that I would like to pursue and giving my 110% here, even if it’s not my idea, is always about getting the vision off the ground, and that comes from different sources. So Josh has House On The Outlands, which will be dropping in a while, and then Natalia has Sunnyside Down. They’re really different stories and vibes, but as an art director, I do everything I can to support each artist’s vision. So that’s, hands down, what’s most inspiring, everybody else trying to get their idea off the ground and make it happen.
NM: You said it was a non-answer, but it was a really good answer.
Alec Mueller: Yeah, I don’t have THE answer, but I have an answer.
Natalia Poteryakhin: The power of friendship is Magic.
NM: I wanted to give you guys an opportunity to tell us what else MAKE does. Doing a little bit of research, I see you guys have clients like Adidas, Hasbro, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Xbox, so what else goes on at MAKE?
Danny Robashkin: So we mentioned earlier, mostly commercials and brand films. So that is the work that we do. We started out as just a couple of CG generalist guys. We did some stuff and then added more skill sets to tackle different types of projects, and then found ourselves a couple years ago being able to do anything and everything. But now, we’re actually trying to refocus our work into being more focused on storytelling and building characters, and that’s where the synergy of MAKE Originals comes into play every time we’ve wanted to change the direction of the studio. We always did it through our internal projects, just in shorts that were created internally, be it through our Instagram Channel that we used for a while to diversify our skill set and now there’s Originals. So, we feel like these are things that synergize with each other.
NM: And then just to wrap it up. I’ll let you guys get back to work now, I promise, but on your YouTube channel, I’ve seen there are many trailers for things coming up. So, can we get a first-time exclusive of what’s coming up and what can we look forward to in the future from MAKE Originals?
Danny Robashkin: Alec did tease a few of them. So, House On The Outlands is going to be coming up after Brave Hurts in a couple months (should be in February). We then have Mythic Co., which is going to be another project. Imagine The Office with fantasy creatures in a fantasy world. Then, Natalia has Sunny Side Down coming up.
Natalia Poteryakhin: Yeah, It’s a diner filled with aliens floating in front of a black hole, keeping them trapped there.
Danny Robashkin: And then the next project after that, I believe, is Albert’s Ark, and that’s going to be a 3D project that very much feels like your classic Disney thing. Think Lady and The Tramp or Brother Bear or something like that, but done in 3D, so it has that aesthetic and feel, but it is a very modern approach beyond that. There’s a large slate right now.
NM: Any plans for Mechsplorers season 2?
Danny Robashkin: I want someone else to do Mechsplorers season 2 as a full show on Netflix or something like that. So, If someone out there is looking for a really cool story about a family exploring an alien world full of robots that just want to be turned into toys, then we have your property. It’s right here.
NM: Yes, let’s make it happen! Drew knows people. We can do this.
Natalia Poteryakhin: I also wanted to jump in and say if people are excited about the stuff upcoming and want to actually see it get made, we’re gonna keep putting that process out on our YouTube channel in these making of videos because with Dead Moon and Brave Hurts, we didn’t quite get to it but we want for these next shorts that people come along for the ride as they are being put together.
Danny Robashkin: On all the other social media channels – Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and such – we post at least three times a week these little behind-the-scenes videos or little teasers of what’s to come. We’re really trying to engage with the community. We’re not hiding what’s coming up. It’s not like, hey, here’s a little teaser for something, but then no one shows anything until it’s done. In fact, it is quite the opposite for House On The Outlands. If you go to the MAKE Originals Instagram, you can literally see all the character designs for it. You can see little animated bits from the intro, and you can see a lot of content about what is coming. We think that the micro short format is a unique way of doing episodic content. So, I would encourage people to follow us on our socials. We’re not just on YouTube where we put the shorts. It’s the same kind of content and longer multi-minute behind-the-scenes videos, and we would love to get feedback and hear what people want to see. We’re just getting started, and if someone says, “Okay, I want to see you guys show some character animation for Dead Moon.” We’re like, all right, we’ll make a video on that, and now we’re doing one today. So, people can make requests, and they can interact with us, and I think that’s something that’s rare out there as well.
Alec Mueller: Talking about what else goes on here at MAKE, which is another component of things that we’re doing, is that we spend time developing our own tools to use. If you will, it’s not heavy R&D, but we do try out and see how far a certain tool can apply in a given project. We also really think about our work, and we never stop learning about our crafts. We try to stay active in what’s going on and sharpen our tool sets and stay present and a part of this student way of thinking.
NM: Well, guys, I’ve wrapped up all of my questions. Thanks very much for your time, guys. Appreciate it.
Alec Mueller: Yeah, it’s wonderful to talk with you.
Danny Robashkin: It’s our pleasure.
And that was our sit down with the wonderful and incredibly talented people over at MAKE. Be sure to head on over to their various channels to see what they are getting up to.
