EPISODE 1: BEHIND THE SCENES

Title: Pile It

Length: 13:29

Debut: May 25, 2003

"Pile It" is a special episode, because it's the one episode that was done for a class. It was our final project in the high school's Clay & Animation class, and the original intention was basically to create the simplest story we could come up with, and animate it with 2D animation. I had never done any 2D animation before Monito other than a few short flip-books drawn on stacks of note paper, so I was very excited when I realized that we could do a full project using nothing but hand-drawn art, without any clay figures or complicated construction paper sets.

Believe it or not, the original idea for doing the show didn't come from the idea of Monito himself, but rather from the fact that I realized we could do it. It took me a few months to develop the software we used for episode 1, but once I had a working version of it, we were able to make animation ten times faster than with the technology the high school had to offer with the Clay & Animation class. (I still remember the very first Monito animation we made, which was of Grout the Destructör charging up his laser gun and firing at Monito. The only difference between that first shot and the version that appears in the final episode is the background.)

Early on, it dawned on us that at the rate we were going, our final project could be at least ten minutes long. Given that the longest project in that class of any of the other groups was a whopping thirty seconds long, we knew that we were going to pass the class with flying colors no matter what. And that's when we decided to load the show with drug references, sexual innuendo, and just for good measure a pig being shot in the head, to spite the "no drugs, sex or violence" policy of the class.

In case you're wondering, when Monito gives the speech about fractals at the end of the episode, that's just me ad-libbing a speech and recording it into my computer.

The moral of this story is, we got an A+ for the class, despite doing literally absolutely nothing the entire time we were in the class at school. As John and Mitchell can attest, the class (which was, thankfully, the first class of the day) consisted of the three of us sitting around our table discussing current events and cool things that had happened the day before.

After episode 1, I wanted to continue the series (after all, it did say "episode 1" so we had to do at least one more episode) so that summer, we got started on episode 2.