Xylus and Dexter in Space! "Fly Right" Episode 1 - Cartoon animation

Episode 1 of my animated cartoon series Xylus and Dexter in Space!

Xylus and Dexter are traveling through space, flying above the planet Mars when a slight mishap causes them to land earlier than expected.

Concept

I watch a lot of cartoons and like to pause and view them frame by frame so I can study how they’re made. I took some of the things I learned and wanted to try them out, so I decided to make my own series of cartoon shorts.

illustration of Xylus & Dexter's rocket flying above Mars Xylus & Dexter flying above Mars

Artwork

I spent more time on the layout of the storyboards for this series. I wanted to make sure I knew what everything was going to look like from the very beginning.

illustration of a cartoon storyboard Storyboard: Rocket ext. Pan in

illustration of a cartoon storyboard Storyboard: Dexter turns to touch the window

illustration of a cartoon storyboard Storyboard: Xylus pushes the button

illustration of a cartoon storyboard Storyboard: Rocket ext. Mars surface

Animatic storyboard scenes with audio

Here is the audio file I created with the storyboard to use for animating the scenes.

Watch the original storyboard animatic below

Inking the characters

When it came to drawing the actual characters for the cartoon at this point I was still inking everything by hand on paper and scanning them into the computer. I would then convert the line art to vectors, clean them up in the animation software, and color them there. I paid a lot more attention to the line art clean-up while making this cartoon but the outcome I think was worth it.

Animation

For this series, I decided to let the software do the in-between animation for me. I started using the “squash and stretch” method ever so slightly in the program, nothing to exaggerate. Mainly cuz I didn’t realize until later that it was okay to get extreme with those concepts.

Audio

You may notice that Xylus’ voice sounds a bit “different” quality-wise than Dexter’s. Well, when I did this episode Xylus was staying at his mother’s house so I had him record his part over the phone.

I thought to make it look like it was supposed to sound that way I would put a 2-way radio mic on his character’s helmet. Seemed like a good reason visually to explain it I thought.

illustration of a kid in a space costume with helmet mic Xylus with his 2-way radio mic