Animation : I would love your Feedback on my NEW Cartoon series called Durnkville!! by Jeff Aiuto

I really love that you put thought into the audio and music, it’s clear you’re thinking about the full experience, and that really adds to the project’s potential.

I did notice that the audio comes across a bit choppy at times and has a slightly robotic feel. Also, the storyline isn’t fully clear, so it’s a little hard to follow what’s happening. Just curious, who’s handling your audio and animation? Are you doing it in-house or working with someone externally?

I think you’re on a great track, testing, learning, and getting feedback is key. There’s definitely room to improve, which is always a positive and part of the process. Excited to see where you take it!

Congratulations on your new series! The main thing that stands out to me are the backgrounds. Using a more consistent style for these would definitely improve the viewers experience.

I used AI. I still have not discovered the right AI software to use to help with consistency. I am sure that software exists but it is either too expensive or I have not tried it yet. This was done with Grok AI. I know consistency is the biggest problem right now.

Choppiness is also a problem. I tried to fix this a bit in the second episode. Thanks for the input guys. I appreciate it.

Jeff Aiuto, I am not an advocate for using A.I., but the "correct" approach would be to train your own model with a consistent set of material. Or you could try something like this that have a "style" option: https://perchance.org/ai-text-to-image-generator (though, there is no guarantee that this tool used non-copyrighted material for training, so use with caution).

I am not a huge AI fan myself, but AI has come closest to what I want to do. I have had these scripts written for years and I wanted to see if I could put something together myself that would bring the story to life. I did everything myself and learning from mistakes is key. I am about to begin a couple new episodes but am contemplating on what to use and how to do it next. One step at a time I guess :).

There are some easy to use tools from Reallusion like Cartoon Animator and iClone.

I have never heard of those. I book marked them and will research them. Thanks!

From your Bio page, you've been working on this idea since you were a kid. It's interesting to see how you've been trying different methods to bring it to life, first with the puppet, now with AI tools. As a proof-of-concept to show that these tools can be used to create 12-13 minutes of footage, it's a success. From a Project Manager standpoint, it proves out a workflow. From the storytelling perspective, well... it demonstrates some of the limitations of these tools at the present time. It's a little jarring that the narrator (does he have a name?) is animated in a different style than EJ, or rather, it's not clear if that difference is intentional, and if so, what you intend with it. Stuff like eyelines (who is this character looking at? who is he talking to?) and reactions of characters to other characters feel a little...floaty in this version, which hurts the setups and payoffs for the jokes. I guess the upside is that the tools let you iterate quickly to really hone in on the rises and falls and beats of each scene.