Director's Commentary

This week we present the second episode of the Hep Cat series, in which Hep Cat discusses the most important six second drum beat in modern history as it pertains to achieving world peace and other subjects.

The concept for this series is that a cartoon cat has a dialogue with his viewers in the form of video responses on YouTube. When you see references to "subscribing" in the video, Hep Cat is referring to the YouTube channel he appears on.

The vision behind this series is to bring to bear every possible limited animation shortcut in order to produce watchable cartoons at a very rapid pace. It's a sort of low brow experiment. Therefore, the technical mistakes you may spot in the video are deliberate to some extent. I can't say that I actually intended moments where Hep Cat's collar inexplicably flickers or his body is partially transparent. But I can say that the production process is deliberately so quick and dirty that I begin from a standpoint of accepting and even embracing those kinds of quirks. The major technical innovation this week was the introduction of animation achieved by moving fields of distortion applied to solitary images.

Story wise, a formula for this series is developing pretty quickly. Hep Cat presents a pseudo intellectual argument to his viewers, punctuated by frequent use of pun-based innuendos. We've developed the habit of calling them "penis jokes," even though they don't all specifically relate to penises.

I should also take a moment and apologize for ignoring some of the people who responded to the first episode, particularly Cullen, who posted some very good feedback here last week. No one was ignored deliberately. What happens is my son and I script about 250% of what we actually need to produce a single episode and have to cut out a lot of it in order to maintain the rapid fire pace we're trying for. The intent is still to answer everyone who responds eventually; especially video responses... so break out those video cameras, gang! :P

I always welcome constructive criticism, but in this case even more so than usual. If you have anything to say to Hep Cat, any suggestions for improving the show, or even if you simply want to insult the video, please leave a comment below.

Thanks for watching!

Kory sometimes has a hard time distinguishing betweeen himself and Hep Cat.

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