Chapter I: The Inspiration

The very beginning of the story...

We always have inspiration of our works, and what inspired me to create this project, The Wanna Be Oddie  was the old black and white cartoons.

So an idea came into my mind when I watch Steamboat Willie, I thought it would be fun if I make this into 3d. I also realized we've seen tons of animation short films but there're very rare of them had done in vintage B&W cartoon style.



As I moved on to seek for the possibilities, I noticed there's big copyright issue in remaking 3d Mickey. At the mean time, I was already a fan of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit when I studied Disney's history.



I find Oswald is actually more charm than Mickey, but he's the one who has been almost forgotten and nobody would ever mentioned about him.

So I decided to make a short film that dedicated to Oswald, rather than Mickey, but somehow I realized it difficult to separate Oswald and Mickey as they shared many similarities.

In the beginning of 2009, as it's time to present my thesis idea in preproduction class, (as Academy of Art MFA animation student, we need to finish a 2-3 mins animated short film as our thesis.) I knew this is what I going to do for my thesis: Remake the old cartoon style in 3D.

In the next post, I'll show the very early stage of my story ideas and sketches.


notes: The Wanna Be Oddie is a student short film that produced by me, Ben Lam that has no relationship with any properties of Disney Corporation. Any Disney related topics, videos, images that I post here is only for the purpose of references, researches and studies.