Film Synopsis
The Grover Guys is a fourth-wall-smashing satire on the “hero saves damsel in distress” cliché. The eponymous trio consists of Mikey, Beanie, and D.D. the duck, alumni of the fictitious Grover University who are expert pogo stick jumpers. The short’s conflict occurs when the trio’s good pal, Henrietta Horvitz, is “ladynapped” by a goofy wolf antagonist named Dick Avery, whose “worst” form of torture is poorly-animated ’50s cartoons. This prompts the Grover Guys to do some “mindful” problem-solving in order to save the day.
Behind the Scenes
So, what inspired me to make The Grover Guys? August 9th, 2018 was when I first sketched out Mikey, Beanie, and D.D. while watching a video discussing how Chuck Jones’ classic short The Dover Boys was so groundbreaking for its sharp humor, and, most importantly, its cost-effective animation style consisting of zippy smear frames. From there, I started to vaguely come up with a concept for a cartoon that was essentially my own modernized, subversive spin on that old Looney Tunes film.
A total of eight months and hundreds of hours went into crafting The Grover Guys all on my own. Because I wanted to feel like this was a Golden Age cartoon I’m working on, the challenging decision was made to have the short be entirely storyboard-driven, making this my very first cartoon to be so. FireAlpaca and Adobe Premiere Pro were my two biggest tools used to bring my vision to fruition. All of the designs, animations, layouts, and post-production were completed by myself. The only aspects I DIDN’T create were the music and some of the character voices. My co-stars were the talented voice actor Christian Frates and fellow one-man cartoon studio Matthew Littlemore (a.k.a. Animator320); they did a great job on the acting, but all the raw voice recordings (including mine) required some audio enhancements to make them sound bolder and balanced out. The soundtrack consists of the free hip-hop beat library of Ryan Little, giving the short a unique departure from the typical orchestrated score.
Aside from being a love letter to the cartoons I admire (from Looney Tunes to the criminally-underrated Sheep in the Big City), I see The Grover Guys as sort of my equivalent to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. If you know your Disney history, you’d have a understanding on how Snow White was the culmination of the artistic techniques that Walt and his team experimented with via the Silly Symphony shorts, whether it’d be three-strip Technicolor or the Multiplane camera. In my case, The Grover Guys combines all of the techniques I taught myself over the years of uploading experimental animations to YouTube, including keyframing, chroma keying, CGI, and working on multiple video layers. If I had a time machine, I would go and tell the D.J. of 2014, “Hey! That MS Paint crap you’re using, that’s all dried up. Use FireAlpaca instead! It’s got Onion Skin Mode and smoother outlines!”
Overall, the preceding three paragraphs explain how much The Grover Guys means to me. Special Thanks to everyone who took interest in supporting and watching the short and its colorful characters!
D.J. Berry 