Animation / comedy writing duo Greg Hahn and Alan Denton team up with voice over pros Colleen O’Shaughnessey, Mike Pollock, Cindy Robinson, and Pete Capella for a bit of lighthearted animated quarantine distraction.
In a bid to fight back against a level of stir craziness even greater than the level they’d suffered the day before they decided action must be taken, the animation / comedy writing duo of Greg Hahn and Alan Denton have teamed up with a group of voice acting vets to produce and record Animation Under Lockdown.
Hahn told AWN, “My writing partner Alan and I were feeling a little stir crazy and frustrated by the whole Coronavirus thing. We saw there was a lot of new web content being put out, and we wanted to contribute something else that could serve as a lighthearted distraction.”
Both Hahn and Denton, who’ve written on shows like SEGA/Cartoon Network's Sonic Boom, Nick Jr's Sunny Day, and WB/Cartoon Network's Unikitty, enlisted the help of Colleen O'Shaughnessey (Sonic the Hedgehog movie, Sonic Boom, Naruto, Danny Phantom, Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes), Mike Pollock (Pokémon, Sonic Boom, Sonic X, TMNT '03, Ultimate MUSCLE, Yu-Gi-Oh), Cindy Robinson (The Purge, Final Fantasy VII remake, Sonic Boom, Powerpuff Girls, Mass Effect 2), and Pete Capella (Sonic '06, Sonic Rivals, The Most Popular Girls In School) to do a Zoom reading of one of the duo’s unproduced pilot scripts, Eli & Mookie's Unpaid Adventures.
Here’s their admirable contribution to our fight against the quarantine yips…
When first considered the idea, like all reasonable people seeking validation…Hahn and Denton setup a Twitter poll. The results were overwhelming:
The ensemble was video recorded via Zoom; the voice artists recorded audio independently for higher sound quality. Hahn then edited the assembled shots and audio.
Quick question: with this whole lockdown situation happening… what if, just to make something, @ItsGregHahn & I assembled some of our favorite voice actors and staged a Zoom live reading of one of our unproduced scripts? Just for the hell of it.
Is that something you'd watch?— Alan Denton (@AlanTheWriter) April 25, 2020
According to Hahn, “The reaction so far has been amazing, except for that one thumbs down - whoever you are, we hate you! It's been a great experience! We're still not totally sure whether we'll follow up with another; since this all started as an exercise in creative anxiety and stagnation, if we get restless enough, it's entirely possible this may happen again sometime soon. Time will tell...”
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
