Undead and Unemployed on GoAnimate

In Undead and Unemployed Mr Tom Mortis applies for a job hoping to achieve his dream of being employed.

This animation was inspired by a comment made by Matheiu Leader, A.K.A Cartoon King, in response to a forum topic that I think I may have started on GoAnimate's forum. I'm unable to find the post or the quote but Matt posted to a topic about Zombies and used the term 'Undead and Unemployed'.

I responded by saying that would make a great title for an animation, which inspired Matt to write a script. He asked me if I'd be interested in animating it. I said yes and that's how this collaboration came about.

Undead and Unemployed by Cartoon King and TET by etourist

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Here's Matt's comment from the animations page on GoAnimate talking about where he got his inspiration from:

The idea for Undead and Unemployed. It came from a short story idea that I was going to write: It was about a company who makes the dead come back to life as cheap labour and form a union and the leader of the zombie union becomes boss of the company!


Also Mortis is pun on rigamortis the act where people die and Umbra tech is a reference to the Sombra Corperation!

Matt did a little more than write the script. He also picked out all the music used in the animation to complement the scenes he'd written.

I suspect Matt reads or has an interest in some fairly obscure topics as his humor sometime references subjects that occasionally require a little more insight to fully appreciate the jokes. Personally, ideas like Communist Zombies is not something I'd ever imagine!

This was the first time I've ever animated someone elses script and I learned a very important lesson; Creating an animation can be done much faster if you write the entire script first.

I think, once Matt gave me the script and I got started, I finished this in a little over a week.

Of course I've ignored that lesson for all my own animations but every time I create an animation from someone elses script it always speeds up my production schedule by as much as 80% (at a guess). I'm starting to think there's probably something to this writing a script first idea.

In creating this animation I do know that what you see isn't exactly what Matt had in his script. There were a few limitations that I just couldn't overcome using GoAnimate's studio so I was forced to make a few minor changes (mostly in the flashback scenes). However it's still pretty close to Matt's vision.

My favorite scenes are the flashbacks, particularly the King Kong scene. I just like how that looks and the Zombie falling seems pretty funny too.

I also like the Zombie uprising scene. I wasn't sure how I was going to do that given the limited movement of the Comedy World Characters but I think it worked out pretty well with the suggested violence rather than actually showing them attacking.

Overall this was well received by the GoAnimate community and got some pretty flattering comments. For me it was a welcome change to work on something where I wasn't writing the script as I made the animation.