When there’s trouble brewing on the streets of Vanzoover, you can always count on the Pork Cops to come to the aid of their citizens. No crime is too big. No crime is too small. No hair is too luxurious.
PRODUCTION
Pork Cops: Smells Like Justice is a 7 minute animated short about a duo of anthropomorphized pig policemen in pursuit of a skunk on the run after committing a dreaded 51-50 infraction.
Where exactly this idea came from, I honestly don’t remember. It goes back a ways when I doodled the two lead characters in a little sketchbook I used to keep near the couch. I can’t even tell you if the idea lead to the doodle or if the doodle lead to the idea. So I guess the roots of this little short film are a mystery worthy of a Pork Cop investigation.
What I can tell you is that I just really wanted to do a fun super cartoony animated short with Looney Tunes style pacing and loads of manic comedic mayhem. It was also a much lighter and easier palette cleanser after the much larger undertaking of my first feature length film. And it WAS a much easier and lighter production to navigate, and it was relatively painless…until post production.
When I wrapped animation I cut the film together and did a pass of sound design. I tinkered with it a bit but wasn’t fully satisfied with the pacing. It didn’t have quite the fast energy I had envisioned and some of the sound really needed some work. I decided to take a break from it and come back with fresh eyes, during which time my computer needed an upgrade. I backed up all my stuff onto an external drive and wound up with a new computer. It turns out that mistakenly all I had backed up of Pork Cops were the rendered file of that most recent cut of the video, and the original storyboards. All the original Adobe Animate files for the individual shots and all the character and environment assets were gone and never to be seen again.
So much for revisiting the edit and the sound mix. Luckily I don’t hate the finished product, it’s still a silly fun cartoony chase through the fictional Vanzoover streets, but it will never not annoy me that I couldn’t do the final polishing touches on the film that I’d wanted to. I had also entertained the idea of doing other shorts with the two lead characters but the wind went out of my sails for that when I no longer had the assets that would’ve represented half of any future installment’s pre-production. Oh well….
