Every time I watch a clip of pop the balloon, someone is always saying something out of pocket 🙈

(Usually I put the reference here if I have it, but unfortunately I don’t have the original user who posted this)

Short Commentary

Inspiration of the short

Dialogue for Post Processing shorts are usually sourced from “X” (formerly Twitter). I usually take a snapshot of something funny that I see and save it to my library. So after going through my screenshots for ideas, I landed on this tweet from @wildsentences on x and thought this would make for a great base for a dating short (note, the screen shot is most likely not from this account, but I’m not sure who the source is).

The hard part is matching the dialogue with a scenario. The past few months a web show about dating has been trending called “Pop the Balloon” in which a bunch of contestants hold balloons, while 1 person is subject to the humiliation ritual of introducing themselves in the best way possible (if someone pops their balloon in means they aren’t interested in dating you).

Every time I watch these videos, I think to myself “this is awful”, but I must admit that it makes for great content. After a bit of time, eventually I had the idea to place the characters in a ‘Pop the Balloon’ scenario because of the similarities between the web show and dating apps. It felt natural putting both the dialogue and the scenario together.

Goal of the short

The main goal of this short was to incorporate the mini-rigs into the production in a more seamless way than previous efforts. While the girl NPC character and the boy NPC character are fully rigged, there are two other NPC characters off to the right side who are mini-rigs. It might not be noticeable on the short format version of the video, but the full, square format shows them.

Ultimately the idea is to see how easy it is to work and implement mini-rigs for full productions. Since they are lighter than full rigs, I would like to use them as much as possible so that there is less of a chance for Toonboom Harmony to crash in the middle of productions.

While the implementation of the mini-rigs were successful, this short wasn’t the best to test if they were light enough, because it was fairly basic and already light weight. That said, I was able to find issues with the mini-rigs that I was able to iron out in a future version.

Production intrigue

This was a fairly standard, and easy to produce short. Maybe in a certain light, that could be interesting!

Fun fact

The addition of the G.W.Bush meme was a last minute addition. I figured since the short already crossed the line into potentially offensive humor, I figured I might as well go all the way.

Final thoughts

Overall I had a good time making this short. In a way it was a perfect production. There weren’t any major roadblocks and what I did have to produce, was fun. This year I’ve had a few shorts that had overly long production cycles so it’s always nice to have a bit of a reprieve!