Alien Planets

Alien Planets was Magne and Peter's bachelor project: an animated parody of nature documentaries like those on Animal Planet, and especially the Netflix series Our Planet. The story takes place on different planets in outer space.

We follow Professor Stephen Von Monocle (who specialises in extraterrestrial species) and his camera crew. Their mission is to travel to different planets and capture the ecosystems on film while the professor explains what is going on. The professor doesn't always know what he is talking about and keeps getting the facts about the creatures wrong. This regularly lands them in funny and tricky situations when the aliens do something completely unexpected and shocking, and sometimes turn aggressive. Luckily they have a bodyguard who, although a bit overconfident, always takes the hits so the others can get away. All this mess and chaos creates a disruptive, comic atmosphere that runs through the whole series.

We made two pilot episodes of about 5 minutes each. The series is made in digital 2D, and the genre is a mix of satire, parody, slapstick and shock comedy. It is inspired by more “adult” animated series with science-fiction elements, such as Rick and Morty and Futurama. The main target audience is young adults our age (in their 20s) who want something short and funny to break up the day, for example after school or work.

Our main goal with this bachelor project was to learn how to make episodes of a comedy animation series as efficiently as possible, from start to finish. We thought a lot about the choices we could make, both in the technical execution of the animation and in the narrative structure, that would let us produce in quantity without sacrificing quality. Knowing that the industry expects relatively large amounts of animation within set deadlines, we wanted to build good techniques and routines for getting it done well. As part of this, we focused especially on the very first stage of production (script, character design and storyboard), and that thorough pre-production helped us a great deal in practice. In the later stages (animatic, animation and compositing), the underlying focus was keeping the look and structure simple enough while still making a competent, entertaining series that could be shown on as many platforms and streaming services as possible.