Kids can now tune in to brilliant new show on Cartoonito – Lucas the Spider. Lucas the Spider started off as a mini-series on YouTube. It was created by Disney-Pixar animator Joshua Slice and follows the adventures of a jumping spider and his friends.
Lucas the Spider is available to watch on Cartoonito every weekday, at 6:00pm and you can find out more over on the Cartoonito website
The 40 second shorts were an overnight success in 2017 and Tom McGillis and the team at Fresh TV helped to turn the mini-series into a fun, new series for Cartoon Network.
The Kidspeak team were lucky enough to interview Joshua Splice and Tom McGillis and here is what they had to say about the Lucas the Spider show.
Oscar – How did you guys get started creating animation?
Joshua – 13, That’s right around the age that I took a summer class at a local school for summer art and literally from that day on there was never a question of what I wanted to do with my life. We were using Bryce 3d which is sort of a very rudimentary 3d program and it felt like Lego’s in 3D space, which up until that point was everything I loved, just building things and computers and I was just completely captivated and so yeah been doing it ever since. For Lucas it was just, now that I’m older and I have my career and I have my day job, I’m always thinking of creative side projects that are just fun expressions of creativity and that’s sort of where the character of Lucas the spider came from.
Oscar – So where did you get the idea for Lucas the Spider?
Joshua – It actually came from a national geographic photo of a jumping spider, it looked like a little leaf and it had 2 eyeballs in the leaf and I remember seeing that and thinking like wow that’s really cute, that’s not something people usually say about spiders, I wonder if that could be captured? I wonder if that could be bought to life? I wonder if it’s possible to make something as cute as the image that I saw? So that’s essentially what started it all.
Oscar – So who voices Lucas the spider?
Joshua – Originally it was my nephew, who at the time of first recording was 5 years old. I remember the first recording I asked him “how do you feel about being a spider?” And he just talked and talked and talked and I took all the recordings that my sister had done and sort of pieced it together until they all fit in like a 20 second segment that made sense. From then as we continued to do the Youtube series he kept doing the voice and then as things transitioned to TV and things had longer time commitments we had to switch over to more trained actors who really wanted to do this all the time. So Tom and the team found a new voice for the character.
Tom – Some of our actors are 7 but most of them are between 8 and 10 years old.
check out the most watched lucas the spider video on Youtube!
Oscar – How long does it take you guys to create an episode?
Joshua – that’s a good question. I remember, well I can speak for when I was making episodes on youtube, back then I was sort of doing everything on my own, the idea, staging, recording, animating everything and it took me about 3 weeks to do an episode but that was a very busy 3 weeks. It was wake up and lets get to work until I had to go to sleep. But as it shifted to TV it becomes more of a complicated challenge because tasks had to be divided and there has to stay organised so people can communicate with each other so it all runs smoothly.
Tom – Yeah and now we have a bigger team, there is more than 200 team members making Lucas the spider episodes. That includes actors, writers, storyboard artists, riggers, lighters, designers, colour, editors, it goes on and on, its all a big team and everybody is working from their house and we are all doing zooms just like we are today with you guys
It takes quite a bit longer when there’s a big team, it takes….now I’m kind of guessing but it takes like 6 months from the very beginning with Joshua and us coming up with an idea all the way to finishing up and delivering it
Henry – Why are the fly and Lucas the spider friends?
Joshua – I like to challenge the audience, I like to find moments that people have an expectation going in of how a fly and a spider would interact naturally and how can we twist that. You know spiders eat flies basically but what if this one is a friend. And what does that look like and once you ask that question and sort of figure out how they become friends you come out with a pretty unique situation, something that hasn’t been seen before.
Tom – I think what we discovered from that idea you had, Joshua, of a fly and a spider being friends – like whaat, and when we explored it we were like well guess what friends, really good best friends can come from the craziest, strangest places, you never know where your friends are going to pop up
Oscar – So where do you guys get your ideas for writing?
Joshua – Well I guess from the very beginning when we were asking the questions, what are some of the experiences that are unique for a spider? You know as you and your siblings go through life and have your daily challenges, those are going to be very different if you were you know this tall *gestures* All of a sudden things take on a life of their own. Right in front of me is a keyboard and you have fingers to type and u don’t think too much of it but if you’re a spider every key is going to be like a building size and so even something as mundane as that takes on a life of its own. So our writers will start with those kind of questions. What does this look like to Lucas? What does it look like to be in a sink? You know it’d be a giant slide, a lot of fun. And once we get there the questions sort of keep answering themselves and we find ourselves in unique conclusions.
Tom – And comedy ensues – we say that a lot when we run out of an idea, but we do fill in the blanks later on
Thank you so much to Tom and Joshua for taking the time to talk to us, and don’t forget to check out Lucas the Spider on Cartoonito, weekdays at 6:00pm or over on YouTube
