Cyberninja announcement
?”A balloon’s consciousness gets uploaded to the cloud. In cyberspace, he tries to earn an honest living while beating up thugs and dealing with the existential dread of being nothing more than a balloon —a thin, fragile veil of rubber, expanded into three dimensional space by pure emptiness.” ?
Fearless Transballoonist Cyberninja is the title of one of our upcoming personal projects. Most of our recent non-client works have been ultra short standalone animations. The last commitment to longer form narrative fiction dates back to 2016, with Liesbeth’s Kitten Instinct, before we even called ourselves Mochi Motion.
Rewind even further to 2010. Joel, in his second year of film school, made a zero-budget experimental film in which all characters were played by balloons with crudely drawn faces. The film is completely unknown outside of metropolitan Ghent, but within the local art scene it was fairly successful at the time, for a student film (ie there were multiple public screenings outside of the school context). For the 10 year anniversary we’re doing a CGI reboot. Due to the cheapness and obscurity of the original, this is one big joke of course. But some of our best work comes from jokes that got out of hand. The universe of the balloon-people, then and now, is cheap and rough on the edges and completely self-aware of this. But the cyberpunk concept for the reboot opens many doors for playing around with genre-conventions from a variety of action/scifi/anime films, shows and games. This (along with the fact that in the past 10 years we’ve grown a lot as directors/content creators) should make it an enjoyable thing to watch for a larger audience. The original balloon film was essentially a social drama aimed at academic audiences and underground art fanatics, but with dumb jokes. And balloons.
Cyberninja will be made during rare moments of spare time. Hard to predict where this will lead, but the next step will be to develop a fun cheesy action-packed opening sequence, a salute to the kind of serialized tv many of us remember from the early 80s to mid-2000s. By the end of 2020 we hope to at least complete one full “episode” as a standalone short. We have story outlines for several follow-up episodes (which will actually converge into an overarching plot) and rough story arcs for at least 2 more seasons. So it may become a fully formed webseries or a one-off curiosity. At this point I don’t want to overthink it. It will be a fun ride regardless.
