The Lost Land of Yehey

This loose series of videos was produced as a proof of concept for an animated series. With my wife and I as co-creators, this series was born out of our love for mythology, travel, food and respect for our Filipino heritage. The series follows the story of a young boy and girl who follow in their late grandfather's footsteps, and embark on a search for the fabled Lost Land of Yehey – a place of great power that can remake the world.

The Lost Land of Yehey | You Don’t Gnome Me

This short served as a testing ground for the series’ production. Our main objectives were to create a low stakes project in which we could test out character designs, background designs and animation techniques. It also helped us to develop our workflow with our composer. This short still remains a great crowd-pleaser, plus who doesn’t like fried chicken.

The Lost Land of Yehey | Prologue I

Because our production team consisted of only 5 people (who all worked full time jobs), we decided to cut our series pilot episode in half to make the production load more manageable. It really worked in our favor and truly left the audience with a cliff-hanger.

The storyboard process for this pilot episode was very different from our previous animated short. I created rough boards (left) with key dialogue/action moments, went over them several times with our composer to make pacing adjustments. From there we produced an animatic (middle), which we looked at and adjusted again. When those were both settled I refined the boards to full fidelity (right), creating art assets I could use in the actual animation. This process helped us course correct any issues we may have had to deal with during production, and gave us a definitive view of what the pilot would actually looked like.

More Videos in the Series…