A Melcre Holiday comes Dec. 22!

By the Melcre Pictures Team

It has been an interesting year with even more interesting experiences from the team, so we made an animation about it. This is Melcre's first short-length video in animation and well, it wasn't an easy process.

Storyline

The storyline follows the Melcre Pictures team that took part in DesireGenie and other productions from 2023 and checks up to see what are their preferred holiday tradition in a lighthearted animated fashion.  Melcre founder Alexandre Aguilar (referred as the creator Dre in the short) personally asked members what they would be doing during the holidays and the responses were just as imagined: anti-social activities, or in Derek's case doing something incredibly dangerous. Not everyone is invited to the party though, as a former Melcre associate was left outside in the cold due to their poor performance in DesireGenie (as voted by the team during the Scout Awards). 

Animation & Production

Melcre debuts their first animated production with Fall back in late September which didn't come without their challenges. The short gave Aguilar lessons on making an animated project in which he would later implement in this short. After changing scripts and entire storylines, production began in mid-November. Aguilar quickly created concept art for the short to figure out pacing and how scenes will appear in the short. Once a script was finalized and several lines were recorded, Aguilar and a few associates began animating the short, with Aguilar taking charge of designing backgrounds and characters.

Aguilar took the responsibility to color, shade, and add lighting to each scene to help bring together the frame in a way that is close to how it would be captured by a camera.

Sound and Music

Post-production sound was done in-house by Melcre Audioworks who previously did sound mixing and sound effects for DesireGenie (credited as Melcre Soundworks). The task of Audioworks in this production was to clean up audio clips from DesireGenie and A World With No Color to be used for the lines of Derek, Luis, Carlos, Ryan, and Jenny from DesireGenie. For all of these characters, their lines were sourced from used and unused scenes and recordings from DesireGenie and A World With No Color and uses AI to remaster lines that were too noise-ridden to use directly from the file. The Barista from the short was voiced by Alexandre Aguilar, to which Melcre Audioworks used AI to voice-morph his performance to the appropriate voice, which was used in the final cut.

The music was composed by the Scout Awards Member of the Year Davet Cabrera, who has previously scored A World With No Color and DesireGenie. The track that plays during the main animation was originally composed last year, however was remastered for the usage of the production, with a newly made end-credits track. If you listen closely in the end credits, you can year a reference to the DesireGenie theme. 

Where to watch

A Melcre Holiday Special is now live on the Melcre Pictures YouTube channel and here on the Melcre website. To access on the website, just tap the sleeping Scout. Just don't wake him up.