The Return of the Space Nicks

“I just can’t quit you, baby.”

This year is the 15th anniversary of ‘Saint Nick and the Space Nicks’, a wonderful ‘Out of this World’ Christmas children’s book written by Richard C. Mears and illustrated by myself. So to commemorate the Space Nicks birthday. I’ve created a new updated cartoon animation.

At the time of the original publication, I created a companion animation from my original artwork to showcase our self-published book. And, for several years it had a good run. ABC-TV’s World New Now would air it on Christmas eve.

Then tragedy struck… HD-TV.

You see, the animation was created way back in 2004 in standard definition, not High Definition. Who knew?! Once television made the switch my Space Nicks cartoon was relegated to the unwatched SD dustbin of YouTube.

What are you gonna do?

I moved on. I created a Space Nicks Interactive App for iPad, iPhone and Kindle Fire. That was cool. I thought that was it. Time to move on. Let’s put the Space Nicks to bed.

Then… Last year I created my new website and decided to include a bunch of my animations, which were on YouTube, in the website blog section. The Space Nicks cartoon just didn’t hold up. Besides the poor resolution, I couldn’t overlook the shortcuts taken during the creation. I chewed on it for a few months and then at the start of the year I decided to dive in. New artwork, new audio and create in in After Effects and Premiere Pro.

With this new version the animation is still fairly simple (if you’re expecting Pixar, look away) but I took the time to create enough new artwork to keep the pace quick and fun. Creating the audio bed with music loops and sound effects was a blast.

The new animation will be posted on this website within a week, or two the latest. Just some audio tweaks to finish up. Until then, I’ll post stills to whet your appetite.