The stop-motion studio’s founders, Max Lopez and Sean Malony, have grown from an apartment to a garage to commercial studio space as they tackled their Kickstarter-funded show about humanity’s five ‘goodest’ beings chosen to fight Galactic Evil; pilot episode hits YouTube December 7 for Patreon supporters, December 13 for the public.
Named in 2014 after their own “Apartment D” unit in Burbank, Max Lopez and roommate Sean Malony’s independent stop-motion studio made its start in branded content for Mattel toys like My Mini Mixie, Justice League, Polly Pockets and Hot Wheels. By 2016, they needed a bigger space, so co-founders Lopez and Malony moved Apartment D Films out of the apartment and into, as Lopez puts it “a garage with a house.”
“Every great business starts in a garage,” says Lopez. “And that's also when we met our third business partner, Cami Kwan, which was the catalyst. Things started really spinning from there.”
The animation studio started working on music videos for The Itchyworms and Ninja Sex Party, Burbank State of the City presentations, and animating for TV shows like Nickelodeon’s Middlemost Post, Good Mythical Morning and the American Girl mini-series, which moved the studio out of the garage and into its own official office space in Burbank.
“To get that many minutes in a very short amount of time, we needed many stages to shoot on simultaneously, which meant we needed a bigger space,” explains Lopez, referring to their work on the American Girl series. “On top of that, American Girl dolls are giant, so the sets have to be giant. And, at that point, we probably got up to about 30 people working for us. A one-and-a-half car garage just wasn’t cutting it.”
The American Girl series had been Apartment D Films’ biggest project for the past few years. But now, the studio’s first original multi-episode series, Ruff Ruff Danger Dogs, is vying for that title. As of September 3, the Kickstarter campaign for the series was fully funded and for the past three weeks, Lopez and the crew at Apartment D Films have been slaving over silicone and cotton to make their pilot episode, which premieres Saturday, December 7 for Patreon members, and publicly on Friday, December 13 on YouTube.
“It’s definitely the biggest personal project we’ve done,” says Max, whose studio has produced multiple original shorts. “The idea was born just before 2020 and it slowly matured over many years. Two and a half years ago, Sean and I really started collaborating to figure out what a real story would look like. That's when I started working with a storyboard artist and character designer, who was actually our third roommate back in the garage days.”
In the series, Earth has been locked in an unending struggle against Galactic Evil for a century. When the planet's mightiest heroes sacrifice themselves to buy the world one more fighting day, humanity must seek out the five “goodest” beings on the planet - The Ruff Ruff Danger Dogs! Can these once-abandoned pets learn how to pilot mecha and unlock their true potential when they're still getting housebroken?
Check out the series’ initial Kickstarter video and current Patreon behind-the-scenes video below:
Each episode of Ruff Ruff Danger Dogs will use a combination of live-action puppetry and frame-by-frame animation to realize the world and characters, while delivering some high-action “Apartment D sizzle,” according to Lopez. Similar to how anime will switch art styles depending on the mood and tone of the scene, Danger Dogs will switch between stop-motion animation and live-action puppetry.
“We did a test with one of the hero dogs, Ruff Ruff Black, fighting a toy and it’s pretty fluid,” shares Lopez. “You may not be able to tell what is and is not stop-motion. In that test shot, I believe only three shots were in stop-motion. The rest was puppeteering work.”
The series is a love letter to Toei Company and Hasbro’s Power Rangers franchise and the Japanese "superhero team" genre of shows, Super Sentai, on which Power Rangers was based.
“We started binge-watching every Super Sentai series title, especially inspired by the 15th season, Choujin Sentai Jetman,” says Lopez. “These series are like Doctor Who. There are a million iterations to sort through.”
The research process was dense, but Lopez says he wouldn’t call it “Research.”
“I think for us, it was more just about nerding out,” he admits. “We are big students of anime because they're all about making economical animation that really gives you bang for your buck. They practice a balance of limited animation with the really well-done high-end animation they call ‘Sakuga,’ and they know where each needs to be to get away with each choice and deliver where people are going to feel it. If you think of Pokémon and all those characters in the far background, you were lucky if those characters even got mouths or eyes. And they were usually animated on fours instead of twos or ones. Yet the close-up action shots are beautiful. It’s really just about knowing how to guide the eye and put emphasis on where it needs to be and save money where you can.”
He adds, “At our core, we want to make stop-motion that feels like stop-motion and tell stories that could only be done in stop-motion. At the same time, a lot of the esthetic that we pull from is from Saturday morning cartoons and anime. As an example, the color space that we're working in is it's very vibrant. If you look at Ruff Ruff Red, the color space is very simple and complimentary, and he's set against these green and blue buildings so that, even on a tiny screen, he pops. We love colors that pop off your tiny, cracked iPhone. In both our design and our animation, we like contrast and affinity.”
The Danger Dogs team is made up of five heroes: Ruff Ruff Red, Ruff Ruff Blue, Ruff Ruff Pink, Ruff Ruff Black, and Ruff Ruff Yellow, whose character models are all made of wire armatures with silicone bodies. The main protagonist, Ruff Ruff Red, or “Hugo,” is based on Lopez’s own dog, a red Irish Setter. Meanwhile, Ruff Ruff Yellow, or “Corn Chip,” who is a cat in a yellow dog suit, is based on Malony’s cat, who in real life is named “Crunchwrap Supreme.”
“I was not involved in the naming process,” notes Lopez. “But while Sean is many things, something he excels at is animation and innovation. He’s discovered all kinds of stop-motion tricks, sometimes out of desperation.”
One such trick was creating a rolling, yellow infinity symbol out of silicone to replace Ruff Ruff Yellow’s legs as he runs to give the impression he’s enacting a Saturday morning cartoon sprint.
“What's nice about silicone is it can look like plastic but, in actuality, it's very soft and squishy and posable,” says Lopez. “Our background is toys, and so I couldn't help but make these characters feel a bit like toys.”
But the challenge with such models, Lopez notes, is that they not only look like toys, they break like them, as well.
“The irony is, I attempted to design puppets that'd be really easy to mass produce,” says Lopez. “I was like, ‘Oh, they're just a simple little dog of solid silicone. It should be pretty straightforward.’ And I learned very quickly that was just absolutely not true. The dogs are fairly tiny, so all their armatures are tiny, so they're prone to breaking. I have become a master surgeon at slicing things open, installing new pieces and trying to make the changes invisible. We’ve gotten mixed results. I’ve literally spent all morning just today skinning Ruff Ruff Red and installing three new legs on him.”
But the silicone does give the dogs a clean, graphic aesthetic, which works in its homage to the colorful palette of Power Rangers. But Lopez also wanted the city buildings in the show’s setting to juxtapose that color and make the characters pop.
“Oftentimes, we do use cardboard but, in this case, the buildings are all laser-cut MDF wood, which is very smooth,” notes Lopez. “It’s like cardboard but it will last you months of shooting and be a bit more durable. But we really wanted visible, painted brushwork on the wood because I knew that's where our stop-motion texture would come through.”
Many of the buildings in Ruff Ruff Danger Dogs are very dark and look rather worn, like something from a Tim Burton film, which of course makes these brightly colored dogs look even brighter.
“An example we pull from is Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox,” shares Lopez. “To me, that film is the high watermark of a perfect use of stop-motion. A film like that - where you can see the corduroy texture and every fiber of fur and these miniatures in these wide shots - doesn't make sense in a different medium. And it was a film where they were okay with you knowing how it all was done and were okay with showing you the building blocks of the esthetic. That's what I really love. And, with this show, we wanted people to be able to see the process of making this thing.”
In the pilot, there’s a shot where Ruff Ruff Yellow goes to do a “super attack,” and their arm and paw extend to become very large. To get their paw to become a big fist, the crew made it out of clay and attached it to the model.
“People are going to know that we have this silicone puppet with this big clay arm,” says Lopez. “There's no hiding that. But I think the effect still works. What got me into making movies was playing that game of ‘How was that done?’ I almost became an engineer when I went to school to make things. I eventually learned engineers just design things and I wanted to be able to do both. So, I became a stop-motion animator.”
Another aspect of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion work that Apartment D Films gravitated toward was the use of cotton to illustrate explosions.
“We love ourselves a good explosion and cotton is our favorite material to use in every shot, second only to tin foil, which is what we use every time you see a laser going through screen or lightning striking or a big, bright, flash,” says Lopez. “We did a film back in 2020, called Election Monster. And for that we used tin foil to create this concussive laser blend.”
For all its celebration of stop-motion, Apartment D Films is also diving into experimental techniques with its series, like using CG animation to create digital faces on the stop-motion dogs.
“All of our dog bodies were originally 3D printed, and then we molded and cast them into silicone puppets,” notes Lopez. “Because of that, it means we have 3D models of all their heads. And so, the superhero version of the dogs have these masks that we can turn into a digital element that we can then manipulate how we want.”
So, the superhero dog (and cat) models have their colored masks with no eyes, as those will be added later in CG.
“Sean has already done some really good tests that prove the pipeline works,” says Lopez. “So now we just kind of have to implement it. Similar to Batman and Robin’s eyes in the old cartoons, they’re just bright white. So, we don’t have to fuss with the lighting. It's all about getting the tracking down. It’s opened up all sorts of possibilities.”
Though Ruff Ruff Danger Dogs’ Kickstarter has come to a close, the project’s Patreon is still open, accepting help for ad revenue and merchandise development.
“This is our last week of animation, then we'll probably go into what I expect will be about a week-long live-action shoot,” says Lopez. “We want to keep building an audience and try to fund the series through audience engagement, including Patreon and selling merch. It’s not a coincidence that I designed these dogs to look like toys.”
To begin with, the crew is set to release their pilot episode this fall, and then two more episodes to follow after the new year.
“Hopefully, that can kind of give us the on-ramp to really build this thing and get the ball rolling on an audience that'll show up consistently and engage with it,” says Lopez. “We’ve found that most seven to 11-year-olds are not watching streaming. They’re on YouTube. And a lot of people don’t realize how much the content there has matured. It’s not just talking heads and people playing video games. One series, The Amazing Digital Circus, got over 300 million views for their pilot on YouTube. It’s incredibly polished, well-done animation and there are more, countless examples like that of animated shows that are popping up on YouTube. We hope Ruff Ruff Danger Dogs can be another like that.”
While the crew finishes their pilot and subsequent episodes, those wishing to follow along with the process can contribute on Patreon and/or follow Apartment D Films’ behind-the-scenes videos of creating Ruff Ruff Danger Dogs, which can be found on their social media (@apartmentdfilms) and YouTube.
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
