We Wish You A Scary Christmas (Short, 2020)

Synopsis: Gooby, a lovable chupacabra, has his first ever Christmas ruined when his best friend is kidnapped by the fearsome Christmas devil: Krampus. He must team up with Santa Claus and Mystery Inc. to not only save his best friend, but also find the true meaning of Christmas along the way.

We Wish You A Scary Christmas is a short film I made in the winter of 2020 over the course of a month and a half. This was for my YouTube channel, Ratgirl Resort, acting as a sort of ‘Christmas special,’ bringing in my newly introduced character of Gooby into a wacky Christmas storyline. This was mostly a test to see if I could make a short film in a short amount of time and I think it worked. The film includes musical numbers, 2D animated characters, and 3D animated characters, as well as a fan crossover with Scooby-Doo. My initial idea was for this to just be a high concept YouTube video with animation and a storyline about horror media set during Christmastime but I scrapped the informational video portion of this to make it just a short film. By far the most embarrassing things about this film are that you can see the crust of the informational video portion and it gets hamfisted into some sort of theme and that there are references to previous videos, such as “Shaggy with boobs” from my video about Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.

This was directed, written, animated, and edited by me. By far the most tedious stuff in this was the animation and editing. The 3D elements were done in the free open-source Minecraft animation program Mine-Imator by drawing flat 2D textures in Clip Studio Paint and then extruding them as 3D elements to create character rigs. The 2D elements were drawn in Clip Studio Paint and then animated using live rigs in Adobe Character Animator. For the characters Snow Miser and Heat Miser, they were made as 3D models in Mine-Imator but proved to be too resource intensive to animate within the program so individual elements were rendered into PNGs and the characters were turned into live rigs in Adobe Character Animator. Everything was cobbled together using Adobe Premiere Pro and a lot of green screen.

Additional 3D models for the project were made in Mine-Imator by users Creeper25559, redwood, and Keep on Chucking.

The songs in this were made in FL Studio, including both the original performances and the score.

The animated closing credits was made in Mine-Imator using a bunch of 2D images.

Soundtrack:

Voice Cast:

Juliet Jolley as Juliet, Gooby, Shaggy Rogers, Scooby-Doo, and Scrappy-Doo

Jonathan Aubrey (J Aubrey) as Santa Claus

Ro Ott as Heat Miser, Krampus, and Tim Burton

Katalina Mancini as Snow Miser and Gooby’s Mom

Houston Coley as Fred Jones

Sarah Moskow as Velma Dinkley

Additional Song Credits:

"Jingle Bell Rock" by Bobby Helms

"Up on the Housetop" by Gene Autrey

"Run Rudolph Run" by Chuck Berry

"Night Market" by ConcernedApe

"Last Christmas" by Cascada