Why Remaster?
Why go to all the trouble of remastering one hundred and fifty videos? Many reasons. First of all, the one-minute format was both a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, it's a tiny bit of time in which to tell a story, so the storytelling must out of necessity be highly efficient. On the minus side, sometimes stories need more room. One solution to this is to make multi-part episodes, but this can be tedious; plus, it can break up a mood.
Another reason to remaster is to make use of improved animation techniques. Dicks was meant to be simplistic and crude from the outset, but as the stories got more serious, this crudeness became a distraction. And mixing old and new styles would look awkward. So it had to be the whole series.
As one might tell from this original graphic, the trailer park was intended to be much larger.
So the first and most persistent thing that bothered me through the entire series run was this
disparity between the trailer park and the relatively tiny group of residents represented on screen,
so the first thing to change was the park itself. It got significantly downsized, which solved some
problems and created others. But once I rendered the smaller park, the happier I was about it, and
remastering provided me the opportunity to rewrite my way around some old problems.
The thing I enjoyed most about the downsized park was the intimacy it created. Now everyone was closer, in every respect of the word. I'd even gone so far as to identify which character occupied which trailer. This helped me visualize events as they unfolded in the park. Incidentally, this map led to the "you are here" poster in the community center.
The new style of the graphic better supported the joke of the park appearing to be male genitalia. Stupid, yes, but that had been a characteristic of the series planned from the get-go; it satisfied my five-year-old need for bathroom humor so I could go off and tell serious stories about "real" people. When my "test audience" (my closest friends) caught on, they began enjoying the show more because, frankly, most of us have five-year-olds still living inside us who enjoy fart jokes.
When comparing the remakes with the originals clearly shows how far I've come working with the tools I had at hand. I have zero budget for fancy new tools, which meant I was pretty much stuck with a primitive visual style, but even this can be improved. Originally my intention was to "celebrate" the primitiveness, to make it an intentional part of the series' aesthetic (not unlike how South Park is all paper cutouts), but after a while this grated on me. So the remakes are as polished as I'd ever be able to get them in my lifetime—I'm sure I could approach a "studio quality" look, but I'd be spending months on a single one-minute episode. And I honestly don't think it would improve anything except the graphic aesthetic; certainly the most important part—the story—would not benefit from that effort. And as we all know, the story is everything.
Ultimately this was still a from-the-ground-up makeover. All of the characters, sets and effects—every visual element you see on the screen—were completely redrawn. Animating techniques were also improved—lip syncing in particular. I worked very hard to come up with a lip syncing process that looked good but didn't take forever to render. (It's still a manual process—I don't press a button and have the lip syncing finished for me.)
There were other benefits from remastering that went beyond mere visual improvements. Gong from one-minute to ten-minute episodes created a nice roomy space in which to tell stories. By eliminating nine title and credit sequences, stories had a little more breathing room. I took the opportunity to improve both the visual quality and the storytelling. I just hope I live long enough to finish the remastering!