Robot Family was a collaberation with Chad Strawderman and Jeff Barfoot (Goldhouse Creative). It was a first attempt at developing a continuing series with recurring characters.

It's about a society of unthinking robots who blindly follow their programming and happily obey anything resembling authority. Completely fictional. Nothing like that could ever exist in reality.

EPISODE 00a:
THE SLICK SALESMAN

It's a battle of robot wills! This 2-minute short is the only Robot Family piece that came close to being finished.

Robots are programmed to be polite and have a difficult time hanging up on each other. As a result, many of them have way more long-distance service and life insurance than they probably need.

Epiosode 00a has screened in several film festivals and was a finalist in the Nicktoons Film Festival contest thing.

SKETCHES

The idea of Robot Family was that the robots should be warm, frail little creatures who wanted a safe, predictable society, but went a little overboard. Visually, there would be a contrast between their organic, colorful bodies and the dull, Sears Catalogue, blueprint universe they inhabit. You want so much for them to break free, but they just never can. Comedy!

Because the three people working on Robot Family lived in three separate cities, blogging software was used to post sketches and concepts to a central site.

Here are a few examples of Chris Harding's contribution to the experiment. Some are pretty funny, and others are very embarrassing.

We may have hammered the point a bit too hard in this early concepts, but it was a good start. Some of the themes may pop up again in other cartoons.

More material can be found at robotfamily.com and at Chad Strawderman's Web site.