Horny Aliens, Hungry World Eaters, and the Many Travails of ‘Thoron the Conqueror’

Nic Collins: Sean and I have known each other for over a decade. We met at Columbia College in Chicago back in 2010, and we’ve made a lot of movies and shorts together. Sean is an animator, and he’d been experimenting with making live-action animated hybrid shorts. I would go and shoot places in Chicago, and I would shoot as if there were actors in the frame. And then Sean added animated characters – like a Roger Rabbit kind of thing. Thoron was, I believe, the second one he made. It was this little animated guy and his ex-girlfriend, and she was an alcoholic, and he was trying to get back with her.
Harry Bhalerao, who’s this amazing artist, did all the backgrounds. If you see something moving in the background – like lava and stuff – he did that. Marcus Drake, who we collaborated with on the short Beached, did all the music. I voiced Thoron, and Nic voiced the co-star of each episode. And our romantic partners voiced all the additional characters. So, six people did everything.
SG: It probably took a little over a year, when all was said and done. It was a very small crew. Nic and I wrote and directed it together. I was the animator and the character designer, and Nic was the director of photography. I would screenshare my Blender with him, and he would be like, “Put the camera here, put the camera here.” And we would just go back and forth until it was at a place that we were both happy with. Nic comes from live-action and he’s worked in animation before with collaborators. That was great because he really helped make it more dynamic.
AWN: Working with that small of a team, you’re really bearing the brunt of getting everything done that needs to be done. What were the biggest challenges for you in completing the project?
AWN: In terms of the actual production, how long did it take to complete, and what was the process like?
Sean always loved that little Thoron guy, but he only did that one thing with it. Then, during the pandemic, when we were locked down and couldn’t see each other, we decided to do an animation together to kind of help get us through it. And we both love sci-fi, we both love comedy, we both love things with relatable characters who are trying to figure their life out – trying to get out of a shitty situation and have a better life. And Sean was like, “What about Thoron, the character from that thing we made a long time ago?” We’re also huge Venture Bros. fans, and I feel like that was a pretty big influence in terms of the sense of humor and the world-building and that kind of stuff.
AWN: What’s the origin of the story? Where did the characters and the idea come from?
How this all came about (the arrival of Thoron on Adult Swim, not the horny aliens or the unfortunate gobbling) was revealed by Godsey and Collins in a recent interview.
Launched in 2018, the SMALLS program is dedicated to “finding new voices in comedy and animation and to give up-and-coming creators an entry point into the Adult Swim Universe,” according to executive producer and curator Dave Hughes. Since its launch, the program has released over 300 shorts globally.
Nic was also the editor, because he’d be like, “Okay, now cut the camera here,” and then I’d place a new camera and we’d figure out what the next shot was. So, we started with scripts, and then we went to audio from the scripts. There was no boarding of any kind. I would say that the process of Nic directing the camera was almost the animatic phase, where we had really rough models of the characters and we were directing those.
It’s so easy and so quick to make any kind of changes because there’s zero approvals. The only person we’re giving notes to is the background artist and the music artist. Otherwise, it’s all us.
SG: It just took a long time. Adult Swim is great in that they give you this unlimited freedom, but that comes with small budgets. So, I was trying to make Thoron while paying rent in other ways. But having such a small crew also allows for the kind of freedom where, if we weren’t happy with a scene, we would both just grab our respective microphones and go into our respective closets and make it better.

SG: Thoron is this intergalactic conqueror in his early 30s and he’s trying to make a name for himself. It’s very directly related to us trying to make a living as artists, first in Chicago and then in LA, and constantly failing at that, or failing to meet our expectations of what that would mean. Especially when you move from a smaller city to a big city like LA, which is the entertainment capital of the world, you have certain ideas of what that’s going to be like. And then you constantly run into these roadblocks, way more than you expected. So, Thoron is a fantastical version of that, this guy who just wants to make a name for himself, but it’s really hard and he’s constantly failing. Hopefully he’s failing in an entertaining way.
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AWN: Apart from Blender, what other tools did you use?
In Thoron the Conqueror, which is actually an anthology of several very short episodes, the filmmakers used their own often dispiriting experiences as inspiration for the struggles faced by their eponymous hero. After Thoron quits his stable job to become a freelance conqueror, he battles horny aliens, discovers an ancient fear-killing crystal, and – on a particularly bad day – gets gobbled up by the fabled Eater of Worlds!
SG: So, all the 3D animation was done in Blender. I would sketch stuff out beforehand in Procreate or just on my iPad. The mouths and some other things are 2D, so I used Adobe Character Animator to do that. They have a good lip-syncing tool. And there’s probably a little After Effects in there too at some points.
Sean Godsey: We’d heard that at Adult Swim, and in this program specifically, they generally let you do whatever you want. We had a really rough version of Thoron that we made on our own in Blender, and we showed it to Dave Hughes, who’s the head of the program, and he liked it. And he just gave us the go-ahead. The only directive was length – it had to be under three minutes. But, other than that, there were really no content directives. Maybe if we had made something incomprehensible, they would’ve stepped in, but, otherwise, it was just whatever we wanted to do.
Being a freelancer is never easy – whether you’re a struggling animator or an intergalactic conqueror, the gig economy can definitely be a slog. Such is the very funny premise underlying the very funny short film Thoron the Conqueror by Sean Godsey and Nic Collins, which debuts today, April 15, on Adult Swim SMALLS, the network’s platform that showcases commissioned original short-form content by emerging animators and comedic voices worldwide. You can watch Thoron below or on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel; four more shorts will follow Thoron’s debut – one released each of the next four Saturdays – beginning April 22.

AWN: What brought you to the SMALLS program and what kind of directives were you given with regard to the short?

But first, take a few minutes to enjoy your widest smile of the day…

I also should note that I come from live comedy and improv, so a lot of the dialogue is improvised. We scripted everything and we rewrote it till we were very happy with it, but, once we were recording, we used a lot of improv. We usually do that in our collaborations together. It’s a very fun way to work. And I feel like animation is a great medium for improv because you can cut up the audio however you want.
NC: And I used Premiere Pro to edit the audio.

Jon Hofferman is a freelance writer and editor based in Los Angeles. He is also the creator of the Classical Composers Poster, an educational and decorative music timeline chart that makes a wonderful gift.