Peter Botev on the spellbinding process behind Bonbonnie

In the pilot of 3AM Sunset’s first web series, Bonbonnie, a plucky rabbit vlogs about her experience as the new manager of a witch’s café. She has no experience as a barista, but this is her lifetime sentence for accidentally unleashing an ancient curse.

Armed with a cookbook, a can-do attitude, and a suspiciously competent hedgehog named Wafers, Bonnie is determined to run the best café she possibly can. The episode sees her best attempts to serve three rats in a trenchcoat, but hints that there may be more to Bonnie’s new job than she initially realizes.

Bonbonnie was co-created by the husband-and-wife duo of Peter Botev and Tiffa Tran. We had the chance to sit down with Peter Botev to discuss the joys and struggles of creating personal indie projects as an industry professional.

What has your career looked like up to this point?

Peter: My name is Peter Botev. I've been an animator and a rigger for the best part of ten years now, mostly using Toon Boom Harmony.

I've worked in studios all across Australia, Canada, the United States, Italy, Spain, and Ireland. The cool thing about being an animator is that animation is happening everywhere, and if you have dual citizenship like me you can jump around and have a big old adventure.

What inspired you and your co-creator, Tiffa Tran, to make a fantasy sitcom set in a café?

Peter: I was going to have my big European move, so I moved to Ireland in February 2020. The next month COVID happened, and then that was a weird time, and then I decided to come home after that.

But during that time we came up with Bonbonnie. When we got back [to Australia], I was  playing one of those café sims. It was your typical, “customer comes in and you click on what shape of glass they want and beverage they want’ games. And my now wife [Tiffa Tran] came into the room just pointed and said, “This. This is what we're making,” and then went off.

She is mostly a background artist. She's been doing some art directing for a show on Netflix. But her main interests are backgrounds. And right now she's doing effects and character design. So she's the design side, and then I'm the animation side. She came back with the full designs of Bonnie, Wafers and Adele [the witch], and I said, “Okay, great.” And we talked about the story. Then I went away, came back with a script. and we kind of started making it.

We initially wanted to make a long pilot. So we have an eleven-minute script that we want to eventually make. Hopefully. Maybe there'll be enough buzz. And then we were like, “Oh, you know what? That's a little bit too much. We'll just do a one-minute proof of concept.” And that kind of kept growing a little bit more, and it was like a minute and a half, and then we made a three-minute thing which was a third of the original pilot.

It's been a couple of years since we started doing it, so the characters have evolved a little bit. But Bonnie is a bubbly, fun, wacky person who does some weird stuff, the shadow puppets. Can other people see that? In my mind she is more magic than she understands. And everybody who's seen Wafers has a lot of conspiracy theories about him.

How large was the team on Bonbonnie?

Peter: My wife and I made the initial design. But we definitely did not make the whole thing by ourselves. It ended up being like twenty names in the credits. So it was a proper team. I would say the core creative team was six people. We did about 80% of the work. And then there were like a bunch of people that helped out with a shot or two, which was fantastic.

I'm a teacher. After some of my favorite people graduated, the industry being what it is, they didn't quite manage to get a job straight away. And they were asking me for advice to get their foot in the door, and I said, “Well, just make something.”  And then eventually we decided to make something together, which was fantastic.

And the other cool thing is that everybody could ask each other questions. Because they were all so comfortable, already knowing each other. And we have a music team, and then our amazing cast is from America. That's where they did all the sound recording and the casting. It was a proper production pipeline. It was really great.

Was this your first time directing?

Peter: It was definitely the first time that I had full creative control over everything, which was really fun, really exciting. Something that would be great if I can do it again. But I’ve definitely done team management before, just not to this extent.

The couple of things I directed with larger studios are currently on hold because of some mergers and stuff, so I can't talk about it. But it's not technically my first time directing, but the first time people get to see some of the stuff I directed.

Which programs did you use to create Bonbonnie?

Peter: So everything was done in Adobe Flash… I'm kidding. All of the animation was done in Harmony, which was fantastic.

We did mostly hand-drawn animation in the pilot, with little bits and pieces where we’d, you know, chuck a head on a peg and move it a little bit to give it that extra movement. All of the lighting is done in Harmony as well. And all of the compositing, all of the fun little chroma effects that you can see throughout the shot.

Toon Boom Harmony’s great! I've been using it for a very long time. I knew [the creative team] and I had trained them to use the software, so they did stuff exactly the way I expected them to do. All of the animators had three to six months of Harmony experience. And what I love about Harmony is that it's so clean, and it's so easy to pick up. It’s super easy to pass stuff from one person to the other.

I went in and tweaked every single shot that we got, which is fun for me. In certain software, picking up where somebody left off can be a bit of a nightmare.

What was your storyboarding process like?

Peter: We really wanted the storyboard to be king. So we did storyboards that were so clean they might as well have been the keyframes, to make it super simple to pass it on. I wanted Bonnie to have a fairly consistent look and feel, but she also pulls little funny faces. I wanted to be super specific about it.

So we went through and designed it and made sure everything was on-model, and everything was off-model the way it should be.  And then we'll just pass it on to the animators.

I was a rough animator for years on a hand-drawn show for Nickelodeon. I actually do all my extremes first and instead of doing roughs, I just do my little timing charts off to the side. And that's how my brain fills in the gaps. Some animators prefer to do roughs. They hated reading the graphs. I think we came to a good meeting point at the end.

For the initial animation that I did, I was pretty loose with timing, and I think that's one thing that I would definitely change going forward. So we spent some time refining the timing, and then everything else kind of fell into place. And then the colouring and stuff is super simple. There are a lot of shortcuts you can use for that.

What were some of the highlights and lowlights of creating an indie project like this?

Peter: I've been a full time studio animator for eight years and I have not had breaks. I'm still working full-time in a studio. So I've never had that point in my life where I've only worked in an indie setting. I think the biggest challenge that we had working in an Indie studio was the lack of timelines. That was the biggest hurdle. Apart from that, working in an indie studio is fantastic.

The reason why I got excited about animation, the reason why I learned English, was because when I was four years old I would watch Cartoon Network. I wanted to know what the funny people on screen said. So I always knew that this is what I wanted to make. I wanted to make kids’ animation.

Having an indie project, where you don't have a budget but you actually have a passion for it, was fantastic.

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• 3AM Sunset is an indie artist collective currently working on a micro game project! If you’re a fellow artist, animator, musician, or just someone passionate about storytelling and want to collaborate, you can contact the team at 3amsunset@gmail.com.
• Want to get the right ingredients together for your independent animated short? Artists can download a 21-day trial of Toon Boom Harmony.