When Oliver discovers that an alien artifact of intergalactic relevance was passed on to him by his late mother, he shows it to the one person he trusts, his former babysitter and newest crush Victoria. Not knowing that the carrier of the artifact might be in jeopardy he blindly gives the artifact to Victoria only to get abducted by the aliens who are looking for it.

Now it is up to Oliver and his uncle Leon, to save the girl and potentially the universe along the way. Will they make it in time?

The brainchild of Jesus Villarreal and his team this is the first episode of a hopeful series. After recieving many favourable reviews at WonderCon Jesus Villarreal hopes to gain some financial backing to continue his dream project.

What inspired you to write this?
Many years ago when I was a young 8 year-old boy my parents dragged me to some family gathering that I probably wasn’t looking forward to. Little did I know that my life would change that very day. We showed up at the family friend’s house and there were plenty of adults doing their normal boring mingling. I somehow found myself walking down their stairs into the basement. I could hear voices plotting and scheming about different rooms in the house. As I neared the voices I saw the backlit figures of teenagers. Their faces were almost permanently adhered to the bright and colorful big screen CRT TV (a very 1980’s TV), their eyes not blinking. I realized that they weren’t scheming about the house I was in, but a house that was on the screen. They were playing a videogame, a beautiful 8-bit masterpiece with amazing art direction. It was one of the biggest "WOW" moments of my life. It was a mystery point and click game with hints of comedy-Horror. The characters shown in the game were nothing like I’ve ever seen before. They screamed classic B horror flick themes. For instance, one of the kids looked like your typical buddy holly nerd and another one looked like the high school jock that everyone loves to hate. They even had a kid that looked like Michael Jackson, which at the time was obviously extremely cool. The bad guys were even more awesome. One of them was a mad scientist – who was also an alien in disguise – and his family was a group of maniac aliens with a tentacle pet. The kids would have to run around unnoticed through a mansion in order to save the girlfriend of the main jock. That game was Maniac Mansion. That game is my inspiration for life. That game was the main culprit for me to come up with "Aliens Took My girl." Ever since then I’ve had the drive to work on animation. 21 years later here we are.

- Jesus Villarreal

How did it all start?
The project first started as a class collaborative at the Academy of arts University. I remember going to Chris Armstrong, the school of animation and VFX director, and pitched him the idea of creating a project in a series of classes that would follow a true production pipeline. He agreed with the condition that if the first class was a success we would be able to continue with a second class and third class if needed. Shaun Featherstone, the storyboard director, was going to be the professor in charge of watching over the progress of the project, helping the crew out in any given moment of stress and production related problems.

It was on the visual and story development stages of the story when most of the core team met. During that stage Christina Douk was granted the 3d technical director position and Chris Rieser, having his focus on story boarding and having previous knowledge on the motion comic media, was offered the opportunity to co-direct the project on the production stage.

Phillip Wong, Tannie Duong, and Stanislav Kochil reached their place on the visual development stages.

After having a successful Visual development class we managed to have a trailer out that depicted the look and feel of the project. That allowed us to follow through the second class. During the production class most of the 3d assets and final 2d renderings where developed and sent to the animators to compile them together. Once we dedicated the second class to gathering all the assets it took us two months with a team of 3 animators to put together the whole first issue.

Even though we had the schools support on the production of our project we managed to pull through all the inconveniences of a student life, such as lack of money, not enough time to work due to a full load of classes among other situations.

We really want to keep telling our story because we feel that we could please the audience with our product. Now all we need is to take the right steps into putting our product out there and reaching the right people in order to have the proper funding to continue our journey.

The team

Creator/ Director/ writer: Jesus Villarreal

Co-director/writer: Christopher Rieser

3D Technical Director: Christina Douk

Animation Supervisor: Keaton Tips

Producer: Racher Rossilli

Production Coordinator: Brittany Kikuchi

Art Director: Phillip wong

Modeling Lead: Andrew Chiang

Character Supervisor: Tannie Duong

Character Lead: Chris Fenoglio

Matte painting Lead: Hyejin Kang

Hard surface design lead: Stanislav Kochil