Last weekend I had brunch with Charlene and Sean, and Charlene mentioned she wanted to learn more about animation. She was curious about my processes, and I told her that I would write up a Movie Monkey making of for the next episode.

Fitting in has never been my forte, and amongst animators I’m something of an oddball. Really good animators tend to be visual storytellers. They have rich drawing backgrounds and are well studied in squash and stretch, drawing forms, and design. They also usually make extensive use of Photoshop, Flash, After Effects, and other commercial tools. I on the other have have a very extensive computer background but no art skill whatsoever. Back in college I developed my own software working on “The Emperor’s New Clothes” with Marshall Miller, and the software I use today still use many of the same techniques. My animations tend to be based on scripts instead of storyboards. True animators tend to look down at my work for this reason, but I’ve given up caring.

The genesis of this work in particular was the Dr. Horrible ELE contest. The idea was to make a video of a fictional character applying to the Evil League of Evil. Cory and I wanted to have the Movie Monkey apply, but spent a long time trying to get a much more ambitious idea off the ground (hint: the character name was the “Funky Monkey”). Two days before the deadline, I had the alternate idea that was the final product. The first lyrics for the song were written that morning while I was stuck in a 3 hour conference call at work. Cory recorded the vocals that night and emailed them to me. It is rare to see Cory in action as he is so fast, but I imagine it looks something like this.

Once I had vocals I could begin shooting. It is usually preferable to have your audio completely locked down before shooting so you know exactly what you need to match up with, but because of the way I resequence frames against the audio I have quite a bit of flexibility (I’m one of the few filmmakers who has a negative shooting ratio – I shoot less footage than what is in the final product). I usually shoot the raw frames with a Cannon Digital Rebel, but I wanted to emulate the webcam look of youtube videos (bad lighting, terrible exposure, extra wide angle lens) and decided to shoot with an actual webcam. I propped the Mac up on the Movie Monkey set and shot the animation using Photo Booth. This made for some odd shooting because I couldn’t see the laptop screen because moving the camera is death in stop motion.

In the end this was a mistake; I had no control over exposure and the lighting shifts wildly from frame to frame. It’s usually better to shoot clean if you’re going to digitally alter your images. Despite the camera challenges, this one was fun to animate. Because the Movie Monkey was nervous, it gave me a chance to pull out all of his ticks.

It’s important to lock down the audio before doing any lip sync. I usually use Audacity for editing the audio. It is an open source multi-track audio editor that is surprisingly powerful. Professionals would tell you to use ProTools, but I’m too dumb to know what I am missing and too cheap to pay the money to find out. If you watch the Movie Monkey archives you’ll hear some really really terrible audio editing in early episodes, but I believe it’s gotten better.

I do lip sync digitally. While this saves a lot of time over replacement animation, you still have to go through the audio frame by frame and match up mouth positions with the audio. I’ve been doing it so long I can usually do it in a single pass (and if I make a mistake, I just say nobody would notice anyhow).

I had written some starter lyrics for the Movie Monkey’s love song and asked Brian Campbell to help me find a melody. Brian is an organist by trade and is studying for his DMA at KU. He re-arranged the lyrics a little and found a very romantic melody to sing against.

I called in a favor to have Brian Hindman sing the vocals. Brian and I go way back; he did the music for The Emperor’s New Clothes and I made a music video for a song he produced. Both Brians brought their best to the table and the result was a pretty great song.

I generally don’t like youtube fan montages (pictures of an actor/actress set to pop music), so the idea of the Movie Monkey making one for Felicia Day amused me, but him being a creepy guy who photoshops himself into those photos amused me more. I’m not very skilled with Gimp, but I gave it my best shot.

Once all the elements were in place I cut them together in iMovie. Once again professionals would use Final Cut Pro, but I’m usually doing heavy digital manipulations in my own software and just doing straight cuts only editing in iMovie.

For the most part this all came together in three days, two of which I had to work an 8-5 job. There is a lot of work involved, but it’s fun to see the seed of an idea grow across time. It’s great when I can collaborate with others, and I try to give the collaborators as much leeway as possible as they usually can find something better than I was thinking of. It gives me extra pressure not to screw up all the great source material everyone else did.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 5:44 am and is filed under Movie Monkey, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.