Nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot has a new album, Zero Day. Frontalot is a DIY hero, who has created his own career, nay, his own genre of music. Zero Day has all the nerdy wordplay MCF is known for, but takes it to the next level in production value. The album also features cameos from Beefy, Schaffer the Darklord, and Mike Doughty from Soul Coughing.

The first single is a theme song for Wil Wheaton, Your Friend Wil. Check it out!

Back in 2000, during my second senior year, I got a research grant to make a student film. The proposed film was far from typical; It was going to be stop motion animated, but use custom written software to superimpose lips and mouths onto the characters. The idea of this wasn’t outrageous. The previous year I had worked with Marshall Miller on his student stop motion film. Marshall is someone who has truly studied character animation, and his enthusiasm for the topic was contagious. My contribution was software that let him compare his frames as he shot, and allowed him to build previews on set.

(Sadly, all I have is this low resolution version. Watch the quality of the character movements, and then realize he got that out of regular artist mannequins).

The next year I was experimenting in lip-sync for undergraduate animation, and I used the grant as a way to expand the research. Marshall and I spent all summer at Oldfather Studios working on a stop motion version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, subsisting mostly on peanut butter sandwiches. My mother had made the costumes, and his mom had made the sets, Marshall was lead animator, Niki Newland was our cinematographer, and I was director, software designer, and animation assistant. My professor at one point exclaimed “It’s like a modern version of let’s put on a show!”

After that year I graduated and moved to Dallas. The animation bug wasn’t dead, but I certainly didn’t have the spare time to engage it. Five years later, when I bought a house, I finally had the space to really try again, but doing an animated short really didn’t interest me. The problem is that you build up a number of sets, characters, and costumes, spend months or years shooting minutes of footage, and then throw it all away when you’re finished. What I had really wanted to do was make an independent animated series. First, you can re-use the sets, costumes, and characters week after week. Second,when you work on a short you have to finish the entire thing, but on a series you get small rewards by having new episodes.

While I was thinking about this, my high school friend Cory Q contacted me looking to collaborate on something. He and his friend Seth had a website monkeyrivertown.com, and they wanted to do something for their site. Cory’s thought was that there should be a professor monkey who talks about random things, like their Ask The Philosotron. This was a little too open ended for me. Cory is very Liberal Arts, with knowledge about history and culture, but the only two things I know about are computers and movies. The solution was to narrow the focus down to writing about movies, and with that the Movie Monkey was born.

Writing episodes usually would involve having a random thought in the middle of a conversation and thinking “I should write an episode around that.” Anyone who follows my twitter feed probably knows I have a lot of random thoughts in a given week. I would bunch up about 6 episodes at a time and then record them with Cory Q and my friends. Of the entire process, recording was the most rewarding. While the script had the structure, Cory, Jason, Chris, Parvenah would make it funny. My scripts were never considered fully baked, and everyone brought ideas to the table to make it funnier (for example, in the original script Steve Jobs was a hippie. Cory changed it in delivery). I got to record my friends hanging out and having fun. What could be better?

I would shoot episodes in the mini-studio in my house. The set and the monkey itself was built by Brendan Lattin, who was a KU student at the time. All of those books in the Movie Monkey’s bookshelf? Hand bound by Brendan. The guy is good. The costumes were made by my mom, and once again she did an amazing job. After her experience on The Emperor’s New Clothes, she’d learned how to design costumes specific to stop motion. If the audio was cut together I could animate an episode across the span of two weekends if I did nothing but animate.

Probably the biggest accomplishment was the Movie Monkey Evil League of Evil entry. Like the rest of the internet, I loved Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog and when I heard about the YouTube contest I knew we had to enter. The original idea was to turn the Movie Monkey into The Funky Monkey, a disco super-villain. I didn’t have time to make Bootsy Collin’s glasses or a costume, or music, or anything else necessary to pull it off. The idea also didn’t fit with the meta-humor of the Movie Monkey, who tends to talk about why things are. Three days before the deadline I had a new idea: rather than focus on making a superhero, make a video about failing to make a superhero. I wrote the original lyrics to the song while in a three hour conference call at work. Brian Campbell wrote the music (and made the lyrics work) and Brian Hindman lent his voice.

Which brings us to the central question – why don’t I post the funny anymore? There are a number of reasons.

I have a disadvantage to most independent filmmakers in that I like my office job, and not just because my boss might be reading. When you have a time consuming creative endeavor, it helps to do it out of hatred of your soul crushing job, especially if you can see it as an eventual escape. Sadly, I like what I do, and surprisingly I don’t suck at it or at least I hope I don’t.

What I do suck at is promotion. Getting a series off the ground involves getting people to watch, which is all the harder when you don’t have a major network or company behind you. It doesn’t help when you pick a main character name Google thinks is a misspelling. I tried forcing my friends to watch by emailing, pestering, and otherwise being a Amway salesman with my friends, but I couldn’t get people to watch.

There is one video I made that was popular.

The reason it’s popular isn’t because it’s very good; it’s just because it’s about Transformers. Movie Monkey episodes can takes weeks to make, and I’m lucky if one of them gets over 1000 views. It took me one evening to write, animate, and put that up after seeing the Transformers movie, and it’s currently sitting at 20,000 views. If I wanted viewers, I could litter Movie Monkey episodes with Transformer, video game, and movie references (it is named the Movie Monkey after all). That isn’t the series I wanted to make though. Sadly, no one wanted to watch the one I was making.

The final problem was that I’m not a very good animator. My best work aspires to reach the heights of Hannah-Barbera cartoons, which is like saying I aspire to paint by numbers. You can actually see the quality of the Movie Monkey’s animation degrade as the series progress: in the first episode, the Movie Monkey shakes and scratches his butt as he talks, but by the end I was happy to just put in head movements.

When you’re your own studio only you have the power to cancel yourself, and I think it’s time to cancel the Movie Monkey. He had a good run, said the things I wanted to say, and was a blast to work on. Does this mean I’m a quitter? Maybe, maybe not. One of the problems I had with animation is that it competed for my free time with athletics. It’s hard to train for sporting events when you have to spend your weekends locked away. The most popular entries on nicreations.com have always been the fitnick posts, so I’ve decided to spin that off into it’s own blog. I’ve picked up some new video equipment in order to record sporting events, and I hope to make interesting and exciting posts.

That’s the deal. I’ll still post nerdy things to this site (and possibly some animation), so don’t remove it from RSS just yet. If you like fitness posts, follow the new fitnick blog. I also recommend Monkeyrivertown for a good site to read. Finally, I’d like to thank my Mom, Brendan, Cory Q, Jason, Chris, Parvenah, Marshall, and everyone else who helped with the Movie Monkey. You guys made it work – I just edited.

It’s been great fun. Good night!

In Taipei there was a coffee shop around the corner from the hotel I stayed in. I had shot some video the day before in Jioufen and had sat down to have morning coffee and look over the footage.

I took this photo because it struck me how amazing it was to be doing what I was doing.  When I was in high school video editing was done using tape to tape editing, where a computer controller would do a controlled record to copy a section of tape from one tape to another. If you wanted to inject something in the middle, you had to re-edit everything from that point forward (unless you had a system that supported edit lists, which cost tens of thousands of dollars). When I was in college, video editing involved using the Avid, a specially designed hardware board in a Mac that could handle non-linear editing (NLE). The system cost tens of thousands of dollars, and we only had two for the entire film program, so students were constantly competing for time and space on the Avid’s limited hard drives.

Ten years later I’m shooting video with a $150 camera that has higher quality than anything I’ve ever shot on and has 2 hours of storage on a 4 gig card at 60 FPS. My editing setup is an MacBook, a 500 gigabyte external hard drive, and iMovie, a setup so portable I can bring it with me 8000 miles from home and still comfortably edit. I can upload my video to YouTube or Facebook and have more people see my work than any of my previous videos combined.

These kids today have no idea what they missed out on.

It’s been a over a year since the Federal switch to HDTV, yet I didn’t buy an adapter or a new TV. For the past two years I’ve been using Hulu and Netflix instant streaming to watch the shows I like when I have time, and don’t have 100 channels competing for my attention. That been said I’d been saving money for a while to do a home entertainment upgrade for a while, and had decided to buy the toys through a company discount. When I went to find the link off the corporate intranet, I saw there was a message that if I bought today not only could I get a speaker bar for half off, I could get a Blu-Ray player that also played Netflix instant streams. Netflix instant streams on TV! ZOMG!

The Blu-Ray player and speaker bar came first. Not having a HDTV to hook them up to, I hooked them up to my standard definition TV and put in the only Blu-Ray movie I had. While I had to admit the speaker bar sounded amazing, Blu-Ray gives no advantage on a standard television (Imagine that). This is where I also realized that the Blue-Ray’s Netflix support was dependent on getting an Ethernet cable to it. My cable modem and router are all upstairs, so I moved all the equipment downstairs so I could hook the router directly to my Blue-Ray player. No luck; the downstairs cable outlet apparently doesn’t have data.

The TV was supposed to ship two weeks later, but instead it shipped early and was supposed to arrive the while I was in DC. I had it held at the Fed Ex office, but this meant I had to pick up in Kansas City, and my Mini just wasn’t up for the job. Thankfully a friend agreed to help, but I ended up sitting in the back seat holding the TV up for the entire 30 minute trip.

Go ahead, ask me about my day.

I got it home, but only had composite cables which would not do. Another trip to Best Buy, and now I had the necessary HDMI and optical cables. I also bought an Apple Airport Express to use as a Wifi to Ethernet bridge to the Blu-Ray player. I hooked the HDMI and optical cables up, and am blown away by the picture and sound. Unfortunately setting up the Airport Express does not go as well. Unlike the ease of configuration of most Apple products, the Airport Express is positively stone age. It has one amber light that blinks at you when something goes wrong, and usually the only solution is to stick a paper clip into it’s reset button.

Later I found out why my Wifi bridge wasn’t working. Wifi to Ethernet bridging involves creating a WDS network, which my 802.11g router doesn’t support. At this point I had been throwing money at Best Buy, so why not a little more. I decided to replace my 802.11g router with an Apple 802.11n Airport Extreme Base Station. My (arguable) logic was that if I wanted to stream movies, I should upgrade my Wifi network to something fast. The Airport Base Station also adds support for connecting to a USB printer over your network, something I’ve needed for a while. (Ironically, I needed to download a software update to my laptop to configure the router, but couldn’t connect to the internet because my router wasn’t configured. Progress!)

After more configuration, the router and the Airport Express start talking to one another. I finally had an Ethernet line that went to the Blue-Ray player. I hooked it up, and then went through the menus looking for the Netflix support – wait, where was the Netflix support? I looked online for the latest manual to my Blue-Ray player and found the following.

What. The. Fuck.

Since I had already done all this work to run Ethernet to my TV, I decided to see what else I could do. As it turns out the TV also an Ethernet port, which gives you the ability to download software updates and browse the web. When I say “browse the web”, I mean “look at the three pages the manufacturer gives me access to using a convoluted interface.” It also gives me access to the weather, which might be useful if my TV wasn’t against a window. I then hooked my Linux box through HDMI to my TV, only to discover that Netflix instant streaming doesn’t support Linux. I also don’t want to think of all the extra money I spent that I shouldn’t have.

So our final scorecard is

Technology: 1. Nick: 0

When my good friend Erik graduated from KU and got a job working in Washington DC, he said that I should come out and visit. It took me two years but I finally made the trip out and had an amazing time. I went out for an extended weekend, leaving on Friday morning and returning on Monday evening. I’d like to write about everything that happened, but since I don’t have the time (and I doubt you’re interested) I figured I’d do the Oscar style summary.

Best Food: This is a hard category, but it would have to be Erik’s grilled tuna steaks with sweet potatoes and caramelized onions, served with Russian River Valley Sauvignon Blanc. SO GOOD.

Kitty drinks the finest wine; uses a decanter.

Best Museum: AIR AND SPACE! AIR AND SPACE!

Spaceship One!

Natural History has never done anything for me; I’m an engineer, that’s how I roll. The Spy Museum taught me that our intelligence technology of the last decade was mostly spent making small cameras and microphones. The best was Air and Space. I spent two hours there I never even made it up to the upper floor. Note for the future: go on a Monday, when the tourists aren’t out in force.

Best Outing: Josh Lynsen were best friends through elementary school at Meadow Lake, but after he was accepted to the technology middle school we grew apart. Josh was an unashamed geek – he loved Star Wars, Transformers, GI Joe, comic book, and he didn’t hide it. I, on the other hand, was an ashamed geek, and kept my love of science fiction hidden from my peers in the hopes it would raise my popularity (guess how well that worked?). He also had the journalism bug from an early age, and was the editor of the school newspaper his senior year. After not seeing each other since high school graduation we re-connected on Facebook a few months ago, where I found out that he and his wife Annie live in Washington DC. We organized a Sunday brunch where I met them at Matchbox, a delicious (and spatially complex) restaurant in downtown DC. After two and a half hours at the restaurant and another few hours walking around DC, we had covered everything between how Annie met his parents to DC politics. It was a highlight of the trip

Josh and Annie Lynsen

Biggest Regret: Not getting a chance to go running around the capitol mall. The weekend I went was the first time all winter that DC had been pleasant, and the runners were out in force. I had brought my running gear with me but there wasn’t a good way to ride the metro 45 minutes to the mall, run for 30 minutes, and then ride the metro back. The DC residents probably appreciate that I didn’t ride back sweaty too. I did get a lot of walking in during my time down there, so much so that my calves hurt for days afterward.

Last Thursday was the first time in four years I played indoor soccer. It was for fun with some friends from work over lunch. Friday morning I hurt all over. Am I that out of shape?

Oh, right. Never mind.

Tim Burton’s Batman was the definition of “awesome comic book movie” for me. First of all it was PG-13, which meant it had far more action than PG rated films; I was 12 when I saw it, and the “pen is mightier than the sword” moment still freaks me out. Second, the visual design was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Up until that point live action Batman meant Adam West and the ‘Bat-tucci’, so Michael Keaton’s brooding vigilante was just so cool.

It’s no surprise Batman was the third Spanish video I made.

Google Readers click here for video.

The story: Gotham Nuclear Power plant has been taken over by the Scarecrow, and Batman goes to stop him. (Points for super-brief recap!)

If you’re wondering how the scenery actually looks like a power plant and not my basement, it’s because my father, who works for Xcel Energy in Minneapolis, was able to get me permission to shoot at one of the coal fired power plants in Minneapolis. We were allowed to shoot in the old control room and in some of the unused parts of the plant (with supervision of course). For a high school video, the setting looks fantastic.

I’m still amused by the “Danger! Nuclear plant!” sign on a music stand used for the establishing shot.

The costumes were done by my mother (who also does the costumes for the Movie Monkey) and Jason’s mother Penny who did his Scarecrow costume. This was a zero-budget production, so there was a lot of creative use of sweatpants.

Penny did the Scarecrow costume, and my mom did the Batman costume with help from an actual rubber cowl provided by Jason. The main problem is that the actor playing the main character, me, was a 98 lbs weakling in high school and there was no way I was going to fill it out. I’m the frumpiest Batman ever.

I look like I’m posing for a “Before” photo.

Before Photoshop

After Photoshop

This was the first (and last) time I ever wrote my own score, composed and played on an Amiga 2000 (the computer for the creative mind). I had dreams that I the second coming of both Steven Spielberg and John Williams, but it was apparent after the fact that I was a kid with a copy of Deluxe Music. If you can play three notes and play them backwards than you can play the challenging Batman score.

It was also my first use of green screen/chroma keying

The live action from the above shot was taken from the third floor of my high school, looking down at some of my sister’s friends from her Spanish class. According to her, her Spanish class had seen my videos their sophomore and junior years, and by senior year they were asking her if they could be in them. Apparently it was cool. I’ve never had outside confirmation on that so it may have been something you tell your little brother to make him feel good, but I’d like to believe it’s true.

While I wouldn’t go so far to say I have a Walter Mitty complex, I do have a tendency to romanticize my life. Maybe I’m just a software monkey, but being a software monkey isn’t so far from the action and adventure on TV, right? This idea has crept into my statuses lately. A few days back I posted on Twitter:

Putting error reports together to find the root problem is makes me feel like I’m in a CSI episode with much worse lighting.

And then yesterday I posted as my Google status:

Do you remember that TV show about the software team lead who played by his own rulebook but always got the project in on time? Thank god that never show never existed.

That status in particular was picked up by my friends Matt and Dave, who sent quotes from said fictional show:

• You’re off this case! I don’t want you messing around with the search module again! From now on you’re on UI duty, do you hear me?!
• Look out, that JIRA is rigged to explode! Looks like somebody’s trying to send us a message…
• I hear he’s a bad mother…shut your mouth!
• It all makes sense… this thing goes all the way to the top. Of the stack.
• You only forgot one thing… that document was preapproved!  (kaboom)
• You may escape this time Diego, but the bug will be fixed! You hear me?
• My extreme programming partner was killed just two days before his release party. Now I’ve sworn revenge on the ones who axed his feature.
• You can’t lock the semaphore there man!!! Are you crazy?? You’re going to get us all killed!! Don’t you care about the schedule???
• I’m about to decrease your priority… permanently.
• You may think I’m not going to merge in these 50 files a week before mass production. You should ask yourself: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?

Maybe my life is more exciting than I think.

Google reader readers: click here to see video.

Okay, we’ve covered the back history. The montage sequence sets up the story: Back in the day there’s an evil mayor (henceforth known as the bad guy) who runs Los Angeles. When the people are being taken advantage of, they go to Don Diego De La Vega for help. Don Diego’s crazy son Don Fransisco is the one who actually helps them, because at night he goes to his C64 cave and turns into Zorro. So one day my sister and my friend Ryan go to talk to Don Diego in our dining room to ask for help because their daughter Angie was kidnapped. Zorro finds out by choking Blue guy, who then takes an inordinate amount of time to get to bad guy island. Of course, bad guy is not concerned with Zorro knowing his whereabouts because

So Zorro shows up in our basement, and sure enough gets the butt end of a sword. Then Bad Guy sets off some well labled TNT, we get some C64 fire, and finally one of my first and last usages of model FX.

Other notes

• The “Sunny Side Video” logo was actually an Amiga Basic program I wrote. I wrote the rotation computations and the animated slide. Not surprisingly, I’m now a computer programmer.
• In the scene in the Dining room, I was standing in front of my Mom’s china hutch operating the camera. Then I took a perilous step back. It took years for my mom to forgive me for that one.
• My Dad made the “bad guy island” model, and my science teacher blew it up.
• This was the first instance of Jason being in one of my videos. He’s shown up in some of my later stuff too.

Whenever I visit my parents, I can always be sure that I will feel at home because my room is pretty much the same as when I left for college many years ago. My parents have done a little work – new carpet, new wallpaper, new desk – but things are more or less been left as they were, from the books about programming the Amiga on the bookshelf to the porn under the mattress. When I was up there last for Christmas, I decided it was time I admitted I owned a house and brought some of these things back home with me. Let’s face it: since I’m only there 5% of the year, there’s no reason my mom shouldn’t use the room as a sewing room.

Of the things I brought back, what I was most excited about – yes, even more than the Magic Eye book – were the videos I worked on in High School. Some history: the Minnesota Spanish teachers had a statewide arts competition, and one of the areas of competition was video. The only real rule was that the dialog had to be in Spanish; otherwise it was a free for all. At the time my friend Rob and I were cable access nerds who volunteered at Northwest Community Television, videotaping everything from sports events to “Tuesday Night Trivia”, a live trivia show. For an outcast nerd like me, this was a place to put a lot of pent up creative energy.

Our freshman year we decided to team up to do “Un Dia En La Vida De Robin Hood” (A day in the life of Robin Hood). For those of you who took other languages, the plot is pretty simple. Robin Hood (Me) needs to steal some gold from the local gold truck shipment for the poor. First he has to cross “The River” (a.k.a Meadow Lake) in disguise, but his fan club gives him away and he gets in a boat chase with the boat guards(?). On the other side of the river he intercepts the gold carriage, but the Sheriff of Nottingham (Rob) was secretly hiding so he could catch Robin in the act(??). Some Commodore 64 assisted sword fight action ensues(???), which ends predictably.

How can you not love something that has “Wacky Sax” as the credits music? You can’t. Don’t be hating.

I remember the day we brought the final copy in for the submission to the contest. For some reason I had to miss the first five minutes of Spanish class, so I gave the tape to Rob with very clear instructions this cannot be shown in class. Predictably when I returned they had already finished watching. The part that shocked me was that they were actually impressed with what we had done. There were questions about how we’d edited it together, and how we’d done this or that. It was the first time I’d put my heart into something and people said “hey wow, that was kind of cool.”

I realize this looks like typical YouTube fodder now. I could defend it by saying it was before computer video editing existed and all editing was strictly tape to tape (computer controlled within five frames of accuracy), but I’ll be honest: it does look pretty bad. What can I say, I was sixteen years old. The wonderful thing about kids and film making is that you’re basically giving them endless possibilities. The thing they have to learn for themselves is to learn from what they’ve done; to strive to be better.

Did I learn that lesson? I’ve got three more of these. I could post them all together, or I could stretch this out for another couple posts because this is the most exciting thing I have going on. Guess which one I’m doing?