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!

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

Before I begin, I’d like to thank anyone who is still subscribed to the blog for sitting through my nostalgia session. It’s been a lot of fun for me to write about these, hopefully it’s been entertaining.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula came out in 1992. Since it was rated R I never saw it in high school (I was a good kid that way) but it made enough of a pop-culture impact.

Movie link for Google Readers

The recap: John and Marsha’s car breaks down in the middle of Europe in the middle of winter, which we all know is truly the best time to visit Romania. After walking for some time they find a castle to stay in for the night owned by Rico Suave, Europe’s trendiest bachelor / castle owner (did you catch his episode of ‘Cribs’? It was more like ‘Crypt’s’! Ba-dum CHING!). Rico lends them some gas so they can go on their way in the middle of the night, but… TWIST!

I’m not sure why, but every one of these I did I was pushing myself to do something a little more ambitious. Since this was going to be the last one, I wanted to go as all out as possible, and for a 17 year old in 1994 I think I did okay. There’s green screen shot over a Targa-painted background

There’s my first 3D computer animation ever, the giant doors opening.

There was rack focuses because I thought they were cool

There was even morphing using $7 software!

This was the only one of the Spanish videos where I didn’t play the main character, and hoo-boy, that helps. I think the opening  is the only time in four years I’m doing anything that approaches ‘acting’. My friend Ryan did the camerawork, which was the best of any of the videos, Jason and Amy return as actors appearing as Dracula and Marsha, and Meadow Lake makes it’s third appearance.

On second thought, maybe my first bit of acting was lying jacket-less on the ice without screaming “OH MY GOD IT’S COLD!”

I’d learned from Batman not to try to write my own music. The music is “Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony” which is a personal favorite of mine. Considering I was working with VHS tape to tape editors with two audio tracks, I’m honestly how subtle the music cuts are.

My one making of story: we shot most of the movie over one evening. For the dinner scene, my mom made a huge dinner for all of us because she thought it would make the scene more realistic if there was actual food on the table. I looked through the dinner scene, and I couldn’t find one instance of food getting into the final cut. This is the horrible son I am.

Nowadays when I think of making a movie I think of schedules, craft services, lighting, and equipment, but it’s fun to see what could be done with some friends, a camcorder, and a satin cape. Of the four Spanish videos I did, this one is my favorite. I admit it has it’s flaws and the ending live up to the setup, but when I watch it I’m still surprised how much of a filmmaker 17 year old me was. It makes me want to make movies again.

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.

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?

I spent a good portion of my Thanksgiving break watching the first season of Mad Men. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s a show on AMC about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early sixties. John Hamm plays Don Draper, the dashing creative director of the advertising firm Sterling Cooper. The first episode sets up the various departments of a advertising agency; the copywriters, art department, customer relations, secretarial staff, and alcohol.

The show has won every award possible and has been a critical darling since it came out, but I had to slog through it. For a show whose main characters are sex and booze it is remarkably dull. There are some central mysteries and characters that drive the show forward, but I never found myself getting behind anyone. Everyone seemed both having the time of their lives and incredibly unhappy and it did nothing for me.

In the debate between critics and the audience, I’m finding myself sliding from one side to the other. During the time I’ve been a filmmaker, I’ve often heard people tell me that they never listen to critics. Usually their reason is that the critic had an opinion about a work that they disagreed with, and it destroyed their faith in the critical process. Take this example from Roger Ebert’s website

Q. I saw your review for the new movie “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.” You have a lot of nerve!! I remember when you and Siskel reviewed the movie “The Accidental Tourist” and gave it four stars, and with that recommendation I went and saw it, and you know what? It was the BIGGEST PIECE OF **** known to man! I decided from that day that I would not listen to you or Gene Siskel and save my money. So, for the next year or so, I did not go to the movies and today, I use my formula: wait two months after a movie comes out and spend the $1 at RedBox to rent it if I dare. Thanks, Roger, thanks for making people not want to go to the movies.
Joe Flambe

A. Hey, in the case of “New Moon,” that was the least that I could do.

Joe’s argument, that because Ebert loved “The Accidental Tourist” and he hated it all of Ebert’s reviews must be completely invalid, would be hard to argue even if he hadn’t picked such a laughable counterpoint (Joe, are you really a 16 year old girl?). I’ve usually argued on the side of the critics. What critics do is give their opinion on the film’s merits. They’re not meant to be unbiased – that’s impossible – but they try to be fair and exclude things like that they were having a bad day.

Something has changed for me though – In the past few years I’ve turned to TV and movies less as a cultural exercise and more as an escape from my day to day routine. When I was younger I had patience for work that wanted to explore new areas. I used to think a film that was 20% interesting and 80% total mess was still worth watching because I might see something new. My patience has shrunk in parallel with my spare time. I don’t have time for quirky angsty mumble-core movies about love from people who seem to have never felt it, or pretentious art house fodder. As of late, I find that I’m not using my spare time to catch up of all the films I haven’t seen, which is a hole I can never fill. Instead I’m catching up on sit-coms and animated shows where you can down episodes like popcorn.

A critics’ job is to watch everything that comes out. If there was a cake critic, who had to spend all day eating every kind of cake there was. Naturally, they’re going to get pretty tired of your chocolate cakes and angel food cakes really quickly, but will champion cakes that are unique and different and didn’t give them indigestion. At this point, I’m only eating cake once a month, so my perspective is very different. I want something moist, sweet, and goes well with ice cream.

If I seem to be overly concerned about a very mundane topic, it’s because I’ve been reading movie reviews for as long as I can remember. I have The Onion AV Club, Roger Ebert, and a number of other movie sites on my RSS reader. As I’m getting older I have to acknowledge that I’m just one of the masses, and not one of the elitists.

I know these are getting tiresome, but it was either this or a whole post about C++ object serialization (and I can’t promise I won’t go back to Object Serialization).

This was my undergraduate final animation project (based on a high school video project my friend Ryan and I did – someday I’ll have to post that one). Our professor didn’t believe in using “computers”, so I was on my own as far as doing the lip sync and sequencing. Since I was poor I didn’t have access to nice tools, so I used the engineering lab scanner to scan my drawings, Microsoft Paint(!) to color them, and all the frame sequencing with my own software.

This one goes out to my friend Brian Hindman in Texas. Back when I worked at Dallas Semiconductor Brian and I were both misfit toys – Brian was a computer programmer sidelining as a Christian singer/songwriter, while I was a computer programmer sidelining as a filmmaker. In the computer industry creative endeavors are generally looked upon with an inquisitive head tilt, so it helps to helps to have a partner in crime.

Brian helped me finish The Emperor’s New Clothes by doing some additional vocals and the score, for which he learned to play the recorder and the mandolin. He then went on to a more ambitious project: producing the album Breaking Ground, which was a collection of original songs by members of his church. He recorded each of them in his home studio and did all the mixing of the songs. It was quite an endeavor, especially since the songs ranged in styles from bluegrass to rock. I actually really liked Matt Stevenson’s “Standing” from the original recording he made in Brian’s home studio, and I asked Brian if I could make a video from it. Bear with it – I hadn’t learned pacing yet, and so as a video it’s fairly slow.

Brian’s song “My Life Is An Empty Tomb” has just been put on rotation at Live365 radio, so here’s hoping for his future success.

One of the problems of writing the software you use to animate is that you have to maintain it. I’m trying to do a very needed overhaul of my system, but it’s cutting into general animation time. Rather than disapoint my two fans, I’ve decided to go through my archives and put up stuff you don’t care about. It’s Filler Time!

This is an extremely early (and extremely creepy) test of the technique I currently use for the Movie Monkey. I believe this dates back to the summer of 1999 (!), which means I’ve been working on this technique for the last 10 years. The vocal is Homer Simpson from the “Songs in the Key of Springfield” CD, and the visual was a Barbie that my mom had on hand for making doll clothes (one of her many hobbies).