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!

A New Movie Monkey! As it turns out his recent acceptance to an Evil League has made him a bit power mad. Will he ever be the same again?

Many thanks to MC Frontalot for permission to use his music!

Perhaps I should join a league?

Felicia Day wrote a comment on the Movie Monkey’s ELE Application!

Oh yes, and watch “The Guild”.

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.

Cory Q in action?

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.

Movie Monkey, meet Mac

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.

The Movie Monkey struggling with his response.

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.

Brian working out the melody

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.

Movie Monkey and Felicia Day

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.

News from Cory Q, voice of the Movie Monkey

Hello everyone!

I thought I would let everyone know in one fell stroke: My internet radio show starts up again tonight. My show, “The Funkomaticjamatron Presents…” runs every Thursday from 5 to 6pm on KUST.

http://www. stthomas. edu/ustclubs/kust/

It is internet only, so I know a lot of you will be busy commuting and not able to tune. So it goes.

Listen if you can!

Google and I have something of a love/hate relationship. I’m a big Google Reader fan (thanks Matt for making the introduction!) and their search engine is fast. On the other hand, I consider them an oppressive internet juggernaut that makes it hard to find small new websites. And they make all their money from lying to people to make them buy stuff advertising. But totally not evil.

My juggernaut accusation comes from failing to ever get the Movie Monkey on to the front page a Google search of “Movie Monkey“. Google’s PageRank system is based on the number of websites linking to your own. My first problem is that, in all honesty, nobody links to this site. I could take this as a hint that my videos are stupid, but I prefer to think that everyone on the internet is stupid but me (It’s a great way to brush off all of your flaws! Try it!). The other problem is that “monkey” is a very popular word on the interweb, so there are plenty of far more popular monkeys to find. To add insult to injury, there is a Movie Monkey episode on the first page, but it comes from an episode I submitted to the Kansas City Filmmaker Jubilee – and they didn’t bother the link back to my site, so there is no way to know that it is a series.

This morning I tried once again to see if the Movie Monkey’s ranking had improved when instead I realized what I was up against.

Lets face it: no matter how much I try, a Monkey impersonating Roger Ebert will never be able to compete with “love monkey”.

Game over man. Game over.

One of the stranger episodes of Movie Monkey that I’ve made had to be “My Filmography”, where the Movie Monkey has a surreal conversation with his maker.

I’ll admit it was pretty out there, though to be fair “out there” is pretty par for course for a Movie Monkey episode. But maybe a little explanation might help. In 2005 the Kansas Film Commission was having a summit at the Lawrence Arts Center, which is around the block from my house. At this time I was just getting started working on the Movie Monkey and I thought it would be a good way to network with other filmmakers.

One reason I never made it as a filmmaker, besides the fact that I’m not an asshole, is my cynical nature. To make it through finding money, production, post production, and distribution, you have to believe that your film will change the world. I, on the other hand, said “wow, nothing I make will ever make a difference” and got a job instead.

So this summit was something of a culture clash. I would be talking to people between sessions, and the conversations would usually go something like this

“So what are you working on?”
“Well, I have a job.”
“On a Movie?”
“No, just the regular type”.

At this point I would notice their eyes move past me, as if to say this guy can do nothing for me. I must find someone important. After a while, I started to realize these people think the most important thing in life is making movies – above religion, above politics, above family. Is your worth as a person really defined by your filmography? The more I thought about it, the more I could see where it comes from. If you read trade magazines you get drilled into your head that “you are only as good as your last picture.” Combine this with the dream and passions of an independent filmmaker, and you have a weird new religion.

So thats what the episode is about – the church of Entertainment Weekly. To anyone who is a member – filmmakers in particular – might I suggest that there is much more out there than making movies and the business of making movies. Like watching videos on the web deconstructing movies.