In trying to do a rails upgrade, I managed to take the videos portion of Nicreations off line. It will be a few days before it comes back up. In the meantime you can see (most) of the videos at www.youtube.com/nicreations. My apologies to my (two) fans.
MC Frontalot is having a DIY video contest for the single “Wallflowers” off his new album Final Boss. I made this as an entry. When you hear nerdcore dance music, who doesn’t think of dancing Transformers?
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”.
The big flaw in my other entry, besides that it made McCain seem like an exciting guy to vote for, was that I violated fair use left and right to have it made, so I decided to make a second entry that doesn’t have any copyrighted materials in it. The idea came from Bert, who commented how McCain reminded him of the old people in Terry Gilliam Monty Python animations. It basically animated itself.Special thanks to Matt for letting me use his shop for foley work. Read up on his adventures of building a plane in his garage.
The Colbert Report is having their second Green Screen Challenge, where they provide images to be composited. This time, the assignment was the make John McCain interesting. My original concept was to have the Movie Monkey interview McCain, thinking he was at a press junket for a little indie movie called “The Straight Talk Express.” The problem is that it wasn’t very funny; McCain’s available dialog online doesn’t lend itself to morning DJ hijinks. In fact, if you watch, you’ll agree that it is very boring. Apparently he can only be funny on SNL.This second concept came together in one day in a crazy rush of compositing and editing. It basically puts McCain in the ultimate pre-9/11 action movie. The music is by Jonathon Vandergriff, a local KC composer who does awesome work.
Enjoy it before the RIAA comes!
When I’m working on a computer program, I generally will mull a problem over for a long time, sometimes days, before a single line of code is written. This of course appears to the untrained eye that I am “juggling in my office” or “reading The Onion“, but I want to have a full understanding of the problem and understand all the implications before I begin. When I actually actually sit down at the keyboard, the initial coding often comes out in three to four hours of bezerk code rage, followed by two to three days of debugging.
In some ways the same applies to my writing. When I write stories, I generally have a fuzzy idea of what where I am going to go before one word gets written. I generally have an idea of who the people are and signposts the have to hit by the act breaks. The difference is that during the writing process I have a lot more points where I have to take a break and make a decision that affects everything going forward.
A good example is picking a name for the a character. The character’s name should be just a token that identifies them in the fantasy universe, but actually is much more. Once they have a name they have heritage, background, a family history, something kids made fun of growing up, and so much more. Making that one decision can give your character so much life they may no longer want to be bound to the fate you have planned for them.
In my case, I wanted my main character to name his dog “McGuffin”, which is something of a writers joke. I thought that I could make it work if he named it after a relative, and this introduced a Gaelic heritage to the character. Given he lives in the Old West it applies new rules to him that weren’t there before. It gives whole new areas to explore in the piece that I hadn’t planned on.
I think I will keep hacking away at my first draft, but I’ll need to go to the library as well to do some research. Three pages into the first draft and I’m actually starting to feel like a writer.
For the past two years I’ve been doing animation projects on the side and posting them online. My eventual goal was to be able to turn an animation out at a respectable rate, like one or two a week, by developing my skill and using my own tools. Granted, I haven’t done much work lately as I’ve been busy with trips to foreign lands and website updates, but I think if I wanted to I could actually make some pretty good stuff once a week; I’d just have to give up my day job.
To most filmmakers this would be a no brainer: “Leave my dead end job to make internet short films? Sign me up!” The first problem for me though is that I like my day job. It pays me money for things I like doing. The second problem – which is a big one – is that nobody really watches my films. They’re cute and I love making them, but my most popular short has one one-hundredth of the views on youtube than a cat that boxes; though to be fair that cat is precious. One could argue that if I put out videos more consistently I could develop an audience on my own, and I would agree, but I’m not sure I want to be that guy.
I think it may be time for a change in direction, and I think I have the answer. I’ve been afraid to do a longer form project ever since The Emperor’s New Clothes wrapped years ago because of the sheer amount of effort that went into what ended up being a somewhat mediocre result, but doing the Movie Monkey shorts has taught me a lot about what makes interesting viewing and I think I’m ready to try again. It will take a long time – possibly years – and I may exhaust every resource and friend I have in the process. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
While I’m working on it I will try to blog about the progress I’m making, if only to give myself something to look back on. I can’t say what the end result will be, but life isn’t a hero’s journey; that’s what makes it interesting.