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?
The problem with writing your own animation software is that you have to maintain it.
The software I’m currently using is actually my second generation of animation software. The first generation was written in college for The Emperor’s New Clothes, which was done on a student research grant (let this be a lesson for you kids – you can get money for your films if you call it research!). On that project I was the writer, director, producer, and lead software engineer, so thank god Marshall did the hard animation or the whole thing would have been trash. The quality of code was pretty good for a college student (read: pretty terrible overall), but I learned some good lessons:
I’m keeping my options open and focusing on what the application will be first, but when even picking a language is an issue you know this won’t be easy.
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”.
One of the crushing problems of independent film making is distribution. Unlike any of the production steps, distribution is in no way creative or fun. The best verb to describe it is “begging”. Basically you find people who control what people see and beg them to give you money for your piece of creativity. Then they say no, and you move to the next powerful person. To be fair, distributors have to only buy things they can sell. You think the quality of available entertainment is terrible? You should look at what they rejected.
When I first started playing with YouTube I realized that independent film making had finally found the 21st century distribution tool. Film makers could now go straight to the viewer and see what they thought. Sure it is unfiltered and ugly, but you only watch things you get forwarded to you as “the hilarious link”. Just as iTunes had re-invented the single, YouTube reinvented the short film.
Of course, there’s that whole “not making money” thing, which I admit is an issue. YouTube and other video sites allow you to be seen but not compensated. However as web hosting costs have come down dependence of film makers on services like YouTube have come down – now you can put video on your own websites and skip YouTube all together. With the ability to self host content, film makers have a whole new opportunity to create not films but rich media websites and make money at it. It took Joss Wheedon to figure out how!
I know you probably have heard of Dr. Horrible by now and quite probably have already watched the first two episodes of “Xander as a Supervillian.” News about it has exploded across the internet due to Joss Whedon’s involvement and it’s already selling briskly on iTunes despite being able to be seen for free. Why do people love Whedon so much? Well, he writes characters they can relate to (nerds), characters they want to hang out with (pre-teen girls who can kick ass), and he communicates with his fans, regularly posting on message boards about what he is working on. He’s created a rapport with fans of his work, and they love him for it.
In some ways, Dr. Horrible represents a new film distribution approach – film makers as rock bands. Whedon is not just a person but a band, and people want to see his shows when he’s on tour. Likewise, new film makers need to not focus on trying to find distribution through regular channels, but build their own audience on the strength of their name and the quality of their work. Once they do that, they can skip the distributors and talk to their audience directly.
The tricky part of course is building up an audience in the first place. That is left as an exercise for the reader.
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.
Back when I was in college with big dreams of film making the one book I read over and over was Robert Rodriguez’s “Rebel Without a Crew“, where he documents the making of his first film “El Mariachi.” Originally he planned to make three low budget films for the Mexican home video market, and by the time he finished the third he would be a real filmmaker. This flawless plan was undone by the small problem that El Mariachi became an independent hit and launched him into stardom.
While I wish he had done two more for Mexican home video before becoming a film wunderkind as none of his following work has had the character of El Mariachi – it’s like his “American Graffiti” – I’m starting to think that I should try his original plan. Animation is pretty difficult and it is hard to put all your eggs into one long work, especially when halfway through you get tired of the characters.
My thought is to take the same set of characters and write a five minute, fifteen minute, and forty minute scripts for them. First, the effort put into writing the five and fifteen minute scripts will be invaluable in working on the forty five minute scripts, especially when it comes to plotting and characters. Second, much of the cost of character development and production design will be front-loaded onto the first two productions, meaning most of the problems will have been solved for the forty five minute production. And if I’m bored with the characters after the first project, it will leave a nice exit point.
In other news, I went back to the KU library to do research on the films. After my initial shock of how everything that has changed at Watson since my time at KU – they have concessions now! – I browsed the dusty stacks until found the books I needed. Special thanks and one up bonus to Brian who came with me and let me use his library card to check out my research materials . The down side is that I need to rewrite everything I’ve written thus far, but I’m getting new ideas about how history can play into the story. Exciting stuff.