BATPEZ!!!

I have vivid memories of hand-me-down half-broken toys and a lots of imagination. I remember having a couple PEZ dispensers and those were my action figures. In the early 2000's I worked a corporate desk job as a support technician. The internet was still new, and there wasn't much to do at my desk when nothing in the corporation was broken. I stumbled across this online animation website called 16color. Oh wow. It was amazing. You could animate in a 100 x 200 pixel window in full 16 colors of spectral goodness! The software to animate was online, and you'd get a total of about 300 frames to animate. So you could make these incredibly simple pixelated cartoons, which you'd upload to a blog and share with the world to see. I made a 5 second film about 2 pez dispensers fighting with their exploding candy, which was the direct inspiration for this short cartoon. BATPEZ was made in Maya. All the audio is my creation, except the canned music. It was a fun cartoon to make and my first serious attempt at animating in 3D.

1 hour -> 5 second film

So I show up to class, and am told that we have 1 hour to make a 5 second film. The film has to have a real lens flare effect (not digitally added later), and some good special effects. Great. So not only do I have to come up with something to do, I have to figure out how to do it. And since everyone in my class is scrambling to finish their own film, I have to find someone to film me. Shaky camera? No problem! Actually, it was. Because it's tough to blend yourself into a shaky background. That actually took the most time. So it's not a great, but was a fun challenge.

1 min short film

So my very first class at UVU gave me the assignment to write and film a 1 minute short film. 1 minute? That's harder than it sounds. That's actually harder than a 2-5 minute film. Because every shot has to be essential and move the story along at a fast past. So I wrote this script idea and filmed it with my group. We each had our own edit to turn in, so this one is mine.

First attempt at After Effects

In my digital special effects class, our teacher wanted us to take a weekend and make a short film with no sound showing what we could do in any special effects software of our choosing. Great. I had never done special effects. So, since I already owned a version of After Effects that I had only launched once before getting scared, closing it, and vowing to never open it again, I got on youtube and tried to learn as much as I could from prepubescent kids more talented than 33-year-old me.

They didn't teach me much beyond how to make text do various things. So I spent a day just learning how to navigate in After Effects. I consider myself lucky because I come from an era where all our special effects came from how well we could scratch the super8 film, or how fast our VCR's flying erase head was. So I learned how one could cheat with simple crops, overshooting the film, and making fast cuts. Here's my first attempt at basic special effects in After Effects.

My Mind

I didn't make this video, but I did write this song. I was dating a girl in high school and found out from a friend that she had swapped me out for another guy a couple weeks earlier. I was angry and depressed and about a million different things. My brain was the noisiest it had ever been in my life. So I locked myself in my room with my guitar and, like every teenager wanna-be musician, I wrote the saddest most depressing song about how my life was ruined and how I should die and all that garbage. It had the feeling of "Why did you crush my heart? I still love you and want you back. Am I ever worth the air I breathe? Waaaaaaaaa." You know, typical teenage melodrama.

So right after I finished singing all 400 verses dripping with dismal tears into my crappy tape recorder, I found myself getting angrier and angrier. I wasn't sad anymore. I was pissed. Again, very typical teenage melodrama. So I kept writing more lyrics. Only they weren't about how I should die, they were about how SHE should die, that rotten bitch. She broke my heart. MY heart. When I gave it to her to hold, I never said she could to THAT! What was she thinking? But the melody was too sad and slow to fit my new words, so I wrote a new one. Same chords, new melody.

A day later when I went back to listen to this intense cacophony of emotion, I couldn't decide which melody or set of lyrics I liked best. Since I had a 4 track recorder, I recorded both songs one on top of the other, and hard panned the vocals so the sad song was in the left speaker, and the the angry song was in the right speaker. That way, as my mood shifted, I'd just pan from left to right on my stereo and switch between the two versions of the song without missing a beat. As tapes of my music circulated a few years later, that song was shared with both versions playing at the same time. No one knew they were supposed to pan left or right, and so people just listened to both playing at the same time. Some people hated it. Others thought it was an interesting concept. Because really, that's how my mind was. It was noisy and cluttered and angry and sad all at the same time. It wasn't simple. It wasn't something you could understand in one listening. It was raw and confusing and gritty. So I have mixed feelings about this recording. Sometimes I pan to one side, and then replay it panned to the other side. Other times I let it play and remember how I felt writing this stupid song. But it really is a good representation of the conflict in my mind.

Life: the cereal, board game, and waste of time.

My dad was a graphic artist. He was always drawing. I started out drawing a lot as a kid, but quickly realized I wasn't any good at it. So I stopped. I took up music instead. I'm not that great at music either, but I'm much better at music than art. Still, even when you suck at something, if it brings you joy, you find yourself doing it when there's nothing else to do. So I draw constantly. Its usually the same old stupid stick figures blowing things up, but it doesn't stop me. The only advantage to constantly drawing is sometimes you get these brief story ideas. Things that spark a scene or short film. Sometimes they develop into something good. But often, they're just quick gags like this one. I thought it would be funny to have some sort of do-gooder superhero type find a guy that's cold, and attempt to use his flame thrower to heat him up. Of course, the idea of a super power is funny in normal life, because you rarely need a "super" power. Regular 12 volt power would be just fine. But what's the point of having a flame thrower arm if you can't use it. My flame thrower arm is built in maya. The flames/snow/breath etc are done in After effects. I did all this in about an hour on a very sunny hot afternoon in my backyard.

Puppet Power!

Sometimes I hate my work. Sometimes I hate it so much that I try to stop doing it altogether. The problem is, when I'm depressed and down on myself, the way I cope is by making stupid films. So it's an endless cycle. Here is one of those "I have no creativity, but am going to animate anyway." pieces of garbage.

Why I don't do traditional animation anymore...

I grew up doing stop-motion films with clay and action figures. That made the transition to 3D animation pretty easy. But I gave traditional animation a try, and realized how bad I was at it. As much as I understand the principles of animation, all those skill go out the door when I have to draw and redraw the same stupid guy 600 times. So here's the cartoon that made me stop doing cartoons.

Dark Day

The animation department at UVU has been hopelessly working on a parody film called "Dark Day." I did a fair amount of composting on the film, and decided I'd tackle the music. Because every parody film needs good parody music. The goal was to make a twangy version of the music in the film we're parodying called "Nuit Blanche." So I made a new arrangement of the song involving old-timey country instruments. It was a great excuse to buy a banjo, set of harmonicas, mandolin and jaw harp. The non-mastered version can be heard in the video below. The only diff between this and the mastered version, is in the mastered version I added a stand up bass and ...well, mastered the thing properly making it not so 2-dimentional and boring.

Tried to build a steadycam - FAIL

So today I got the last part to my DIY steady cam, dubbed on youtube as the Silver Flyer. I followed the instructions perfectly, but my steady cam is anything but steady. It wobbles around and rotates whenever it feels like it. I've made a ton of adjustments and such, but it still seems caca. So head's up, you may not want to waste the $30 it takes to build this thing. I know every video on Youtube says it's only $10 or $15, but it's for sure $30-40 and possibly more. I haven't tallied up my total cost because, well, who cares. It doesn't work.

Here's a video if you don't know what I'm talking about.