RSA Animates Again!

DJ Nu-Mark "Tonight" Featuring J-Live

About 2 weeks ago, I got a call from DJ NuMark of Jurassic Five fame, asking for some last minute animation. The video had been shot, and they were looking to have animated elements interact on the shirts. It can be tricky, lining up elements to moving imagery.

There's digital tracking tools, which were used here, but sometimes, don't work perfectly. I split the difference with these shots, and you'll see some definite glitches. The toughest part wasn't the actual animating, but covering up the green dots they had on their shirts in the footage. At times you'll actually see the 'color box' move around, which is embarassing to me. Nevertheless, the client was happy.

My contribution to this was pretty minimal as director Odin Wadliegh really deserves most of the credit here:

Masters Of Illusion- We All Over(2000)

In early 1999,DJ and producer Kutmasta Kurt released his grand opus, Masters Of Illusion. After years of releasing LP's by Kool Keith, Planet Asia and numerous other artists, the Masters LP was a sort of personal project for him. I was brought on to put together a graphics package and a basic art direction for it.

We'd been talking about creating an animated music video for it for a while, though, I'd never taken on anything as long a 3 minutes. With Kurt's encouragement, I got started and put together a video for We All Over. After about 2 months of working nights, I got this completed:

The video was basically created for the then new 'web distribution' method. Seeing this on a site like 'Icebox'(which was the go to place for web animation at the time), and watching the views top 7,000 was a huge thrill. It was way more than I expected. Turns out that MTV had expressed interest in airing it as well...

I tried to remind Kurt that this was a terribly primitive web animation (12 frames per second), not to mention my first. I was a bit uneasy about it showing to tens of thousands. Nevertheless, I sent in the broadcast version, and cringed when I finally saw it, as every slow motion, mistake, bad art, on the screen for all to see. It was a great feeling though.
It was an exciting project, and did lead me to a lot of great work. Though some claim it was the first animated Hip Hop Music Video, KRS-1's Break The Chain beat us by about 6 years.

Cereal Box Artwork

After spending a few days in Battle Creek MI, which happens to be the cereal capital of the world. Not so much for the abundance of grain, but the mills gave us today what we know as breakfast cereal. Might not seem to be a very elaborate product, but as far as the marketing and design of the cereal box, it's a world all of it's own. All of the characters that adorned those boxes were the invention of ad men, and cereal marketers, and have become ingrained in our minds. And to think it all stemmed from this one small town:

The 'Dude' abides.

Another title sequence of the Food Dude has been finished up for Spike. Admittedly, didn't have a ton of idea s for this guy, but, tried a couple new things and delivered it. Was going for a montage of film scenes for this but the 15 second length of this didnt allow us to get too specific:

Dexter Titles by Saul Bass

A great imagining of how the legendary, late Saul Bass would have treated the titles for Dexter on Showtime:

Asteroids!!

Some new animation and compositing shots for a new project. One involving adding the classic game Asteroids to a billboard. Interesting yet challenging:

Noma Bar

Some great, simple illustrations from this Israeli born artist:

Malcom McLaren

Not sure what to say that hasn't been said already about  Mr. McLaren, but his name seems to keep popping up from time time. Whether it's the Sex Pistols (which he infamously created and then destroyed within a couple of years), or with Duck Rock, his solo record of production, and possibly my favorite LP of all time. When he passed a year or so ago, he left a vast body of music production credits, including Adam & The Ants, Bow Wow Wow, etc. (Rumor has it, he approached the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in 1984, wanting to produce them as a rockabilly parody band)

But Buffalo Gals will still be what I know him for, and what I consider to be my first introduction to Hip Hop.