MadVillain- All Caps (2003) Part 3

About 4 weeks or so into the production, I soon realized this was easily a 3 month job (I'd originally budgeted for 2 months). In creating the hand inked animated frames (hand inking was the only way I could pull off the hand drawn integrity). getting the heavily inked frames to register became a nightmare. I knew I didnt want to rely to on motion graphics software to make this work, I merely wanted it to be the finishing touch.

On top of this I'd wanted some 3D camera moves and employed a primitive 3D program to create the shots. I then traced the 3D movies by hand, and compositied the moving 2D elements into them. While time consuming, it seemed to work well and look natural enough.

Finally, after compositing was finished, I had something to show the folks at ST (nothing had been shown yet). Chris was pretty excited, remarking that he thought I'd outdone myself. I on the other hand kept thinking of all of the things I could have added. I'd always wanted a shot that actually took you 'through' a panel, into the artwork, and out to another part of the book. Nevertheless, I felt like it was ready to show, and started sending links out to everyone.

In my mind, I'd just delivered another music video, and was somewhat happy with the results. As I was bracing myself for what I expected to be nasty critique from the 'motion graphic/animation' politburo, a small stream of praise started to circulate. Ain't It Cool News had even asked for a link, and that seemed to open the floodgates.

In the end, the video opened up a lot of doors, with some folks asking for almost the exact same video. Ultimately, a small cottage industry based on the video seemed to spawn some unusual items including an action figure. Most thrilling off all had to be the HP/Serena Williams Outdoor Ad Campaign of 2007.

Since then, a lots happened to all parties involved in the project, especially Stones Throw. MF Doom went on to enjoy increasingly mainstream success, (though reports that a Doom Imposter in early 2006 didn't help him). A follow up MadVillain LP failed to materialize to the dismay of many fans, with the folks at ST anxiously waiting new material from Doom to no avail. A MadVillain Remix LP was released in 2008 to wet the appetite of fans, in which we had a hand in designing. It was a fantastic and memorable project, and one that I felt I was lucky to be a part of.

MadVillain- All Caps (2003) Part 2

From the start, I had in mind what I'd wanted this animation look like, I just needed to figure out the best methods/software, to make it happen. I did have a handful of references of motion graphics composition I'd seen seen that had similar look to what I had in mind. The animation was another story.

I scoured 1960's Marvel Comics, particularly the work of Jack Kirby for inspiration. So much so, that I ended up borrowing some of his actual poses:



By now, the song had changed to "All Caps"(which was a much better song as well as considerably shorter), and Wolf was OK to keeping the same budget. He was pretty hands off with the whole project, trusting that I knew what the hell I was doing(!). I just kept giving him updates saying, "well, it's gonna be weird", to which he'd reply "Weird is good!".

The real trick with this was to try and make it look like heavily inked panels, move, and retain the weathered old comic look. This involved drawing and inking each frame of animation. To top it off, I wanted also use 3D camera moves. I had my work cut out, as, I had 2 months to get this done. I feverishly started the artwork, finishing up the toughest shots first. I hand inked everything, converted the shots to EPS, colored it in Illustrator, and composited it in Flash and After Effects as seen here:

As time went on, I wanted to do a lot more animating that I'd planned. A ton of ideas had come along the way, as well as having 'comic-ads' that would come to life. This involved shooting real actors against green screen, and compositing. Before I knew it, this project was taking a lot longer, and costing way more than I'd set out (continued).

MadVillain- All Caps (2003) Part 1

In summer of 2003, I'd rediscovered the GrantRay/Lawrence series of Marvel Comics cartoons. I distinctly remember these as a kid that my brother and I would laugh and make fun of these embarassingly simple animations. Marvel was trying to get into the animation business, and using the actual 60's comic art, moving the images, and adding poorly recorded audio, with limited animation.

I had the idea to recreate something like this for a music video, as mostly an inside joke. Out of the blue, I emailed Peanut Butter Wolf , head of Stones Throw Records, and asked if I could direct a video for him at some point. A week or so later, he wrote back saying 'sure, what do you got?' I told him the idea, and he suggested we animate a video for the upcoming MF Doom project they were recording. I got the single 'Money Folder' from him, showed PBW and Madlib some of the cartoons I was referencing. After about a month or so of non-starts, I quit my job, and got started on the initial artwork (continued).

Biz Markie - La Da Da (2000)

This came my way right after the 'Masters Of Illusion' music video (which was my first animated project). As it turned out, Groove Attack Records, who were involved with the 'Masters Of Illusion' single, were also featuring Biz Markie on a compilation.

News came my way that he was interested in a music video for his single. It was a bit intimidating being that it was Biz, but also that it would be my second video. I met with the label owner and got the song, all the while I was working at FOX as an animator. One day my phone rings and it's Biz himself. The conversation was brief, but he simply requested that he have a small afro, and make it like Fat Albert, yet not to make him too fat.I came up with a design, to which the label responded "He's WAY fatter than that!!". I submitted a redesign.

I had a sizable budget, and about a six month deadline. Around the same time, FOX had announced that our department was to be closed, and all employees would lose their job (this was to be the final axe of the 'dot.com' bubble).

The conditions couldn't have been more perfect considering I had some more time to make this happen. I got started, and after about 2 months, with maybe 20 seconds finished, I noticed that things weren't looking too good. I didn't even have one background completed.

A lot of it had to do with the methods I was employing to animate him. I sketched all of the shots, traced each frame in illustrator and colored them. It was a painstakingly tedious method, but I'd hoped it would keep the hand-drawn integrity. This method made the animation rather 'jumpy' and was almost impossible to smooth out. The timing on it of it seemed off as well. I literally spent the last 2 months of the project trying to sync everything as much as I could.

I ended up delivering it on time, and played it for the folks at the label. They all just sat and watched it and bobbed their heads. I took that as a good sign. The video ended up airing, and I never did get to hear Biz's reaction, but, it led to working with him on a few other projects, it was huge honor to work with one of my heroes.

Kleenrz- Filthy (2012) Part 2

By month 2, I finally had something to show Kenny & Co. He was pretty pleased at what we had so far, so that was a hug relief, though, I figured we met the criteria he'd presented early on. Kenny wanted to add some title graphics, to make the whole piece look a little more like an infomercial. It can be tough to add elements like that at the last minute, as they can seem 'tacked on', but we did our best to make them work.

With these full animated pieces, there's always dozens or so of shots that just didn't come out well. You hope that ones that did will outnumber the glitches, but, this one was 50%. In this case, I usually find myself not able to watch my videos when I'm done with them.

Once the video was done, Kenny had me come up with a design for the LP cover. This can most times be much more fun than making the actual video. Plus we had a wealth of assets to pull from the video, so, we were almost half way down with the cover before we got started.

We had a few more items to finish up, and the LP was finally released. It was a blast to be involved in the video/Lp Art/ and promo materials for this, as, you get to manage all aspects of the creative direction. Once that's done, you juts hope the record does well to justify all of the hours. And from what I understand, the record did pretty well!

Kleenrz- Filthy (2012) Part 1

I was pretty excited when Kenny Segal first contacted me, and seemed serious about producing an animated video. It had been a couple of years since I'd done a full length animated piece, as I'd found myself doing much more motion graphic, design animation, rather than full on cartoon. The other key component of this project was that the Kleenrz consisted of the aforementioned Kenny Segal as well as Self Jupiter who hailed from the legendary Los Angeles  group Freestyle Fellowship.

The idea behind 'Filthy' centered on a team of 'Cleaners' whose job it was to clean up grisly crime scenes, using some rather unique gadgets. One crime scene in particular ends up being haunted and coming back to life. I had 3 months to finish.

Once we nailed down budget and time frame, I was anxious to get started, as the production would  coincide with the birth of our son. In fact, most late night I spent animating would be shared with nursing my infant son, Sawyer back to sleep. Staying up late wasn't such a problem anymore.

I got started on the character designs which, required a bit of back and forth. Self Jupiter was designed to be a squat, rotund character, while his partner Kenny Segal, taller and lanky. Kenny quickly informed me that the statures of the two were actually reversed, Self Jupiter being almost 6'3" and Kenny being 5'8". I quickly obliged with some revisions......to be continued

Quasimoto- Bully's Hit (2005) Part 2

After a month or so, most of the ideas started to gel. The storyboards I presented involved Quasimoto (though, the little yellow character we were animating wasn't truly Quasimoto. Quas was supposed to be 'the unseen', and for the most part, no one knew who this yellow guys was, but anyways...) and he was being abducted into a graffiti piece by the evil Lord Inamel. Inamel was a character that was supposed to represent what i saw as the blatant bloated ego involved in most street art. Especially in that street art employs so many strict rules. The arm band was supposed to signify this 'fascist' trait.

I also wanted the video to play as my 'love letter' to graffiti art. A part of my own past that I've always cherished. The world we were creating here was a sort of 'land of graffiti', in which names of all of the legendary graffiti artists stood on rolling hills. You'll see Vamm, Dondi, Taki 183, Blade etc all placed in there one way or another. One thing I'd wanted to be mindful of this project was also my color palette. As the video progresses, I wanted the colors to get darker and darker, until we find ourselves in Inamels evil lair.

On a handful of shots, I was hoping to have some 3D camera moves. The problem was I was using some pretty primitive software for the shots. I literally would spec the scene objects out, then trace them frame by frame to give them the hand drawn look. The results were mixed, but it gave the video a bit of dimension and depth.

I started to composite all of these separate elements, which was a pretty daunting task. So many pieces need to be laid out, and work together. Plus, I was assigning a bit of a blur to all of them to take some of the 'vector' edge off of everything (since most of them were created in Flash and Illustrator). Another method I was trying out was assigning  textures to animated vector elements (importing pixel patterns and imagery into vector animations):

After about 5 months, I finally had something to present to the label. Egon was pretty happy. It was somewhat incomplete, s the original treatment had Quas getting actually sucked into the wall, whereas this version started with him in the vortex at the beginning. 4 months later, I finally delivered the video with complete intro. It was probably one of my most ambitious videos (though, I always thought I could have made it way better), and something I've always been proud of.

Quasimoto- Bully's Hit (2005) Part 1

When I heard the first Quasimoto LP back in 1999, I was pretty blown away. I heard the track 'C'mon Feet' in a mixtape, and it was like nothing I'd ever heard. It was the perfect mix of Hip Hop and psychadelic that was truly left field. It was something I'd always felt Hip Hop had lost since it'd become so conservative and trend bound. I knew it'd be an instant classic.

In late 2004, Egon called and asked if I was interested in a possible animated music video for the follow up- The Adventures Of Lord Quas. I answered in two parts,  a) I said there was no way I WOULDN'T be somehow involved with this record, and b) I was working on another video AND working a full time, job, but, I would make it happen. Egon and I had always talked about making an 'animated graffiti' video, and I figured this was the perfect chance. It was great news amidst a pretty dismal time in my personal life, dealing with break-up as well as seriously ill parent.

 

I first set off to get the 'Quasimoto' character design nailed down. It was a strange aardvark sort of creature, and I worked closely with Jeff Jank to get the right look and texture. The character itself was the work of DJ Design, and Jeff had sort of fostered the look and attitude of Quas since. I wanted to get it right, but, I ended up spending a lot of time trying to get the design settled, and just needed to get the animation started.

I had a billion ideas, but no real narrative to put them in. I just kept thinking about 'Yellow Submarine' and had ideas of man-eating graffiti letters, and treacherous landscapes. Also, I created a character named Lord Inamel who would serve as a sort of nemesis for Quas . From there, the idea of being kidnapped into a graffiti art painting came into being. (continued)

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.

Motion Man- C'Mon Y'all (2002)

With the LP art finished and some other artwork done for a Single sleeve, we'd started on the video. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to actually animate the figures themselves. We opted for taking a puppetry approach, and got started. We'd mix in digital effects and erasing techniques, and shoot it all digital.



Kurt had wanted to shoot it on PAL, which required us to rent a PAL camera as well as a monitor, which ended up shooting up costs. The results did come out a lot better though. We shot it at the producer Dean Chamberlain's brothers home, and enlisted the talent of his nephews and neices to star in the video. We had a blast, and wrapped up shooting in 3 weeks.

We were going for a vintage 1970's look with the video, so, we studied ads like these old toy commercials:

The digital effects ended up taking much longer than anticipated, so, all together, production from start to finish ended up taking us a good 6 months. I didn't get the results I'd originally hoped for, but, we pulled off exactly what we'd intended:

Hired Killer 4

Explosions! That's what's been consuming my late nights. Not how to illlustrate one, or even animate one properly, but create one that looks as though it's a collage. But at the same time follow the same principles an actual explosion has. It's a challenge, but at least an intresting one.

Finalizing up the last few shots of this, and then comes the hard part. Take all of these shots I've spent the last 2 months making and string them into something interesting to look at for 2 minutes....

Hired Killer 3

Almost coming to 1:40 minutes of finished motion/animation with this (not bad considering the whole piece clocks at 2:35). Ive broken these into 6 pieces, each being 20 seconds of animation. To put them into one big composition would've been a nightmare, considering even some of the 20 second pieces can't even render all the way through due to lack of memory (something I'll need tackle eventually).

Once all six compositions are completed, I plan to render out all six, and comp them together along with the audio for the final cut. It won't be the most flexible (if one particular part needs to be adjusted, I'll have to go back to original composition), but, hopefully, it'll all come together.

The main issue still is sheer size of all of the assets. Making a video HD, and having deep zoom shots, requires source PhotoShop files that are gigantic...

Hired Killer 2

The project is coming along nicely, and new ideas keep popping into my head all the time. It's about 70% there, but a problem I keep running into is processor strain. It goes to show, no matter how powerful a machine you have, you'll push it to the limit as soon as you can.

This one involves large, multi-plane imagery, that's panning and zooming at different rates. Lots of tweaking and jiggerring of artwork. The possiblities with this sort of thing are endless, as there's an endless sea of imagery out there, most of which I bought or took myself around town or  using friends as models.

Hired Killer 1

The majority of this project so far has involved compositing in one way or another. Taking dozens of disparate elements and trying to give them a 'same world' look. Mostly tweaking light source. It can be a challenge and somewhat frustrating, but, often times you can get some unexpected results.

The latest piece of animation is involving 'train smoke' that has 'collage' style patterns inside of it:

Let Me Talk To You (2001)

In May of 2001, right on the heels of finishing up the 'Biz Markie' video. I'd promised Kurt that's I'd put together a follow up video for his Masters Of Illusion LP. In keeping with the 'wrestling mask' theme of the record (a costume he would don on stage), we figured on some sort of a 'love caper' involving mexican wrestlers. The whole story would culminate on a final showdown.

Much like the 'We All Over' video, we'd create this for web purposes. Especially at the time, making 'Flash' videos was popular, as you could also embed games, hidden items and features into the streaming video. It was something that not a lot of developers were taking advantage of. And most music video directors were sticking with straight NTSC videos, hoping for that one in a million shot on MTV.

The time frame we had for this was 4 weeks. The We' All Over video had 8 weeks of production time, and that ended up being the hardest I'd ever worked on a single project. The advantage here was having the precedence of making a couple of these by now as well as having left my full time job. Aside from the animation, I'd wanted to put a simple Flash game in there as well, to coincide with the 'wrestling' theme (the YouTube version obviously doesn't have this). After 4 weeks or so, the video was delivered, and had a good run on the Web as well as broadcast versions on MTV2.

Cut Chemist- 'Spat' (2006) Part 2

About a year and half had passed since the video production stopped. It had always been an itch I couldn't scratch, and had wished I could get back to it at some point. In mid 2006 at a benefit I was involved with, I ran into Luke.

After talking a bit, he'd told me he was hoping we could pick up where we left off, which was the best news I'd heard all day!. I had a pretty clean plate in terms of work, so, it was a go. I was surprised how much work we'd finished the year earlier, so, it was almost half done in terms of art. We just needed to settle on a character style and movement. I tried to manage the expectations a bit more this time around, and Luke seemed pretty happy with things.

The trickiest thing was trying to figure on the 'mouths' and the mannerisms. Since these characters weren't going to sing or do much moving we really had to emphasize the movements as best we could, to give a sense of character. The animators I'd brought on did an amazing job at some of the subtle movements. Once the 'mouths' were synched to the scratching noises, we were almost there.

Luke ended up being really happy with the finished product, and would play it during his performances while he performed the song live! Truly amazing. It ended up being a great experience and offered up a lesson for me in persistence.

Cut Chemist- 'Spat' (2005) Part 1

Once upon a time I submitted an idea for a Jurassic 5 video. It was a Schoolhouse Rock/Rap educational video , and I'd sketched all the guys out. I got no response, but a year or so later, a mutual friend introduced me to Lucas McFadden (Cut Chemist) who was looking for a video for his upcoming album.

He had the idea to have two 'turntable people' having an argument, as the song itself was an instrumental, with scratched noises and exclamations. I came up with a bit of a treatment and animatic, including the two characters, but involving a lot of arbitrary animated elements and scenes, that would offer up a 'jazz' sort of approach. Luke was pretty adamant to sticking to just the two characters on screen. We met halfway, by allowing me to keep some of these elements at the beginning of the video.

Settling on a character design for the Turntable Guy was a whole different matter. Luke submitted a design (upper left), and I'd come back with something a bit more streamlined, and 'animatable'(middle). We went back and forth on this for a while until other projects came up, and Luke wasn't happy with the designs thus far. We'd decided to stop the project...(continued).

Macromantics- Moments In Movement (2006)

In late '06, I had a chance to work with Romy Hoffman, otherwise known as the Australian rapper Macromantics. A friend of mine from Melbourne had mentioned he knew her, and that she was interested in a music video. She'd just been signed to Kill Rock Stars here in the states, and was ready to start a tour in the US. I was excited to direct the video, but little did I know it would become on of my biggest dissapointments.

We talked on the phone and she told me she'd be in town for just the weekend. We met at a Halloween party that she was slated to perform at and talked ideas. She'd just flown in the day before with her DJ (DJ Amy) and manager. We were set to shoot her against a blue screen the next day, after which they were off on a flight to New York that night.

My friend Davon Ramos, who produced the shoot, and I put together a makeshift blue screen in his basement. Davon was dubious it would work but I pressed ahead. They showed up the next morning on time and we shot her in front lip synching.

Romy was a real sport and performed numerous takes for us, and we wrapped it up in 6 hours. It was my first time working with a blue screen and wasn't at all prepared for the challenges that lay in post. We said our goodbyes, and I set to start on the animation that would encapsulate the live footage we'd shot.

First off, the footage didnt key as well as we;d hoped. The footage ended up being pretty low-res, and we seeing actual jaggedy edges on her performance.

I was determined to finish, and forged ahead. The idea was pretty vague, but I knew I'd wanted to incorproate some 3D with some classic cut out imagery. With other deadlines looming, and time running out on this project, the finished product just never seemed to come together. Sometimes letting a project stew for to long can cause it to never quite jell. While it was big learning experience of what NOT to do, I regret not producing the kind of video she'd deserved, especially for such a great album.