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Friday Double Feature! by Kory Schaubhut
This week we have two videos for you, a limited animation cartoon featuring "Captain Obvious" and a live action (if you can call it that) show about living hot peppers in outer space. These videos are representative of the house style that Fictional Universe is moving toward, both intended as retro television homages. Limited animation cartoons are familiar to most people. The other style could be called "Animotion" after its roots in "Claymotion" that is similar in feel, but focused more on clay characters specifically.
We've intended to do something with Captain Obvious for a while. To belabor the obvious, the character has his origin in the idiom, "Thanks, Captain Obvious." The main thing that I, if not the average viewer, consider noteworthy about this cartoon is the evolution in our technique for making them. The production level speaks for itself, but what isn't so obvious is the time involved in making it -- approximately three hours. Strategies that we've come up with to speed production include use of chroma keying (blue/greenscreen effects) and more careful regard for character design that facilitates limited animation techniques. The method used to animate the children's mouths makes its first appearance in this video. I'm rather happy with it. This is the video that I mentioned last week was apparently destroyed by an accident with a cup of coffee and my laptop. As it turns out only the touchpad was rendered permanently inoperative in the accident and I was able to access this file using a USB mouse. I call this style "Animotion" because the most conspicuous thing in my mind about it is that the characters are objects, photo cut-outs, etc animated mostly by moving them around during filming or digitally afterwards. This is our first use of chroma keying, which is painfully evident. Everything in this video is a photo, except Mr. Roboto's mouth when he speaks and the disintegration beam. Even the Rat space ship is not a drawing, although it mysteriously looks like one. We did most of the mouth animations with a program called "Crazy Talk." A bit of public domain stock footage also appears in this video. Kory was once known as Captain Not So Obvious
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Comments
I love the eyebrow wiggle in Captain Obvious. It was hilarious.
I also love the hot pepper video. I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit with the chroma key. It completely achieves the look you're going for, I think.
Posted by: Cullen | November 17, 2006 6:29 AM
Thanks. I think the problems with the screening effects may be more obvious to me than other people. There are some unintended shadows that I had to try and cover up. Also there were minor spots of accidental character invisibility that are harder to make out with the resolution of the video degraded (both artificially for style and of necessity for file size).
Posted by: Kory | November 17, 2006 6:34 AM
am i the only one who feels bad for the poor rats?
he looked so cute
really great job
i love where this is going
Posted by: the turtle | November 17, 2006 10:35 AM
My son kept wanting to have the rats survive. I had to explain to him repeatedly how their deaths were integral to the artistic concept of stereotypical Star Trek situations encountered by evil hot peppers.
Posted by: Kory | November 17, 2006 11:18 AM
I had to explain to him repeatedly how their deaths were integral to the artistic concept of stereotypical Star Trek situations encountered by evil hot peppers.
That's a father/son talk I'd love to witness.
Posted by: michele | November 17, 2006 11:24 AM
well, im a fan of evil peppers now.
even if they do kill cute rats
Posted by: the turtle | November 17, 2006 2:07 PM
holy crap these are awesome!
Posted by: kali | November 17, 2006 2:33 PM
Thanks. I think we're going to make more of the Space Pirate vids in particular because of the reception it got.
- Kory
Posted by: Kory | November 17, 2006 4:41 PM