Archive for the 'Filmmakery' Category

Why You Should Support Your Face is a Saxophone


The copyright industry is not going quietly. The legitimacy of its monopolist and consumerist practices are still upheld by policymakers and panicking creators who haven’t seen any real alternative in action. I humbly submit my silly cartoon about people with inanimate objects for heads as a first step in that direction.

Your Face is a Saxophone is a surrealist satire of the advertising industry, which makes fun of actual companies and brands. It tells the story of the staff of Buzzword Marketing, and their dealings with the absurd demands of their corporate clients. Also, everybody has inanimate objects instead of heads for some reason. It’s either an artistic statement on how consumerism objectifies us all, or an excuse for us to not have to animate their mouths moving; you decide. As a bonus, Your Face is a Saxophone is Public Domain under CC0.

My friends and I formed Plankhead to produce the series. At the beginning of 2011, we released the first full-length, 25 minute episode — a pilot that we pitched not to a TV network, but to the Internet. We were able to raise enough money from individual donors to make a second one, which came out astronomically better than the first. Naturally, we’d like to continue the series — we have five more episodes planned, and we’re starting on the third in the next few weeks. But this isn’t just yet another crowdfunded indie project.

Your Face is a Saxophone started out as an assault on advertising. Since it began, I’ve realized that the problems with advertising are just one part — along with the copyright monopoly, unchecked greed, the pursuit of censorship, and other problems — of the holistic problem that is the ancien régime of the corporate entertainment industry. Much like these motivations, Your Face is a Saxophone is a part of a larger whole; a prototype for how to produce, promote, and proliferate culture in complete opposition to the problematic habits of the copyright industry.

I certainly hope you find the show entertaining. But even if you don’t, let me explain why you should still help it succeed:
Continue reading ‘Why You Should Support Your Face is a Saxophone’

    Your Face is a Saxophone — Episode 2

      Principal Animation for Your Face is a Saxophone Episode 2 is Complete!

      Phew.

      About ten minutes ago, I placed the final keyframe for the second episode of Your Face is a Saxophone. I am too exhausted to pick out some kind of image with which to illustrate this occasion.

      Left to do:

      • Rendering
      • Commercials
      • Editing
      • Sound editing

      All of this will need to be done by October 12th, as I’m screening the episode on October 14th at FurFright. At the very least, it will be a rough cut. I’m hoping that I can make it final in time.

      That’ll be the first semi-public showing. For the first public premiere, I’m going to look into screening it at Occupy Wall Street sometime after the weekend of FurFright.

      There are some fundraising- and promotion-related things I need to do before the episode will be online. This will be on, um, oh, what the hell…

      Your Face is a Saxophone — Episode 2 will be online October 28th, 2011 at
      6:00 PM EST

      There. Okay. Ugh. I need something extremely alcoholic right now. Brb drunk.

        Zombies, Dude! — An Experiment in Flashmob Filmmaking

        This is the result of the first prototype of a workshop I’m planning to call “Flashmob Filmmaking”. The idea is to get a large group of people together to make a film — from pre-production to post — in two hours. Writing the script, shooting the footage, and cutting it together, all in that short span of time.

        When this idea hit me, I envisioned it as something to do at some kind of fandom convention — a place full of regular people who’d be interested in doing something creative. But I needed to make sure it worked first, so I tried it at a party.

        As you can see, it definitely worked. For the most part. We did go slightly over two hours total, so I’ll need to refine the formula to keep things moving along.

        And I need to figure out a better solution for shooting footage that can be edited right away, without wasting any time to capture, transfer, or transcode. We shot this on a camera hooked up to Adobe OnLocation on my MacBook, and carried the laptop around along with the camera. Then, I put it into Target Disk Mode and connected it to my larger and more capable iMac, and used ClipWrap to make the footage editable into Final Cut. Unfortunately, the process of Target Disking and ClipWrapping took up a good five minutes — which is fast compared to capture or transcoding, but still too long for this purpose. I’ll probably need to get a camera which shoots to SD cards in a QuickTime-native format (or maybe ClipWrappable, since that process only took about a minute; I can live with that).

          YFIAS Episode 2 On Track for Late October/Early November

          Principal animation of Your Face is a Saxophone Episode 2 is almost halfway finished. My lovely assistant, Erica Frohnhoefer, had to go back to college this week, so I’ll be on my own from here on. But I’ve got a good bit of momentum going, and the episode should be online by the end of October, or the beginning of November at the latest.

          Just wanted to post this since things have been quiet for a while. I haven’t had as much time to produce video diaries as I’d have liked, but a few weeks ago David Lanz was down on Long Island shooting some footage of us working, so there’s some material ready to be edited into one as soon as I get the opportunity.

          I’ll be taking a bit of a break from animation from August 28th to September 3rd, as I’ll be in Washington, DC helping to document the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline protest. It’s okay, though, because it’s for the environment and stuff.

          UPDATE: Actually, I won’t be in Washington. Hurricane Irene screwed up my travel plans.