I made some marionette puppets for the J. Viewz music video “Come Back Down” (the boy, girl, birds, and turtle.) The puppets were made out of blue polystyrene foam and acrylic paint and dressed up in bits of foam and some bright fabric from socks. Some tiny wire hinges kept the puppets joints loose enough to be puppeted by fishing line, along with bendy yarn legs.

Alisa Stern, Peter Ahern, Jeff Wallenhorst, & Matt Witham put this whole project together with their super design work, puppeteering, propmaking, and animation skills. Alisa even made us waffles!

Right now, the video is exclusively on Spinner, so please check it out:

http://www.spinner.com/2010/03/11/j-views-come-back-down-feat-joshua-james-video-premiere/

A music video that Fran and I made for Miles Kurosky is up on the internet this week. Hooray! I can finally show you all some pictures and video!

Amid Amidi did a ‘lil writeup on Cartoon Brew over here: Cartoon Brew

Fran is a big Beulah fan, so when we made The Upstate Four he contacted Miles Kurosky to see if he would be interested in making some music for our cartoon. Even though we couldn’t pay them too much, Miles and his friend Nik Freitas wrote and recorded 25 songs for our cartoon. Really really good songs! If my computer’s music player is on shuffle and one of them pops up it is never skipped and often repeated.

We offered to make him a music video so that our exchange of goods and services would be more fair, and Fran proposed that our music video should require that all of the check boxes on an animation festival application form for “Media type” be checked. (We missed sand-on-glass and paint-on-glass, but there’s still quite a bit of stuff in the soup.)

Fran and I started out thinking that our video would be a weekend project like Robot Dance Party, but it was so much fun to try new things that it expanded into our free time over several months.

We made puppets, set construction paper houses on fire (which lit up quite nicely!) and had lots of fun along the way. Our video has played the ASIFA-East Festival, The Ottawa International Animation Festival, and it will be at Stuttgart this May.

 

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/fakeheads-anthology-vol1/7991756

The FakeHeads are a loose-knit unit of animators and illustrators who live and draw in New York City. Despite their varying choices of media and aesthetic differences, they are linked by their desire to express their shared affection for amputees, kittens, and the overall awkwardness of the human condition, and engage in storytelling in all its various forms.

With stories by:
Dan Pinto
David Sheahan
Alisa Stern
Will Krause
Isam S. Prado
Maya Edelman
Emmett Goodman
Joshuah Weisbrod
Max Salazar
Andy London
Nate Dorr
Michael Ricca
Dina Kelberman

 

Here’s the Valentine that I’m sending out this year (on the left) along with the rejected Valentine (on the right.)

Let’s get some half-price candy tomorrow.

 

The puppet is made from urethane foam covered with liquid latex and acrylic paints. I also added UVA foam teeth and claws, and some red LED lamps for eyes. Steel rods inside the puppet can be used to move the arms, and there are two dowels that fit into sockets located at the back of the puppet’s knees so that the puppet can be “walked” without a puppeteer’s arm inside.

Of course this isn’t THE Godzilla. Godzilla has powerful lawyers with radioactive law breath. Let’s just say he’s a Destroyosaurus. Or possibly a Destructiodon.

 

The rain was made by gluing construction paper raindrops to some string, and cycling through three different strands of drops (purple, light blue, and dark blue.

 

And here’s what those things look like when they’re moving:

Click here to view the embedded video.