Will Krause – Animation, Propmaking, Design, Illustration

For this video, I designed, constructed and puppeted the Godzilla-style creature. (there are some shots of the process of building the puppet over here) I also made a few of the props for the city and helped to dress the set.

I worked with Ryan McFaul (director, camera, props, set) and Katie Akana (props, set, moving vehicles and things around with magnets) It was so much fun to smash things with them, even though I spent the better part of two days crammed under a table with one arm reached as high as I could manage, surrounded by the output of a sweet-smelling fog machine.

We even managed to make Godzilla breathe fire! (kids at home: the secret is an aerosol can of WD-40 and a lighter.)

You can see the video in high-resolution at the Youtube site. High Res.

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.

Here’s the finished project for which I made all of those cardboard props! Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata helped take the pixellated photos of the props and costumes, and even helped out by wearing them. When I brought everything into After Effects, I had to scale Max and Ru horizontally to make them chubby enough for animation!

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:

I’m making an interstitial for the Sundance Channel. All of the spots are themed to days of the week, and I was chosen for “Monday.” I’ll be using these props and costume pieces to make a short segment where a grandfather clock character steals peoples’ timepieces. I made most of the items out of scraps of cardboard, matboard, and wire.