Billy runs when the large orange ring background rotates – the ground beneath his feet has offset bumps so that each foot is alternately set in motion. The faster the ring spins, the faster little Billy’s foam legs run.

It was made out of leftover materials destined for the trash: dented foamcore, faded construction paper, scraps of insulation foam, and almost-empty tubes of paint.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.