I’ve never had to cast an animal before, but there’s a first time for everything.

To keep the hot plaster from melting the octopus into a pile of reek, it was frozen. Its tentacles were flattened against a sheet of aluminum foil so that there wouldn’t be too many undercuts on the mold.

Katie Akana cast the octopus in gelatin (with some sort of secret ingredient to make the creature especially stinky!)

This electric chicken mixer was made to scratch Silent Library contestants with its sharp talons!

I removed the guts from an ordinary hand mixer and modified them so that they would fit inside a rubber chicken; I’m very happy with how it came together, especially how the power cord comes out the chicken’s mouth.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This red robot needed some modifications so that it would not look like a toy commercial when it made an appearance on Sesame Street to illustrate the word “activate.”

I disassembled the robot and removed the speaker and some random ear-popping and eyebrow-raising functions, added some details, and painted it a more generic silver color.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

I made this puppet for a health-care advocacy group. In a short video, the puppet will wreck hospitals, clinics, and maybe even get to eat some ambulances and doctors. I’ll be doing the puppeteering today, so I’ll post a link as soon as it is available. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that fire will be breathed.

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.

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

With googly eyes.

A pair of gossipy pyramids.