Tuesday, October 26, 2010

JOHNSON-SMITH NOVELTY CO. HORROR RECORD WITH ANIMATION

7 comments:

  1. DANG!!! Some pretty gruesomely fun stuff Keith. Kinda like Rob Zombie meets Charlton Comics :) Haven't seen this many severed heads and limbs, stakes through the chests of scantily clad babes, and slobbering bloody mutanzombies since, well, the last Rob Zombie shclock movie I watched. The animation (were there some 3-D effects?) wasn't all that bad, considering.

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  2. wow those animation effects were cool. reminded me of my old 3D comic books. the narrator's voice was WEAK though, he sounded like a nerd. I guess Vincent Price was too expensive.

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  3. Those images were scans from the covers of old horror magazines. They clipped them out and animated them with Flash or something like that. They did a really good job. That voice guy was pretty amazingly awful. Ha!

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  4. Hey, cool -- glad you guys liked the video! I really enjoy your art Keith so this was a nice surprise.

    The audio was actually taken directly from a realllllly lame Halloween record I bought out of a comic book when I was 8, and the images were indeed all culled from the covers of the z-grade 1970's horror mag publisher "Eerie Publications" (not Eerie magazine from Warren though, lotsa folks seem to confuse them.)

    Here's a quick little breakdown on the software I used to cook it up:

    Photoshop: This was the most time consuming part. I did lots and lots of visual prep work like eliminating cover text, completing any truncated images (like if there was only half of a vampire or something because it hit the end of the cover page), breaking components out into separate layers and then creating new art that would fill in the holes left by moving those elements around, and so forth.

    Motion: This is the program that allowed me to do all of the animation in XYZ (or "3D" you could say) space. Here's the part where I'd move the images around like pieces of paper on popsicle sticks inside of a shoebox stage (well at least that's how it felt to me) and sync them with the audio.

    Final Cut Pro: This was what I used to do the final editing together of the various scenes, add the transitions (like the cross fades, etc), and to do the final exporting to video.

    All of this took me about 4 weeks from start to finish, which accounts for more than a few false starts and obsessive tweaks. This was actually the first project I had ever attempted to do in Motion and while it turned out to be waaaay more work than I had initially bargained on, I really had a lot of fun.

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  5. Gasp! That sounds like a ton of work! You did an awesome job. Thanks Jason, for the comment and the visit!

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  6. Actually, the video is kinda lame. A little too stereotypical of the gore world. I'm more into atmosphere than excessive gore.

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  7. I guess I used to feel the same as you long ago. Five thousand movies later my tastes have broadened.

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