Alright! We are proud to announce Quandary’s submission to the Red Hot Chili Peppers ‘Direct a Video’ contest for their song Charlie is now up on youtube! Hooray for exporting! We’re both a little delirious from sitting around in the office for days on end tinkering with export options in Avid (if any of you guys know some awesome high quality settings for youtube using Avid let us know!) Spenser has been spearheading the exporting operation, and I’ve been providing the moral support by humming along with the incessant guitar riffs coming through the wall from the recording studio, and coming up with awesome bad puns. I know, we make a great team. But my tedious work was done a few days ago, there are over 600 frames of animation in this video, and because I am technologically ignorant (and it just looks better), I drew them all by hand into Photoshop (flash animation is for n00bs anyway).
I found out about the contest about three weeks ago. At the time Spenser and I were up to our eyeballs in pre-production for our sci-fi movie, and as much as we love the Chili Peppers we decided we shouldn’t spend time on such a frivolous endeavor. One night over a couple glasses of Rootbeer we indulged in some creative brainstorming, and came up with some cool ideas. We decided that since we didn’t have the awesome band to film the only way it would work, would be to animate the performance half of the video. My thought was animation would take too long, Spenser mentioned something about stick figures, I scoffed, and we finished off the Rootbeer deciding that only morons try to make movies anyway.
A few days later for some reason I thought, “Hmm, what if I did try stick figures…” So I animated Flea, dressed in his Lakers outfit head banging with his bass. It came out looking perfectly absurd (which is what we wanted) I showed it to Spenser and all discussion was over. We had to make this video.
It was already late in the game as far as the contest was concerned so we had to act fast. A few more hours of brainstorming and a couple cans of Barq’s later we had our idea. Finding a location where we could fling paint around was near to impossible. So we decided on my garage. The problem was our spaceship set is taking up most of the room, so we had to work in the small alcove in the back.
After clearing out the stuff we took stock of our newfound location. It looked like the dingy back wall of my garage, not good. The walls needed texture, and we could cover everything else with plastic. We thought about putting rows of egg cartons on the walls which would have been cool, but we didn’t know where one would one get 500 egg cartons on short notice without raising suspicion. We had a big box of old drafts from scripts we had written, and somehow got it into our heads that if we rolled pages from the scripts into tubes and taped them to wall, it would look awesome. After eight hours, nine rolls of tape, and 1,892 paper tubes later, we defiantly were beginning to question our sanity. But the wall now had the “over the top” surreal quality we were looking for, so no complaints. But that was a lot of tube rolling.
Check out the video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0SY8JXb98Y
We are proud to announce the first installment of the Heart of the Argos productions journals! Thanks to fellow filmmaker Patrick Newman, who has taken on documentation of the project, we will be posting a series of videos chronicling the making of our film over the next few months. These short broadcasts will feature our talented crew and the progress we make, giving an in-depth look of the work behind the scenes as we embark on this crazy adventure.
