Casper & the Cookies - Little King
- By Fredrick
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That was way back in February, and the goal was a finished product for the mid-May record release. That seemed like a reasonable deadline, so I began drawing with a panoramic of downtown Athens, GA. Before I knew it, two episode of Lost had elapsed and I hadn't even colored the damn scene. Of course that trial was followed by the concept of 'moving pictures'. I found that when it came to making things move, I had no idea what I was doing. The next few days were dedicated to walk cycles, which seemed to challenge me in every aspect, from the arms to the legs. It just never added up. I was practicing with a lanky drawing of Frank Zappa, and when the gait was proper, the arms were out of sync, and somehow there were always extra frames in there. What the hell?
The months went by, and, still jobless, I kept trucking on the music video. I remember a moment of reflection when I finally broke the 1 minute milemark. I was thinking back to the beginning and it occurred to me that this project was entirely too big for me; I simply wasn't experienced enough and honestly I'm not much of an artist. I'd spend entire days trying to make these cartoon Cookies move around the way I thought they ought to, and often enough ended up scrapping the entire days work only to start anew the next day. It was tough work, no joke, and that deadline was fast approaching.
Of course the release of Modern Silence wasn't the only thing happening mid May, I was also moving out of Brooklyn around the same time. Of course I didn't have that pesky employment to worry about, but I was then splitting my time between the moving process and the animating process. The weekend before I moved the Cookies actually came through town to play a few shows. I felt entirely guilty for not sending them home with a finished product, but I was resolved to get it to them soon.
Upstate was inspiring in a lot of ways, and stifling in many more. I worked hard on the project and the stuff I was doing looked a lot cooler than the stuff I had been doing. I started getting input from friends and started feeling a certain sense of pride. Once I finally got to the home stretch it all fell into place so quickly. The last hurdle I had to jump was the run cycles for, in my opinion, the most pivotal scene - the hallway chase. Once I finished the last frame of the last run cycle I resolved to never animate another (and I'm fairly certain this is something I can stick with). With the video finally completed, this is early October mind you, I excitedly let Jason know I was done and only had to convert the files to the proper format and send them along.
Except nothing every goes that easily; my aging laptop couldn't deal with the stress of converting a massive avi file into a more manageable format and size, and none of the many, many high end programs I tried could provide me with closure. I was downloading everything that had any glimmer of hope and was let down every time. When I was about to unload the raw files on my friends and say "you deal with this", I tried one last solution - that crummy Windows Movie Maker program that comes pre-installed with Vista. It's bare-bones interface was easy on my resources and was able to, finally, put all the pieces of the puzzle together in a neat little package with very little quality lost in the translation. And with that, it was over.
I can't stress enough how important it is to me to share this wonderful band with the world, I would do just about anything to bring them the success they deserve and have worked so hard for. Of course I believe in them 100%, which is why I set to do something so daft in the first place. In honor of the music video release, The Cookies are having a massive sale on their gorgeous double 180 gram vinyl release of Modern Silence. For only $15 you can pick up this extremely limited record featuring an epic 18 tracks from Jason Nesmith, Kay Stanton, and Jim Hix, as well as a slew of Athens musicians on the closing track. For your own sake, I urge everyone to pick up one of these, or maybe even a couple.
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