“Dead Man’s Pants” – the most intense of all our pack’s grim Hallowe'en contents… yet of eternal appeal all year ‘round! I’ve performed it hundreds of times for a decade, first arranged on the occasion of Vancouver’s first ZombieWalk, but even after all that time here was a new approach! A breakout hit from MIST1015, having been enjoyed more times than the artpack itself has – here it receives a much-warranted behind-the-scenes “making-of” interview (or… would “postmortem” be too obvious?) conducted in an impromptu fashion as soon as it was submitted:
Sept 5:
Whazzit> I have finished my submission for the Mist pack, I think.
Cthulu> So in advance, very rigorous!
WZ> You might remember, about 6 months ago I said I had an idea that felt more Mist than Blocktronics.
[shares video]
CT> holy swamoli, this is pretty incredible
CT> I can see why you needed to make sure I had some time and was sitting down before you unleashed that on me
WZ> Does it work?
CT> I only wish I could have provided you a better quality recording!
WZ> Haha that one was quite good quality, compared to the live ones I found
CT> oh yes, I have a long career of only being caught on tape doing my very worst performances
WZ> I would have asked, but, well, I wanted it to be a surprise. Also, I had no idea if I could pull it off.
CT> also I’m wondering if I could interest you in the album cut of my band performing the song, I have no idea how it would effect the synchronization
WZ> It’s synced quite specifically to this version of the song, besides which I like the simplicity of you playing alone on the accordion. (It means I didn’t need to draw a whole undead band ;)
CT> I’m curious what was the source of that audio track?
WZ> Um, that Louw down interview you did
CT> oh gee whiz, just about exactly one year ago!
WZ> I grabbed the video from youtube, then cut the song out, then trimmed the sound
CT> I always felt a bit dubious about the value of having conducted that interview, but at last it has been vindicated as well worthwhile!
WZ> It was a good quality recording, anyway ;)
CT> that’s an amazing tribute, I’m curious at a few technical aspects of it. you know what, hold on, I haven’t even finished watching it.
I had to restart and pull my girlfriend over to explain that I wasn’t just vainly listening to a recording of myself. It’s amazing on several levels. it kind of deserves to be entered into the textmode demo competition 8)
WZ> Yeah, looking at the rules, I don’t think there’s a category for this in the demo competitions.
CT> duh, wild compo! if I won it in crash '97 by fighting people with foam boffers, this has a much more legitimate place. Also, hats off – there are many incorrect ways of drawing an accordion and you managed to duck all of them.
WZ> hah that was one of the easier parts :D I just copied yours from that video.
CT> reference! it helps. artists be like, “sure I know how an accordion works”… then they draw something that could never play, hands strapped into immobility. damn, this is going to be hard for me to avoid spreading all around immediately, but it will just act as incentive to expedite the pack’s release.
WZ> I admit I have no idea what the left hand does… but I decided that wasn’t particularly important to the animation as a whole.
CT> the very attempt to render the instrument at that resolution is audacious. well whatever else ends up in the pack now, I can rest secure that we have one historic first for the books!
WZ> It *may* be the first accordion in ansi. I’m not sure. I imagine there are a number of firsts here :D
CT> currently searching for instances of the string “accordion” in 16c… hmm, three returns, one from last year’s mist pack, and two more from older mist file separators 8) if it is drawn anywhere, it is not described by its name.
WZ> It certainly hasn’t been the most popular instrument for ansification… I think we’d struggle to find a piano in ansi, for that matter.
CT> Hey, you could be on the vanguard of a sea change! drawing a skeleton and an accordion individually are tremendous feats, together it seems almost insurmountable! did you draw one and then draw the other around it, or draw them separately and superimpose them? there are just so many fiddly little fine details
WZ> Well, the skeleton came first - you’ll see the same rough picture a lot before he actually picks it up and plays it. I just took the picture I had, cut out the chest and added an accordion.
CT> but of course bringing them together after being drawn separately would present problems of keeping a consistent scale
heh, so does this mean that somewhere you have five animation cells of accordions in different positions floating in space? (thoughts for video material if I ever make good on my threat to do an accordion cover of Skaven’s Catch That Goblin!)
WZ> hah, 12 and that’s without the head movement
CT> plus the obligatory “accordion dropped slack in shock” pose
WZ> resignation, really At least, that’s what I was aiming for. “Damn it, it’s back. And now I need to look at the jeans? Gah. Stupid afterlife.”
CT> I want to show the video to the author of the song’s words, but he isn’t even online and no part of it will make any goddamn sense to him
WZ> Hah, yeah I just used the title as inspiration rather than the lyrics, mostly.
CT> My partner is like, “he put the pants on and now he’s happy, look how he’s smiling!”
I’m all, “he has no choice, he doesn’t have any lips. that’s not a smile, it’s a rictus!”
WZ> Hah, I actually made the decision early to allow him some movement for expression. You’ll see his eyebrows move in the first major scene.
CT> Despite the fact that I’m going on at some length about it, basically I’m speechless. I’m blown away. Did it change my life? Quite possibly. I think this will really open the doors of possibilities for others to follow the trail you’ve blazed.
WZ> Well, thank you. The whole thing was inspired by the song, really - when I heard it I immediately imagined a skeleton playing the accordion.
CT> see, everyone always imagines the skeleton playing xylophone, but that’s the unimaginative way out
WZ> I imagined it as a picture to begin with, but the idea of a video didn’t take too long to coalesce.
CT> but the work!
WZ> Hah! Yeah, it took a while. It was an exploration.. I began with a “can I do this?” attitude, then moved to “I have to finish this!” Make a picture, save it, tweak it, save it, etc… I really do not know anything about animation, except for what I puzzled out while doing this.. The whole thing was one big problem-solving exercise, really.
CT> I must know, did you just export your ANSI screen cells as static pngs and string them together in conventional animation software? It’s ansi animation but it’s not ansimation, y'know?
WZ> right And yes I made each frame according to whatever criteria I had, then put them together to figure out the timing of the sync
There are somewhere in the vicinity of 1200 frames in total. I went with 10 frames a second… easier to calculate.
CT> how many distinct different screens are shown?
WZ> I’m not sure exactly, but I’d hazard to guess about 800 unique ANSIs.
CT> egad! so incredibly labour intensive. I would never recommend anyone make an animation without tool assistance to fill in between keyframes, but the end result sure is impressive!
WZ> Obviously I wasn’t starting from scratch on most of them.
CT> you see, that’s why the Raimis would have filmed this using practical effects
WZ> hmm. Difficult. That would require a much larger budget.
CT> How long start to finish did you spend working on it? start of project : end of project or estimated hours logged?
WZ> oh, I wouldn’t know. I started pretty much as soon as I asked you about where to find the song/video months back.. in April? May?
CT> aha, that’s actually relatively quick
WZ> As for hours, I really don’t know. Maybe 100, but it’s hard to say. I tended to draw, get bored and take a break, come back for an hour….
CT> I was pretty floored that it shrunk down to only 15 megs, considering what a big chunk of that must just be the audio
WZ> The audio mp3 is 3.4 megs
CT> it all seems impossibly inefficient by artpack file size standards
then again, when we stacked the bells of yule music disk re-release with remasters in mp3, I think we bloated it from 1.5 megs to 300 8)
WZ> Times have changed ;D We can download 300 megs in 2 minutes now
CT> ok, I almost certainly have more questions but my partner is kindly suggesting I wrap it up as I have a long day tomorrow playing accordion in a recording studio for use in a video game (at last, living the dream!) in conclusion: wow!
WZ> Good luck tomorrow then!
CT> a perfect closing note for two old farts celebrating an extinct culture!
WZ> Oh let’s wait another 30 years before we accept that.
(The crazy thing is… this isn’t even the only ANSI animation he shared in MIST1015 – he also devised overlapping sprites for Kirkman’s tool-assisted parallax-scrolling mermaid tech demo “Under the Sea”. But that’ll have to get a post of its own – or you can enjoy Kirkman’s own notes on it!)
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