Happy Cinco de Julio, everyone! (If you don’t know what that is, you haven’t been watching ALL the TYRANNOVISION videos! Heh-heh!)
I’ve been doing a lot of test footage lately, while I am also writing and designing “Empire Highway”. One of the challenges I always present to myself is “How much can I do with 2D graphics and animation?” Well, I’ve played with a couple of things here: a view of a highway from a moving vehicle, and footage of a live volcano.
I’m really happy with the Volcano test, but the road test was a bit of a challenge, because I created it as an animated GIF greenscreen element. Let’s just say I did a LOT of work to make it move in linear perspective, but I think this will actually require some kind of 3D-CGI animation. KrisInteract has volunteered some of his time, energy, and Cinema4D skills to create some 3D road tests for me. I hope to share that with you in one form or another very soon.
I didn’t want y’all to think I had abandoned you. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’ve been writing and designing Empire Highway and it’s coming along really nicely. One of the big showpieces in the movie will be our Villains’ trip into fantabulous Las Ta-Tas, as sort of Bizarro Tyrantulanian incarnation of Las Vegas, NV. Presented here is some test footage of the first batch of signs I’ve made for the environment. I’m hard at work (and fun!) creating MY “ultimate” Las Vegas, the one I’D want to visit. One of the things I really like putting in are the classic colossal hotel signs. Signs that sadly aren’t in the real Las Vegas anymore. I’ve amassed a huge collection of photo books of Las Vegas, as well as pics and videos from online, as research and reference materials. To construct this world, I’m using a technique of assembling several GIF animations, much the way I created Col. Muenster’s lab in the episode “ReFLESHment.”
The video below starts as a sort of “old” newsreel montage of the signs and marqees, then segues to the actual full-color animations of the same signs along with miscellaneous club and show signs. I hope this gets you as excited about this project as I am!
JUST START AT THE TOP of THIS POST and WORK YOUR WAY DOWN. Welcome to my soundstage. This was a scene that opened the episode “Rude Awakening”. I draped a small table with green fabric positioned in front of my greenscreen canvas so I could have the Tyrant asleep on his control panel. I use MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 14 to do all these effects composites. For Fifty bucks it does a LOT!
For an upcoming war scene in “The Trial Of Doctor Interact” I set up a makeshift greenscreen over my photo studio backdrop and some green-painted masonite. I’m running in place and using digital zooms to give the appearance of forward movement toward the viewer. Yeah it looks a bit cheesy and silly…but so does TYRANNOVISION!
This is the “Magic kitchen” where the entire first year of TYRANNOVISION was created. These impromptu Behind-The-Scenes videos were shot during the filming of the episode “7/11: The Wrath and the Wringing”, so you’ll see me dressed as the characters. It was like, hey, I have the camera here, might as well talk bout how I do this stuff.
Dressed as the Tyrant’s Minions this time (All of them, actually) I go into more detail on use of the greenscreen canvas. I also discuss how I build costume and prop pieces and my favorite secret weapon: The hot glue gun. It was always in the wee small hours of the morning when I shot the characters for the show, so if I seem a litttle out of it in these videos, well….now you know why.
A common question videomakers ask one another: “What are you shooting with?” I use a nice Sony Digital-8 camera, but the way I show it to you is to use a cheap-ass Aiptek Digital Camcorder. You’ll find that of benefit, though, because this video is an argument against buying any camcorder that is sold in a blister card.
Now…That said, I DO like the way that the Aiptek video looks like cheesy Super 8 or 16mm film. So I’m considering shooting a silent B&W movie with that camcorder (Especially since the microphone is atrocious, with very tinny distortion, as you will see demonstrated in this video.)
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I use the greenscreen to give you a weatherman’s overview of MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 11 (I have version 14 now. Pretty much the same), explaining its interface and the beautifully intuitive way it works.
Dr. Klindowiener makes his video debut, explaining the finer points of greenscreen lighting and staging.
WRITTEN & DIRECTED by KRISTIAN JOHN THOMAS (South Wales, UK) and BARON DIXON (USA)
TYRANNOVISION EPISODE 22: The LJK commandos attack! ….with a special treat for the Tyrant.
****[NOTE TO VIEWERS: This is the very last installment...FOR NOW! We are currently in production on the epic war which will conclude this saga, action-packed, and full of surprises!]****
WRITTEN & DIRECTED by KRISTIAN JOHN THOMAS (South Wales, UK) and BARON DIXON (USA)
TYRANNOVISION EPISODE 20: The Puppet Press Corps is all over the “Trial of the Millennium”. Terry Bubble interviews the Tyrantulanian Spokesminion, and Scruffy The Pirate hosts the Trial. The Tyrant is prosecuting this case personally. And the world is watching.
****[NOTE TO VIEWERS: For easier buffering and playback, we've broken PART 2 of this saga into three sections. Each picks up exactly where the previous leaves off. --Baron]****
WRITTEN & DIRECTED by KRISTIAN JOHN THOMAS (South Wales, UK) and BARON DIXON (USA)
TYRANNOVISION EPISODE 19: The SpaceCops haul Dr. Interact into a holding cell at the Galactic Court planet, but the LJK army is already moving into position to mount a rescue. Meanwhile, the Tyrannovision Tyrant needs a little help to transmit himself as a life-entity hologram in the Galactic Courtroom.
NOTES-n-STUFF: This is the official beginning of my longtime collaboration with KrisInteract. This saga is completely his idea, but I have helped in scriptwriting and visual concepts. We have enjoyed bouncing various ideas off of one another.
TYRANNOVISION EPISODE 18: As Lt.Adams coarses his way through the Internet in search of The Chosen One and his Reindeer, Col.Muenster7734, instigates his own plan to restore Lt. Adams to the flesh. Meanwhile, a strange delivery arrives for the Chosen One. This episode is a joint USA/Canada/Germany video collaboration
TO THE VIEWER: PAUSE THIS ONE FOR A BIT SO IT CAN BUFFER. IT’S A LONNNG ONE!
NOTES-n-STUFF This epic episode is another personal favorite of mine, and NOT just because a couple of plot points get resolved, but because I got to really cut loose with it. With the exception of flashback recap moments, the Tyrant and his gang are nowhere in this video (The Tyrant is busy amassing his prosecution against Dr. Interact). This is Lt. Adams’ story! It was fun to get out of the confines of the fascistic angular reds and grays brutalism of the Tyrant’s fortress, creating two new environments, one dark and hellish, the other pastel and heavenly.
We have visited Col. Muenster’s lair before, but it’s now furnished with alien lab equipment. I also featured Binky the cat prominently as he looks on. Because Binky loves any and all attention I give him, it was very easy to wrangle him on a small tabletop greenscreen stage. To make him jump off the control panel when it shorts out, I blew on him (Coaxing him with charm wasn’t working.LOL). The lab equipment was individual 2D-animated components when I would then composite together in different configurations to create the alien machines throughout the lab-lair. The swiveling plasma cannon was animated to look like 3D by morphing to separate pieces of art of two different angles of the cannon. On the main viewscreen is an abandoned dumpster baby fetus with Lt. Adams trademark sunglasses from a separate roleplay story. Hopefully it communicates the idea that Col. Muenster has located some of Lt.Adams’ DNA.
The other environment was the skybound world of The Chosen One. I saw her as a sort of faerie princess in a tower above the clouds. Both she and her mother, Alandria, who plays the OOPS Skyvan driver, were filmed against black cardboard. I had to carefully design their backgrounds to be layered on TOP of their footage. This is why The Chosen One is always suffused with an atmospheric glow. Alandria built the “Cross-hatch generator” out of a cardboard flat and aluminum foil and green poster board. The Chosen One’s dialog wasn’t filmed in one session, but two, and between those two, the kid got a haircut! How does one deal with a big continuity glitch like that? Well, in TYRANNOVISION, we POINT IT OUT! Hey, good comedy is where you find it! Alandria earned a tongue-in-cheek “Continuity” credit in the end titles for that one. Heh-heh! The Chosen One herself had grown a bit in the few short months since her debut. She was also a lot more confident and had fun delivering her lines, especially the one about the “Big Hairy LOUD one”. She made sure to do several takes of that line to get it JUST right….yeah… }:-{D>
I handed sound effects duties to Peter Adams who LOVES doing sound effects editing, especially for Sci-Fi. This freed me up to do what was the funnest part of the project: Scoring the all-original music.
Most of the time in Tyrannovision the music is a dark miltaristic medley of evildoing. But for “ReFLESHment” I was able to compose across a huge spectrum of styles. Of course “Prepping The Lab” was more of the heavy malevolent music that I enjoy doing, with a lot of avante garde touches. It then segues into the light and airy “SkyVan” flight music, which is actually a major key version of the melancholy music box waltz I used for the Chosen One’s theme in earlier episodes. The humorous Mancini-esque “Special Delivery” reflected the awkward exchange between the Driver and the Chosen One, as both actresses were acting into the camera and appearing to avoid eye contact with one another as a result, thus inadvertently creating a nice comic tension between the two in the final edit. The harp and flutes of “Waiting For Adams” reflected the lilting hopes of the little Princess awaiting her dreams to come true as she anticipates what her new “TV” is going to bring her. Finally we have the crescendo of “Materialization” for the big violent moment of Lt. Adams return to the flesh. It took me a week to compose and record all the music. I perform it almost entirely on an old Yamaha PSR-85, which for me is practically an orchestra and concert hall in a box! I used its Jazz demo as the theme to “Ask The Tyrant”. I augmented the electronic performance with samples of live instruments and my own vocals.
Peter was my German Dialogue coach for our final scene together. I told him what I wanted the dialogue to be, and he translated it to German for me. He then recorded himself reading the lines and even himself pronouncing each word by itself. I sent him recordings of me doing five versions of the same lines, and he told me which ones he felt worked the best. Now I REALLY wanna make a German Expressionist film with him!
Because I am so proud of my collaborators’ work on this episode, I proudly call this a “Joint USA/Canada/Germany Collaboration”. In this time of war, strife, and nations pointing fingers of blame at one another, projects like these show how people from different countries can transcend their borders and governments and synthesize something truly special. Yeah, we’re playing Supervillains attacking one another, but there’s a lotta love and affection going into it!
TYRANNOVISION EPISODE 17: The Tyrant awakens to find that Lt.Adams is ALIVE! (sort of). And who is that mysterious Text Messenger who keeps pestering the Tyrant?
NOTES-n-STUFF: I knew the convoluted roleplay plotline dictated that the Tyrant’s empire was supposed to fall, which didn’t go with my own narrative agenda. The gag of course was that the Tyrant did “Absolutely freakin’ nothing” and the Empire never fell. But my plan was always to pull a Dallas and declare it was all just a dream. The dream would take place after the Tyrant’s encounter with The Chosen One at the end of the episode “Throwdown”.
I wanted an operatic transition from the Tyrant’s command center to the underground lair of the mysterious “Text Messenger”, Col. Muenster 7734, so while the tyrant rants the camera dollies into a creepy cave which leads to Muenster’s chamber where he’s watching the Tyrant in his usual rant mode. I currently lack 3D skills, so I used my own digital equivalent of the old-school Disney Multiplane effect, compositing several zoom-in’s on 2D art representing sections of the alien-style cave,
Look carefully at the bottom of the screen as we approach Col. Muenster from behind. I was completely unaware of it at the time I was filming myself, but my white Persian cat, Binky, walked into the scene and you can just see his fluffy tail swishing past my chair. He just had to check out all the greenscreen fabric I had laid out on the kitchen floor. At that point he became Col. Muenster’s mascot, and is featured prominently in the next episode, “ReFLESHment”.
I already have a Germanic character on Tyrannovision in Dr. Klindowiener, but I wanted Muenster to be Germanic, too, because Lt. Adams is German, but not sound like Klauss the Goldfish on American Dad. I wanted Muenster to be of the same alien race as Adams. Also, I had always wanted to make a German Expressionist film with Peter Adams, and I wanted to do it in German, even though I don’t speak a word of the language fluently. For the next episode, “ReFLESHment”, Peter graciously offered his services as my German dialogue coach. My delivery of Muenster’s dialogue is inspired by my TV professor in college, Dr. Manfred K. Wolfram, who hailed from Hamburg, Germany. He turned me on to German Cinema.
So why does this complete stranger, Col. Muenster, look like most of the Tyrannovision characters? Check out one of the two objects resting on his control panel, and that’ll give you a clue…..
TYRANNOVISION EPISODE 16:The Chosen One finds the bodies of Lt. Adams and his Reindeer, and invokes her life-restoring powers…with surprising results.
NOTES-n-STUFF This was a pleasant episode for me to assemble because it’s the one Episode where I don’t appear as one of the “Dix” characters. I didn’t have to shoot anything or perform, just animate and edit. My raw footage came from Peter Adams in Germany, and Alandria in Canada (She’s the little girl’s mom, and appears as a delivery van driver in the Episode “ReFLESHment”). Actually, I didn’t get new footage from the Chosen One, I re-used footage from “Throwdown”, and put her in a sort of Glenda-the-Good-Witch spirit-ball. Peter provided greenscreen and location footage of himself along with location photos, and I assembled the scenes on my end.
Peter had himself “killed” a second time because he needed to grab some down time from the roleplay to produce and direct a massive video collaboration. By using and re-splicing footage of Peter making faces and moving his mouth, I was able to keep him alive as a “Max Headroom” type of computer virus. All he had to do after that was record his dialog and e-mail it to me, to which I would edit his action. He was so perfect as this screwball allternative version of his character, that I’m bringing him back as the “brain” of the car driven in the new Tyrannovision movie, EMPIRE HIGHWAY. Even though this performance is cobbled together from “pre-fabricated” bits, Peter’s personality still shines forth as fresh and true. It’s been a real pleasure and an honor to work with him again.
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