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Well, the winter-storms struck the East of England once more, leaving a lovely blanket of the frozen white-stuff in it’s wake. As I state, I love the snow. It’s a rare treat here in East Anglia, and one that quickly loses it’s novelty, honestly, due to how unprepared we usually all for it, as evidenced by this video of a particularly notorious area of ice in my hometown.
Originally filmed during the snow-storm in February, however there were numerous other additions that took me much longer to prepare. Namely, a brand new intro and original song. The song was composed after finding a Lithuanian musician on Fiverr, and after a cryptic description, he managed to bang it out within only a couple of hours. I tried to find someone to create an intro for me on the same platform, but I was a little put off by the range of results, obviously it being a site dedicated to small and cheap orders. I was however inspired by the idea of several animators, although I decided to take it into my hands. I’d only had a little animating experience in my teenage years, and we mostly used the program to goof off in IT lessons, because all of the internet was blocked. I used CLIP Studio Pro, and tried to start off with a simple walk-cycle, looking at loads of tutorials and reference points. The first three attempts were simply awful, and to some a waste of four days straight animating, but without those failures I wouldn’t have been able to learn how to use the software. In total, I would say it took me about eight days to get the intro working, and I soon after learned it was easier to work on it in small sections, such as the bag-picking up section, and the front-facing walk cycle. I like the roughness of it, although I probably could have spent a little time neatening them up if I wanted to. These films aren’t a technical marvel, or even that proficient, but they’re full of heart, and I think the new intro exemplifies that perfectly.
The next elephant in our cramped room, would be the opening and ending skit’s. Of course, they are direct Twin Peaks copies, but they almost came out much differently. Originally, I was going to have my Dad play The Man from Another Place (AKA The Arm), as Dad has that unsettling kind of aura about him, however he was obviously quite reluctant to be apart of it, not being a Twin Peaks fan himself. I was fast running out of time to get it filmed, so I decided to wait for a day when I had the house to myself (Apart from Donut, who jumped onto the sofa halfway through filming) and decided to alternate the characters. The biggest difference, is of course the speech. Trust me, I really did try to achieve the same effect. In the show, the characters in the Black Lodge speak in an unsettling and off-beat manner, by David Lynch recording the lines, reversing them, and then getting the cast to repeat the reversed lines, before reversing it again, so it technique it is comprehensible, just with a strange sound to it. I tried it using several different techniques, but fair credit to the cast of Twin Peaks, it is incredibly difficult to pull off. I practised multiple times, but couldn’t figure out how to get it sounding like words, so i decided to simply use reverse speak. However, if you played the sound-clips exactly in reverse, you wouldn’t get perfect speech in return anyway, as I lost one of the clips, and I had to use another part of it, which is why it doesn’t synch up quite right. I decided to only do a small part of the scene, and synched it up with a clip from Youtube, simply for my own coherence. I do wonder if some point down the line, maybe I should parody the rest of the scene, because if you remember anything from the season 2 finale, you’ll know shit goes bananas, and it would be very fun to recreate that in some fashion. The strangest part for many, is probably the shock of seeing a 28 year old man in a dress and lip-stick, all of which were provided by Sam, my step-mother. I have no qualms with dressing up and potentially making a fool out of myself for a laugh, so it didn’t bother me in the slightest, although I was wary not to stay too close to the windows, as there were some builders about, doing something in the neighbouring house.
Overall, this was easily one of the most fun episodes to create. I wish I could have gotten it down a little in terms of length, but I just didn’t want to part with most of it.
UNBOUND 