This Friday: Hit "Nu Jangle" release @ Stone Circle Theatre
Plus a behind the scenes look at the making of the video
Happy President’s Day everybody,
Just shooting out a reminder that this Friday (February 23rd), Hit is playing a very special show at Stone Circle Theatre in Ridgewood (59-14 70th Ave) for the release of our new single and music video “Nu Jangle,” which (small pending technical details notwithstanding) we’re gonna screen at the venue. Also on the bill are Jackie Simons and Babas. This is again ALL AGES, which is ironic given that Friday I will officially be old enough to run for president. It’s an early show, 6:30 doors with a 10pm curfew. You can get advance tickets by clicking this link.
I made the video last summer, and was inspired by Brad Neely web series like Baby Cakes and the Professor Brothers, where they’re cartoons, but it’s more of a stylized slideshow than actually animated. I also liked those low quality turntable animation meme videos on YouTube, where it’d be like a spinning cheeseburger set to “Funkytown” or something, and the audio sounds horrible. I figured it couldn’t be that hard to learn how to do, and that combining the two could make for a nice little lazy man’s version of an animated video.
As I mentioned in the last newsletter, the “Nu Jangle” vid is about a bowhunter named Ted Nujangle, who goes critter hunting the woods. Without giving too much away, no cartoon animals were harmed in the making of this video. Since the video concept was a linear tale told in three and a half minutes, I had to storyboard out the whole thing. This was time consuming, and involved watching a lot of admittedly disturbing Ted Nugent hunting videos, but in addition to helping make sure everything fit together, it wound up making the final drawings a lot easier, as I mostly copied these original sketches.
The final drawings were all light green paint pen on black paper, 76 of ‘em in total. Because the storyboard sketches were in pencil, there’s a lot of shading that wouldn’t have looked good with the paint pen, so the main trick to translating them was using stronger, cleaner lines.
I had to re-watch a tutorial on how to make low poly animals in Blender probably a few dozen times, but eventually I got spinning guys for all the cast members. It was liberating in that they were supposed to look bad, so I could have some fun with it instead of worrying about how they didn’t look Pixar-level or whatever.
There’s some other stuff in the video that I won’t get too into because I don’t really know or understand some possible copyright implications, so best to just let sleeping dogs lie. Don’t wanna over-explain a video no one’s even seen yet anyway. I know you only get to trot out this line so many times, but if there were ever one Hit show to check out, this would be it. Hope to see ya there.
Keep poundin’,
Craig