Get your own nuts (1999)

This old film was made by myself and my very old friend Robert Lee.



I was doing my 3 year Film and Tv course at TAFE and my animation lecturer was really cool and let us borrow the Umatic machine over the weekend so we could produce this film.

I used an all wire armature for the main character but we had the problems on working on the first shot of the wire snapping in the arm. So being the geniuses we were, we replaced his arm with a tentacle arm. The smoke was done by drawing chalk onto a vinyl blue folder (you can see the edges of the folder on one shot). We had heaps of fun putting as many sound effects as possible and often just throwing in crazy ones to make it funnier. I'd love to do another animation and treat the sound in this way. (Space Monkey I guess was pretty close) The song in the background was the films temp track that we never got around to replacing. It's Tom Waits 'Chocolate Jesus' from his 'Mule Variations' album (a great album you all should own)

We were big fans of the video game "The Neverhood" and it's all plasticine look. So this is our own version of that style. Actually thinking of that reminds me of a story. There was a follow up to this game called "Skull Monkeys". On the weekend we decided it be a great day to hire out this game since neither of us had played it. We were at Rob's place in Rockingham at the time and we checked out every video store around Rockingham and none of them had Skull Monkeys in store. Determined that we were going to play this game we drove over to my place in Gosnells (a 45minute+ drive since the freeway wasn't finished yet) and we started looking at all the major video stores in Gosnells but still no luck. We then furthered our search checking every video store from Gosnells to Cannington (about 20minutes from Gosnells) but nothing. At this stage we had practically given up and we were driving back home just as we were about to reach home I remembered just near my place (like 2 minute walking distance) there was a small privately owned video store. It was so small they wouldn't have something like that ....NO THEY DO! So something that begun at about 10am finished up at about 5pm, we could have been playing that game probably 3hrs earlier had we checked the store closest to my house but then it wouldn't had made it that rewarding of an adventure. heh

Well I'll finish up saying goodbye, safe trip and all the best to my pal Rob as he journey's to England for work as a writer for some tv production team. Of course if he tries to leave to country with my copies of "taste of tea" and "izo" he'll be leaving in a box! haha. Goodluck Rob!