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Time for a Throwback Tuesday and a bit of some confessions. Not so much in "an old shame" sense but... I guess talking about an old trial-&-error. (also ties in with this year's Oscars announcements)
In the late-90s, Sesame Street made a couple of theatrical shorts for Loews Theater: Don't Forget to Watch the Movie , a song explaining theater policies, and A Brief History of Motion Pictures , which is self-explanatory of what happens there, both of with showcasing the good ol' fashioned Muppet insanity. I don't remember seeing either of these in theaters, but I have using that reliable YouTube. DFTWTM was online longer but all we had for ABHOMP were pixelated pictures on Muppet Wiki. Wouldn't be until around the time the Muppets' Green with Envy trailer came about did a physical video of ABHOMP pop up (not uploaded that day, but that's when I found it). Interesting vibes came about after a couple viewings. What was it? Ambitious inspiration, that's what! Before long, as YouTubers were making their own videos of the short with their own cast (as some YouTubers are prone to do), I began writing out lists, collecting reference images and drawing pictures for an ANIMATED version (since I didn't/still don't have a proper kind of video editing program), in one of my first projects utilizing Photoshop. Instead of using my Disney as Muppets cast, the proper step would be to use actual motion picture stars and characters. Here's how it first went: Alfred Hitchcock took Cookie's place. Grover & Freddie were John Wayne and Clint Eastwood squaring off in the High Noon town. Musicals onward was pretty much the same (sets, placement of characters and everything), the only difference is with each transition (color, widescreen & all 3 special effects), more and more movie characters would join in from a specific timeline (like the musicals would have 1920s-1940s, color = 1950s-1970s, widescreen = 1980s to present). The effects would have effects from every era, only a bit more specific (Indiana Jones bolder = practical effects, Jaws = featuring movies that have large amounts of ocean or water, Oz twister = non-practical effects). Then the twister ends up picking up the movie studio, dumps it on Justin Bieber's house (as he utters "Oh, mommy"), Hitchcock returns, loads Bieber's corpse on Rosebud and the sledded singer slide into the hungry mouth of Audrey II. It all ends with Big Bird's "enjoy the movie!" being represented with Porky Pig in his "That's All Folks" iris, as the other Looney Tunes run by (with Roadrunner providing Telly's Harpo beeps).
I only made it as far as the musicals cast appearing (before "boom-chicka-boom") when it comes to the animation- actually... it wasn't so much animation as much as it was still-by-stills set up like a storyboard, with the occasional movement more limited than Hanna-Barbera (like one movement per sentence). To be not so hard on myself, that was one of my first fan-animations (I still do that sort of animation sometimes, but I add a lot more movements nowadays). That's one of the reasons I paused doing it. The other bigger reason is because I realized that it actually had a large chunk of TV, Broadway, internet sensations, singers and other entertaining mediums that the amount of motion pictures section was really small. And even though the usual greats were included, there were also a lot of really mediocre movies. So I had to pull the plug just so I could fully differentiate the movies from the miscellaneous... which made me think that I should also have separate animations for "Brief History of Television/Theatrical Shows" so it was deva ju all over again, only no animation was continued with movies or started with the others. Add on top of that other projects and personal affairs (school, college, family, etc.), it's been complicated.
And so, just like the thousands of other projects I have, it's been put into the "to be continued" category. But I've still been thinking and developing it through written documents (determining what/who appears in each section). But it wouldn't be until some time last year that I thought it best to just keep it simple, scrap the other versions & just do the movies version... with a twist. One of the other disadvantages is that there's only so many movies to cram into a 2 minute short, even with limiting myself and "this ain't big enough for the 2 of us" mentality. So another revision was made to make different variants of the short: one for each decade of movies. Seems like a good way to highlight everything with this short history lecture. But before any of that started, I thought I'd show one of the stills I made. You can sort of tell this was from my primitive age of drawing, as I was alright at drawing humans, but replicas of humans not so much. The sizes are off, some colors seem off, some of the people don't look right; yeah, I know I'm being pretty hard on myself, but as an artist, you have to be aware of when to see your flaws of anything you create. If any of you guys wanna see what the first attempt looked like (the whole 40 seconds of it), you can check it out on my Facebook .
Would you guys be interested in seeing this fanimation (that's a word, right) continue? If any of you have your own helpful insights, feel free to express anything.

Comment & enjoy!

A Brief History of Motion Pictures (c) Sesame Workshop
Movie characters represented in drawing (c) their respective movie companies

Description
Time for a Throwback Tuesday and a bit of some confessions. Not so much in "an old shame" sense but... I guess talking about an old trial-&-error. (also ties in with this year's Oscars announcements)
In the late-90s, Sesame Street made a couple of theatrical shorts for Loews Theater: Don't Forget to Watch the Movie , a song explaining theater policies, and A Brief History of Motion Pictures , which is self-explanatory of what happens there, both of with showcasing the good ol' fashioned Muppet insanity. I don't remember seeing either of these in theaters, but I have using that reliable YouTube. DFTWTM was online longer but all we had for ABHOMP were pixelated pictures on Muppet Wiki. Wouldn't be until around the time the Muppets' Green with Envy trailer came about did a physical video of ABHOMP pop up (not uploaded that day, but that's when I found it). Interesting vibes came about after a couple viewings. What was it? Ambitious inspiration, that's what! Before long, as YouTubers were making their own videos of the short with their own cast (as some YouTubers are prone to do), I began writing out lists, collecting reference images and drawing pictures for an ANIMATED version (since I didn't/still don't have a proper kind of video editing program), in one of my first projects utilizing Photoshop. Instead of using my Disney as Muppets cast, the proper step would be to use actual motion picture stars and characters. Here's how it first went: Alfred Hitchcock took Cookie's place. Grover & Freddie were John Wayne and Clint Eastwood squaring off in the High Noon town. Musicals onward was pretty much the same (sets, placement of characters and everything), the only difference is with each transition (color, widescreen & all 3 special effects), more and more movie characters would join in from a specific timeline (like the musicals would have 1920s-1940s, color = 1950s-1970s, widescreen = 1980s to present). The effects would have effects from every era, only a bit more specific (Indiana Jones bolder = practical effects, Jaws = featuring movies that have large amounts of ocean or water, Oz twister = non-practical effects). Then the twister ends up picking up the movie studio, dumps it on Justin Bieber's house (as he utters "Oh, mommy"), Hitchcock returns, loads Bieber's corpse on Rosebud and the sledded singer slide into the hungry mouth of Audrey II. It all ends with Big Bird's "enjoy the movie!" being represented with Porky Pig in his "That's All Folks" iris, as the other Looney Tunes run by (with Roadrunner providing Telly's Harpo beeps).
I only made it as far as the musicals cast appearing (before "boom-chicka-boom") when it comes to the animation- actually... it wasn't so much animation as much as it was still-by-stills set up like a storyboard, with the occasional movement more limited than Hanna-Barbera (like one movement per sentence). To be not so hard on myself, that was one of my first fan-animations (I still do that sort of animation sometimes, but I add a lot more movements nowadays). That's one of the reasons I paused doing it. The other bigger reason is because I realized that it actually had a large chunk of TV, Broadway, internet sensations, singers and other entertaining mediums that the amount of motion pictures section was really small. And even though the usual greats were included, there were also a lot of really mediocre movies. So I had to pull the plug just so I could fully differentiate the movies from the miscellaneous... which made me think that I should also have separate animations for "Brief History of Television/Theatrical Shows" so it was deva ju all over again, only no animation was continued with movies or started with the others. Add on top of that other projects and personal affairs (school, college, family, etc.), it's been complicated.
And so, just like the thousands of other projects I have, it's been put into the "to be continued" category. But I've still been thinking and developing it through written documents (determining what/who appears in each section). But it wouldn't be until some time last year that I thought it best to just keep it simple, scrap the other versions & just do the movies version... with a twist. One of the other disadvantages is that there's only so many movies to cram into a 2 minute short, even with limiting myself and "this ain't big enough for the 2 of us" mentality. So another revision was made to make different variants of the short: one for each decade of movies. Seems like a good way to highlight everything with this short history lecture. But before any of that started, I thought I'd show one of the stills I made. You can sort of tell this was from my primitive age of drawing, as I was alright at drawing humans, but replicas of humans not so much. The sizes are off, some colors seem off, some of the people don't look right; yeah, I know I'm being pretty hard on myself, but as an artist, you have to be aware of when to see your flaws of anything you create. If any of you guys wanna see what the first attempt looked like (the whole 40 seconds of it), you can check it out on my Facebook .
Would you guys be interested in seeing this fanimation (that's a word, right) continue? If any of you have your own helpful insights, feel free to express anything.

Comment & enjoy!

A Brief History of Motion Pictures (c) Sesame Workshop
Movie characters represented in drawing (c) their respective movie companies