Wiz & Oz, the animation!

Here it is, the animation debut of Wiz & Oz!

My Hero Project

Here is the image I created for my Hero/ Villain project. The Characters are called Wiz and Oz, and are a team like Batman and Robin. The bunny is not the bad guy, which is a little confusing in the artwork, I'm told.

The Adventures of Wiz & Oz!

Here these two characters stand in my personal favorite buddy cop pose. The image is a little smaller here then I wanted but the idea is still conveyed.

The light and color's are bright to make him appealing to a young audience. I chose primary colors for Wiz to contrast with the villain my Partner Max designed. I colored Oz orange to contrast happily (not violently) with Wiz and  also to evoke the classic comic book character "The Thing", who Oz is partially inspired by.

The story is that the boy, Wiz (Short for Wilbur Isaac Zimmerman, poor devil) wants desperately to become a great stage magician. He can't afford a proper magicians kit, however, and buys an old dusty magic kit from a stranger who claims to have bought it from Harry Houdini himself. Later, when Wiz is in a Jam he finds out he can summon an 8 foot tall super rabbit named Osric. Together the two have a series of adventures guaranteed to be fun for the whole family! Or at least they would if they ever were continued beyond this project. But hey, who knows?

Here is the original sketch before I colored it. The too were based on other cartoon characters. Wiz is actually taken from Luigi of Mario Bros. Fame. The wardrobe was my design with my step-daughter Emily doing the initial rendering of it.

Oz was based on Genie from Disney's Aladdin. He has the same light-bulb torso. I liked the angles they gave to Genie's cranium, and it was a way to make the hero bunny have a square head. The round curves still make him a friendly character though.  Having him rise from the hat also lends to that Genie effect. If I had it to do over again I'd have Oz springing from the hat instead of appearing from the smoke.

Here is an early draft of the character. Emily actually drew Wiz's body and Oz's face here. I re-drew the face on Wiz, although I wish I hadn't. I also drew the "Where's Waldo version in the upper corner. I really liked Ozzie's face here, but I felt he needed to be a little more square in shape. It doesn't quite work as a super-hero, but it's a perfect cartoon bunny though.

This is the finished version of Wiz's face. He needed to be younger thean he was in the initial sketches, so I made his nose and chin triangular to make him look more like a teen. Even his hair forms a triangle. Typically this is a look for a villain, but I think he comes off as a character who has to grow into being a hero. This look is very similar to Ash from Pokemon.  I later changed the face in the upper sketch to practice drawing it. I wish I'd kept the original for the record.

Here's a small sketch of Oz lifting a bus.I wanted to show how strong he is (Like a Hercules or Captain Marvel character), but this ended up looking like he was going to throw the bus instead of save it. I chose this pose to show the weight of the bus pushing down on his ears, which I hope makes him a different type of super-hero character.

So that's the genesis of a comic book hero.  I had a great time drawing and designing them, and I hope to re-visit these two when I have more time to dedicate to the project.

2nd Video Joke

And here is the second! Enjoy!

Video Jokes

Here is the first video joke my group produced.

Roy Lichtenstein is a dirty rat!

In a pretty interesting twist this week,w e were assigned the task of re-imaging (Or re-imagining) a visual we had worked with before. We needed to show or revision next to the original and then explain ehy we chose them and what was at work there.  So here  they are. Roy Lichtenstein's original is on the left.

Now, they seem pretty similar side by side like that. I zoomed in on her face becasue there seems to be so much guilt on her face. I really wanted to focus on that. To discuss the question why the artist framed the image the way he did we need some quick historical context.

Roy L was a very successful painter in his own right, but the image above directly lifted  by him from a comic book by Tony Abruzzo called "Young Romance". He projected a blown up version of the panel onto a canvas and painted it. Now, Lichtenstein selected the single image from  god knows how many, but the painting itself was a straight replication.

The visual intensity of the image is incredibly powerful. The emotion is boiling over. The lines on the man's flesh show her grip to be so tight it's almost smothering him. In my zoom in, I focused on the softer curves in that portion of the image to make the intensity less immediate and put the attention on the rounded tears in her eyes.

I hate to criticize a buck-eye made good like Roy Lichtenstein, but what he was able to accomplish using "inspiration" from others has always been somewhat uncomfortable to me. In fact, to read an article written by Don Marksten on Roy Lichtenstein's methods and his personal issues with a cartoonist named Irving Novick, click here.

Songs

Some songs my classmates composed, and my analysis, such as it is.

Dan Wainio and my post

Joshua Strizak and my post

Alex Wiseman and my post

Soundscapes

Sorry for the delay, but as always, I'm a pair of brown shoes (PC user) in a Tuxedo (Mac) world.

Here are my musings on my classmates soundscape projects:


Megan Scalf  and  my post

Ian Reynolds and my post

Erin Riordan and my post

Cover Song Battle Royale

“This old world is rough, and it’s just getting rougher.”

That little sample of lyrical vim is from the Song “Cover Me” by Mr. Bruce Springsteen, and it introduces the notion I’m exploring today: The cover song. This is a topic very dear to me since some of my oldest friends have spent years in cover bands. Is this a worthwhile endeavor? Is it just for fun? Is it a colossal waste of time?

Well, probably somewhere in between.

There are thousands of cover songs out there. I don’t know if I could even pick my favorite cover of all time. Quite often it’s a cover of a song I didn’t like as well originally, like “Personal Jesus” by Johnny Cash (which I much prefer to Depeche Mode’s electronic opus) or a song where I heard the cover before ever knowing the original existed, like the Grass roots’ “Let’s Live For Today” (which is much more famous than the obscure original “Piagni Con Me” by the Rokes).  But I did select one song to look at, or two if you believe the separate versions constitute two songs .

“Mad World” by Tears for Fears.

Tears For fears did this song in their debut album The Hurting” in 1982 before finding international success (click on the title above to listen).  Essentially a two man act, it was written by Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith. It is a song very much in the mold of what was popular in England at the time. It has a hint of electronica,  dreary incomprehensible lyrics, and beat that you can dance to. I first heard the song in 1992 on their compilation disc “Tears Roll Down” which was ironically a second version of the song by the band, adding more techno elements to make it sound more like the music of that day. It was probably 1999 before I heard their original take, which is much softer and more heartfelt in my mind. It’s the 1982 version listed above

"Mad World" by Gary Jules. 

Like many fans of his version, I first heard it in the movie “Donnie Darko” and the song lingered in my memory far longer than the film.  It’s haunting vocal and dreamy piano were so moving hearing the song was a transforming experience for me. That’s a very grandiose statement, but warranted in this case.

The two songs are very dissimilar, but not completely different. 

The lyrics of the two versions completely identical.  They use the same exact wording, and even sing them in the same pattern (Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, verse, etc. ect.)

The melody is also identical. It is almost as if the cover artist was playing the sheet music to the original.

The rhythm is completely different. The Tears For Fears is a dance song with up-tempo rhythm that serves in contrast to its lyrical darkness. The Gary Jules version is down-tempo, possessing affinity with its bleak verbiage 

The timbre is also completely different.  The two versions differ in their aural tone greatly. The Tears for Fears version uses studio techniques such as heavy doses of reverb and echo, and what is undoubtedly a drum machine.  It’s almost as if the artists were embarrassed by the lovely melody they created and had to drown it in a backlash of discordant layers. This causes a sort of musical dissidence that the song becomes bogged down by. The Gary Jules version, in contrast is straightforward in its engineering and production, using the sounds of a piano in place of synthesizers, and strings in place of guitars to create a harmony between the beautiful orchestration and the likewise beautiful melody.

The two versions contrast each other in their approach and production methods. The first relies too much on the electronic technology that was novel at the time of the recording. The second realizes it is a beautiful and haunting melody and uses its studio wizardry very subtly. It has a dreamy effect, where the Tears For Fears version is more a bad trip.

But the British duo really did write a beautiful song. I’ve head them perform it live and they really do it justice now.  And it’s their version, not one overly reminiscent of the popular cover song.  I’ve heard Jules perform it too, and he does a nice job, but it isn’t as powerful as his recorded version. I think he caught lightening in a bottle in the studio that day and he created a very rare creature indeed: A cover better than the original, and that ain't bad.