Toad Hall: August 2010

beginning with a 2am phone call which lead to a 2:15am freezing conversation atop our apartment roof on 94th street in new york we've been plotting and scheming and sketching and twirling our hair erratically leading to what would eventually become this video. Our first idea for the thing involved a centralized stop motion figure which was supposed to be duplicated and animated to perform a sort of experimental dance segment amdist an alienish space station. From March until early April we storyboarded each shot for this idea to the exact frame and picture count required. We created concept art, mock ups and a fully functional central character. Three days from our shooting date we arrived to the studio to proceed with test shots and found that the spray paint we chose to cover our wonderful model in, munched straight through the armature wire, rendering him a stump.

tripp stamped on his hat a couple of times and we left the studio fuming about the aspect of rebuilding the thing. the next morning Tripp moped to Fido for a cup of coffee with his sketchbook and began doodling about with what could be done to fix the situation. four pages of scribbled nonsense later, a new idea was drawn out - we chucked out our previous plan and went with a new one that felt much more lightweight and exciting in a childish sort of way. we described the idea in one phone call to our friend and lead singer of the band as a hippy's Mr. Toad's wild ride, a kitsch confetti explosion of stop motion, classical, and motion designed animation scenes all sewn together into one long tunnel walt disney world dark ride. Tiger said he'd love whatever we made so we began shooting two weeks later.

returning to old sketchbooks from the days of new york and savannah and Tripp's childhood drawings, we began to gather as many ideas as we could muster to cram into 3 minutes 42 seconds. the original list of proposed shots spans six pages front and back. out of all of them probably only 15% made it completely into the video, most either got changed, 86ed, or couldn't be read from their original illegibly scrawled conception. because our studio was situated comfortably alongside the cumberland river it became annihilated by May 1st in the floods of Nashville. we managed to get most of the expensive stuff out but were left with nowhere to begin shooting.......until we hauled the rest of our junk to the basement of Tripp's father's house in the suburbs. From May to June we constructed, shot, animated, scouted, acted, casted, choreographed, painted, and designed all that would appear in the video.....all within Tripp's dad's basement. It became quite humbling....

The entire project was edited solely in After Effects CS5 and Final Cut Pro. Each scene was handled separately and then later carefully "sewn" together to form one seamless shot. Here are some stats for the finished video:

15,033 pictures taken
121 individual after effects save files
119 hours render time for Master file
669 layers created in the first comp of the finale in AE
All together equaling 511 gb of space total

This video has set a few records for us and we've learned an unfathomable amount while working on it. The ending scene turned out to be so confusing it required a few math equations to structure correctly. We are both very excited about how it all came together and look forward to showing it to all the people who helped us put it together. We will be screening the video in full quality this MONDAY NIGHT at 7pm in the projection room of our friend Reece Tucker's basement In Brentwood. The facebook event page can be found HERE or call Tripp at 646-457-9844 for directions/info. Hope to see you there!

SCREENING

COMPLETION