A rough frame from my new side project – Doris and Mary-Anne are Breaking Out of Prison.  Gonna post more of these as I start in on the first chunk of episodes.  I like calling this a side project because it makes me feel like I’m in a band.

I’m building a head library for a web series or, as the British say a ‘nettie show’, that I’m making.  The stuff I tend to write is pretty dialogue heavy, so I create a group of mouths and expressions (or a library) that I can reuse to save myself some time.  I have three heads I’m creating for this.  A three-quarter head:

And then another, that’s almost in profile:

And finally, a front-facing head – which I’ll mostly use as an in-between for head turns.  See if you can pick it out:

I don’t spend as much time on the front-facing head.  In my experience, characters rarely look directly into the camera.  Usually you’re staging shots at an angle that provides depth and clarity as you cut back and forth between subjects.

I put everything on layers so that I can animate each part of her face.  Even the hair is on a layer – just in case I want to do a weird hair gag without having to redraw everything:

Tell me something weird to put on her head – I’ll do it, man.

The day has finally arrived!  Here’s my music video for the Max Levine Ensemble’s “Ghost Song”!  Just in time for Halloween!  From the album “Mr. Gikokovich 2000-2005: A Retrospective”.  Available for download HERE.

The video is loosely based on a comic David (aka Spoonboy) drew for the original release of “Ghost Song” on the TMLE split with Spirit Animals.

I’m going to try and give a little backstory here, and forgive me if I’m incorrect on everything – I have horrible memory.  I first heard the Max Levine Ensemble around 1999/2000.  I was in high school back in Maryland, and had just recently formed a ska band with my buddies called the Konami Code.  Our guitarist, Darrell, told me that some other kids in the DC scene had started a band, and he played me an mp3 of “Spoonboy’s Revenge” on his computer.  And I remember thinking something like: “Oh this is good.  Like this is actually good.  And they’re a year younger than us?  Wow.”

The Konami Code broke up around 2003, but the Max Levine Ensemble kept going.  And ever since hearing them through those shitty PC speakers, they’ve continued to blow me away with their awesome, ever evolving music, their ability to be sharply political but maintain a sense of humor, and their lyrics.  It’s always seemed like Spoonboy has had the ability to effortlessly convey complex relationships and ideas with a couple of sentences, and then make them rhyme.  Which is always cool.

What I’m saying is, I’ve been a fan of them for years and I’m super glad to have been able to collaborate with them on this music video.  I hope you like it and I hope you check out the Max Levine Ensemble here: http://tmle.terrorware.com

Or was the song I first heard “Curly Brown Hair Love Affair”.  I can’t remember.