Feed Us A Live Insect

We must be famous, look at Mary's hair

Ah ha, I can finally write another entry 'cause I'm finished working on my latest piece of animation. This is work I do for money, see, not Monsieur Gustave-type stuff. My client wanted something that looked like a clip from a Cartoon Network-type show...I dunno if it actually does, but I went for a bastard-cousin-of-the-Powerpuff-Girls look, you know, kids with giant heads and headlamp eyes. It's got a hardboiled detective theme, see, except the detective is an eight-year-old girl whose office is in a treehouse and who slaps the bajeezus out of another kid, and it's pretty special.

But anyway--what I really want to write about this time is the amazing new music video that we just finished shooting this past weekend. It's for "We Fell Dead," and while I don't want to give away everything I will say that it's going to be in black and white and have a psuedo-fascist theme to it. And we don't exactly play the oppressed peons, if you know what I mean. So now I'd like to offer a little photo gallery of pictures from the set, to whet yer appetite (if it is whettable):



So here we are. The idea, see, is that there's an election going on--The Monolators versus the Anti-Monolators. This is us during the "debate" sequence, where we deliver our message via song. Look at Mary's hair. Just look at it.




More of Mary's hair.




Arright, the guy in the red shirt is the video's director, Locke Webster. I wish there was a bigger picture of him because he was really the one who pulled all of this together. Many, many thanks to you, Locke!





Okay, here I am looking dictatorial, as best I can, which probably wasn't too convincing. The guy with the camera is named Joe Fitz and he was amazing! Extremely nice guy, and he made a little light shade for his camera's on-board playback monitor out of a flattened cardboard Heinecken case. I was impressed! Plus (I hope he doesn't mind me saying this) we were shooting this one scene where we were driving around with both of us hanging halfway out of Locke's car windows when a guy on a motorcycle pulled up alongside us and grabbed Joe's ass. There was a second biker too, he pulled up and said "he grabbed his ass, ha ha ha!" It sounds funny but kind of wasn't. I dunno.





This is John Andrews, he played my Anti-Monolator political rival. He lost. Good actor, though! Acting is hard and I'm not all that good at it. I think the pinnacle of my own acting career was appearing at age 13 in my middle school's production of "Annie." It's all been downhill from there.

There are some other folks who didn't get their picture taken: Tiberius Nour, our producer, Connor Twigg, our PA, and Max Newman, our astonishing costumer. There are more pictures coming...I have to get this posted now or I never will finish it...

-Eli

posted by Eli Monolator @ 11:09 PM 0 comments

Especially the part with the squirrel...

I wasn't sure if I should write about this because we generally try to keep things involving our son, Ivan, seperate from the band...but it had a pretty serious impact on us, so I'll make an exception this time.

Sometime last weekend Ivan picked up a rotavirus, which is basically a very nasty kind of stomach flu. I'll spare the details, because they're pretty unpleasant (fountains of vomit, anyone?), but the upshot was that he spent four days at Huntington Memorial Hospital hooked up to an I.V.. He's fine now--or, at least, he's more or less back to his normal self, except that he can't have any dairy for the next week (a major point of contention, if you ask him). We took turns spending the night with him at the hospital, during which time he was so uncomfortable that he was unable to sleep much--so most of that week is kind of a blur, because we didn't sleep much either. Poor kid.

I gotta say, though--if you're gonna be sick, Huntington is probably one of the better places to do it. It was like staying in a hotel...a hotel with really bad food, and people losing control of their bodily functions in the lobby. Apart from that, it was really plush! Oh, and we watched about 150 continuous hours of cartoons, 'cause when your kid is sick in the hospital you let him do pretty much whatever will take his mind off of things, and Ivan wanted to watch cartoons. Fair enough, but most of the cartoons were just...oh, just godawful. Okay, okay, I'll admit it...Spongebob Squarepants, which I'd never seen before, that was pretty good. Especially the part with the squirrel. And I kind of liked the show where the kid has the fairy godparents, that wasn't bad. But the rest? Feh! Dora the Explorer? Dora can go explore the dark end of a tar pit for all I care. And it was charming to see that kids' commericals are as horrendous as ever, the worst by far being the ones for "Bratz," which are these unattractive plastic hydrocephalic freak dolls. Apparently these appeal to 11-year old girls...the trashy, promiscuous ones, I gather, judging from the commercials. Belching played a large part in these ads--America, these are your daughters!


Bratz pez.

posted by Eli Monolator @ 2:02 PM 0 comments