Nothing, Nil, Nada.

Nipping niblets! I'm giving away over $100 in my From A to Z Contest. Enter today!

I was going to talk about ninjas today, but NOTHING, NIL, and NADA¹ threatened me with a class-action lawsuit. Only, the words they used were not class-action lawsuit, but "death by Pokemon." And those might not even be the exact words — it's hard to catch everything when threats are passed along via the wind — but there was no mistaking their intent. Thus, ninjas are out.

Update: For the record, none of those secret ninja organizations are real. Really. (Please believe me.)

Anyway, I realize a ninjaless post is quite the letdown, so I'll try to make it up to you with this short video about ninja thumbtacks.² I created this over ten years ago, although I didn't get it online until this past February. For the purposes of this post, I'll call it Nate's Nawesome Nomputer Nanimation:

And if you're interested:

• More detailed information about how I made The Hunt
• A list of all the Easter eggs I hid in The Hunt

¹ The Nefarious Organization of Terribly Homicidal International Ninja Gangs, the Ninja Integration League, and the National Association of Deadly Assassins.
² Wait, did I say ninja? I meant "pseudo-samurai."

This post is part of the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge, hosted by Candace Ganger and seven others. Go check out the other participants!

The (Easter Egg) Hunt

On Monday, I shared my computer animation The Hunt, the culmination of hundreds of hours of anti-social behavior work during my senior year of college. (If you haven't seen it yet, go and watch it now. I'll wait.)

Many of you were quite impressed, and I don't blame you: I'm still impressed every time I see it. But I suspect many of you were so wrapped up in the plight of that poor sheet of paper that you missed out on some of the subtler aspects of the animation. By which I mean: the Easter eggs.

Yep, I inserted a bunch of little hidden touches throughout The Hunt. Some of these are noticeable if you look for them, but unfortunately others are obscured by the mediocre picture quality of the recording. Anyway, below is the list of Easter eggs, and I'll even throw in a few extra details that only I would know. Think of it as your own personal commentary track.¹

• I designed the font which appears on the first two sheets of paper that come out of the printer. It has only ever been used in this animation and this image.
• The kid in that photo on the wall is me at age four. I was cute back then.
• The gray book by the coffee mug is the user manual for Maya, the animation software I used to create the piece.
• I had to kick one of the thumbtacks off set for drinking too much.
• At the 1:11 mark, as the thumbtacks move past the alarm clock, the time changes from 8:42 to 8:43am. This is exactly one minute after the paper first emerges from the printer, and is significant because at the time I believed I was also born at 8:42am.²
• During the overhead view amidst the high-speed chase scene (from 1:18-1:20), the sheet music showing at the top of the screen is for the very bars of music being played.
• The A|W on the box, although it doesn't mimic the company's logo, is for Alias|Wavefront, the original makers of Maya.
• The envelope is addressed to Current Resident at 30 Paper Trail, Pushpin, OR.
• Not that it matters, but the segment revealing the paper clip catapults is my favorite in the entire animation.
• The books on the shelf include The Anatomy of A Thumbtack, The Philosophy of Confusion, David Copperfield (by What the Dickens), The Art of Forehead Mastication,³ Catch-22, and 101 Ways to Make Paper Airplanes. When the thumbtack knocks down the latter two, it is directly above the words "Catch" and "Paper."⁴
• The soda is "The Original SodaCola," a product of Deja Vudu Enterprises. "DejaVudu" was my AOL username back when people still had AOL usernames.
• The image on the computer screen is from a prototype for a game called Ooze, which I mocked up for some guys in the Games department of Sonalysts Studios.⁵
• There are nine more thumbtacks in the "The End" screen than chase the paper during the preceding animation.

In addition, I cut the credits down from five screens to one. Among what now lies on the digital cutting room floor:

• Images of the thumbtacks ogling the contents of The Anatomy of a Thumbtack and shooting x-acto knives at an apple using the paper clip catapults.
• Friends credited as Origami Crane, Thumbtacks #3 & 18, Mr. Pushpin, and stunt performers.
• Introducing Sheet of Paper as himself.
• Friends credited with roles such as boom mike operator, stapler trainer, lasagna chef, provider of Mr. Wilson's wardrobe, and of course: Key Grip.

Thank you for reading aloud this personal commentary track. In the Special Edition DVD and BluRay coming out later this year, this commentary will be narrated by Morgan Freeman, as stipulated by the Morgan Freeman Narration Act of 2005. Pre-order yours today!


¹ And when I say personal, I mean one you have to narrate it yourself.
² I remembered wrong. It was actually 8:41.
³ It was an inside joke at the time. I have no idea why.
⁴ Not that it matters, but that little tidbit is my favorite Easter egg in the entire animation.
⁵ The department specializes in naval-based games and military simulations. Needless to say, Ooze never made it past the prototype stage.

Before The Wheel

At this time 11 years ago, I was a ghost. An apparition. Friends would swear they'd seen me, perhaps at the dining hall or by the mail room, but always out of the corner of their eye, and they could never prove it. Late at night, they might swap stories about such sightings, about their brief glimpse of a spectre resembling someone they once knew.

It was my final semester of college, and I spent half my waking hours in the art building working on pieces for the art majors' senior show. The other half I was holed up in a computer lab, completing my other senior project: a 3 min 15 sec computer animation. With no time to spare for food or socializing, I lost 20 pounds and 30 friends.¹

Three minutes may not seem like much to you, but you've never been an animator.² For comparison, it took 8 people to complete Pixar's short Luxo Jr., which is 2 min 18 sec long and only contains 6 items on-screen (2 lamps, 2 balls, an electrical outlet, and the floor). Admittedly, Luxo was made 14 years earlier and is far superior, but I was doing everything myself, with 100+ 3D models, 80+ textures, 30+ lights, 4 cameras, and a total of 5,850 frames of animation.³

Back in 2000, it took 2-3 minutes to render a single frame. If I was lucky and no one else was using the computers, I could run 4 of them overnight and get about 800 frames rendered. The next morning I'd pick out all the mistakes (e.g. motion, lighting, timing, executive producer credit), then make adjustments and run the machines again that night.

Rinse, spit, repeat.

There are still plenty of mistakes in this. Close to fifty, at last count.⁴ For years, I told myself I'd go back and fix everything, but life and laziness always intervened. I finally stopped deluding myself a couple months ago — for one thing, I no longer have access to the software — and got a local video place to copy the animation from Beta tape⁷ to DVD.

The picture quality isn't great, but for the first time in 11 years, I have a digital copy. Thus, I've finally released it into the wild (a.k.a. the Tube of You). And since the Academy just awarded the Oscar for best animated short last night, I thought it fitting to share mine with you now.

Behold! The Hunt, the greatest computer animation ever made (by me):

Also, if you're interested, here's a list of all the Easter eggs I included in the animation.


¹ Neither of these is true.
² Or have you? If so, disregard that blanket statement. Instead, read this blanket statement: "I like blankets."
³ Okay, that's not entirely true. I didn't do everything. My friend Jared Castiglione was gracious enough to record two sound effects for me.
⁴ Don't try to count. Really.^5
5 By the way, when I tried to get a job in computer animation after college, everyone loved the video. Creative directors, Human Resources, graphic designers, even CEOs. Everyone, in fact, except the animators. All they saw were the mistakes.^6
6 Yet it was good enough to be shown at Temple University's NextFrame Film Festival. The site provides no proof of this, of course, since the 2000-2001 year is the only one without an archive page. Like I said, 11 years ago I was a ghost.
⁷ Yep, you read that right. Beta.