How to fail completely...
or, how we made "Lyman."

When my good friend and frequent collaborator, V. Lyman, approached me a year and a half ago about making a concert film, the first thing I said to him was "How?"

"You're a cartoon rabbit," I said. "And besides, you don't even make music."

"I actually just started DJing," he told me, straight-faced.

This was very him. I started recording.

It turned out he'd opened for a local band on New Year's, and it had gone "really pretty chill." Plus, (perhaps at my recommendation?) he'd finally seen Stop Making Sense. And so he proclaimed, "I want to do that."

Well, I was in my second year at art school, and I needed a Junior Project. "Send me the mix," I said.

I'm no DJ, but neither was Lyman at this point, and you could tell. Plus, the quality of the sound file he'd sent me was just fried. But... you know, he'd curated a vibe. It was sort of, vaguely Y-2K, which annoyed me at first, but as I sat, listening, in the dark of my studio, I found myself grinning.

Maybe, to get people to dance, you didn't need to be great––you just needed to start. Maybe my rabbit friend was onto something. It was a cool, weird idea.

I had to think about it. First, we'd have to re-record the set, obviously. The bootleg was crunched to the point where it was unusable––it made my headphones pop like bubble wrap. I couldn't imagine what sort of fantastically retro device it had originally been captured on. Then, we'd need the visuals, which I was pretty sure we could cobble together in much the same way as Lyman wildly threw together tracks. But I was beating around the bush. New Year's 2024 had come and gone. The project required filming a cartoon rabbit performing a show that had already happened. I told Lyman all of this.

"This was a stupid idea," I said.

"Hey!" Said Lyman.

"Sorry," I'd forgotten whose project it was, because it had already become something I knew I had to make exist. Nobody was doing stuff like this.

Sound

Lyman's job, starting out, was to make any sort of progress with the DJ setup and ideally source some visual inspiration for us to work with. Mostly this meant hanging out in the shipping container, passing around a carrot with his friends (more on that later). Man, this project got really weird. I honestly don't really know how exactly Lyman spent his work hours those first few months. I only saw his workflow a few times at that point, since I was sequestered away in my own studio, but I know it involved a free trial of Serato, a version of Audacity that looked like it was designed for Windows XP, and an Ableton crack he signed up for with my school email, which I mostly only know about because of the 500 predatory mailing lists I've since had to unsubscribe from. Lyman has had a very different online journey from others in his profession. Sometimes I forget he's also Gen Z, and not simultaneously 80 years old, and a baby. I'll get back to Lyman later.

Design

My first job was to design a representation of Lyman for 3D space. Was I jealous that Lyman got to hang out while I toiled away animating? Yes. etc.

3D

It was time for 3D. This was all the 3D animated work I'd done up until this point, with character modeling crucially missing from my reel.

I knew I wouldn't be able to make something that looked good by modern standards, so I tried to embrace my limitation, turning to Zelda for inspiration.

Old Zelda... not overtly beautiful.

To those in the know, Nintendo's Spaceworld 2000 demo represents the best shitty GameCube graphics, ever. This was where I set the bar for my 3D ability after two semesters. I'd use simple, strong shapes, lighting, and color, to make the best looking Lyman I could.