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 to me, "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 guessed 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. I thought, nobody's doing anything 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 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 Gen Z, like me, and not simultaneously 80 years old, and a baby. I'll get back to Lyman later.
Design
My first order of business was to design a representation of Lyman for 3D space. At this point, I was still coming down off a particularly troublesome semester where I'd pushed four 2D animated shorts through to completion, and basically never wanted to animate traditionally again. This had been a largely unhappy process, and I felt ready to leave the program... or try one last, left field project, before finding another way to contribute to society, like making comics. 3D looked like a shortcut, a feasible way to end up with an animated project more than a minute long, that didn't take a year to create. I'd try it.
Was I jealous that Lyman got to hang out while I toiled away designing him? Yeah, a little. But this was the last time I'd have to do so, and I was still trying something new. So it was kind of exciting.
I started by observing Lyman, and how he held himself...
(Note the sag and bad posture)
...and broke him down into parts I could visualize in 3D space.
These are some 2D animated explorations of how he's shaped.
This is the kind of drawing for animation you practice ad nauseam at art school, apparently. I got assigned model construction work like this several times, but after taking the process seriously once, I became pretty bad about skipping class to, instead, work on this project.
This is when I first noticed the ever-growing gulf between myself and the real animators, real pursuers of craft, who were willing to keep showing up long after I'd gotten bored, and left the building. It's a consistent point of defensiveness, as well as pride, for me, he who will not be pigeonholed. I'm not doing what anybody else is doing, I thought.
(More work from my frequently skipped but supremely well taught Drawing For Animation course is archived here. Wallace Keller always encouraged me, even when my work sucked. I truly didn't deserve him.)
Real Life
Okay, so, Lyman and I managed to sit still long enough to get his look down. We still genuinely didn't know how we were going to get him onstage in San Francisco.
In addition to Drawing For Animation, I was also taking a 3D Animation 2 class in which I'd just started all my work over because my modeled sets looked so bad. We were significantly into the semester at this point.
I was behind, and so I went to see Los Pirañas, a psychedelic, Colombian party music outfit, play at the Rickshaw Stop, to get out of my head. I went with the other members of the band I was in, a director friend, and our friend who worked at a dispensary. I believe I ingested a mixture of alcohol, edibles, and magic mushrooms. The lights looked really great.
Look up pictures of the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco (or go yourself). This was my first time inside, and the setup that night was basically three walls of a big box illuminated by glowing, undulating projections. I could trace the technique we went with for the Lyman project back to the aesthetics of, say, Richie's Reality (led by Anders Zhang, who's always influencing me) or even the ancient, projected Magic Lantern shows we had to read about in Animation History, but it was ultimately high thoughts that would bring a cartoon rabbit DJ to San Francisco (sounds about right).
The idea I had was this: as the audience, your forced perspective could make a projection look like it was happening in physical space. At the same time, when a projector projects negative, black space, it just looks like nothing. So, if you're in the dark, and a character's projected at the right size and distance in front of you, he'll look real-ish. Maybe. In theory.
"Help us figure out how to do this," I said to Joaco and Efrem, who were at the Pirañas show.
"OK," they said.
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.
Visualizers
For his part, Lyman also came back from his vision quest with a lot of visual inspiration.
Bla bla, all that was left was to film. I went to Colombia for the summer and missed Los Pirañas and Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
Filming
Lyman test number one
Ghosty tests of the first shot
Geneva figuring out the first clay prosthetic
Layers shooting the first scene
Real Life (again)
The documentary ends up being super hard and looking terrible, and we keep reshooting the set, with less and less people showing up each time. Pretty real stress on personal relationships at this time. Possible resentment towards Lyman, who had moved on to doper DJing opportunities. I was like, dude, this sucks, and I dropped animation a couple weeks before we learned CCA was closing.
Um, then I went back for Junior Project 2. I tried just making something simple and easy so I could finish something, since, you know, I'd wasted a year. I couldn't... relationship may have withered... at least I could quit the project I quit the project for, and finish the first one I'd been avoiding. Said no to stuff and felt pretty low again for a while. Cut half the first shot (10 seconds). Filled the crowd with myself. Went on the radio with Lyman a couple times. We missed the showcase to interview a musical hero of mine. Ended relationship. Failed completely. Kept going. Gave up. Never again. Working on a comic now.
Junior review, feeling pretty bad. Yeap
Keep going...
Lyman doc
New Year's Eve Pre Show
Drawing for Animation
Rabbit Radio: Lyman – New Year's 2024