Animator. Director. Artist. Scapegoat.
There are better ways to encode animated gifs, but I don’t have access to them right now. This was exported from Macromedia Flash 8 (2005), so it’s dithered. If anyone knows of a safe, modern online .mov-to-.gif converter that uses a non-dithering encoder, or same to download for my antique (OS 10.6) Mac, let me know.
Water, like fire, is basically impossible for me to animate correctly, so I try to come up with extremely stylized ways to evoke it. Right now I’m designing water-walls for the Parting of the Red Sea. Not sure how it’s gonna work out, but here are a couple tests as I find my way.
These little animated gifs have dithered colors which give them blue and purple flickers absent in the original animation.
Here is Exodus 3-7, too much to quote here. Featuring the Burning Bush, Moses, Hebrew slaves, strange gods (actually goddesses), Aharon, Pharaoh, a staff turning into a snake, and sing-along phonetic hieroglyphs.
The introduction to this scene is “God Calls Moses to Mt. Horeb”.
Music: Go Down Moses
Arranged and performed by Louis Armstrong (with Sy Oliver’s Orchestra, 1958)
Unlike most other Seder-Masochism scenes I’ve posted, this one isn’t primarily parody; the overall message is similar to that of the song. I still argue it’s Fair Use, and transformative. Parody isn’t the only way to transform (nor is transformation the only criterion for Fair Use). “Go Down Moses” itself was transformative without being parody: it made Exodus into a story of American slavery. Creativity is complicated and shouldn’t be dictated by lawyers. LET MY PEOPLE GO!
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Here they are, in order, in time for Passover: all Ten Plagues I animated for Seder-Masochism, my feature-film-in-progress. Yes, they will be joined together by a unifying narrative device in the final film, but for now they exist as separate clips. Click on each one for more information and higher resolution. Like this work? Donate here.
“4 Else, if thou refuse to let my people go, behold, to morrow will I bring the locusts into thy coast:
“5 And they shall cover the face of the earth, that one cannot be able to see the earth: and they shall eat the residue of that which is escaped, which remaineth unto you from the hail, and shall eat every tree which groweth for you out of the field:” –Exodus 10, KJV
Wrapping up here with the final stanzas of Oingo Boingo’s 1982 “Insects,” which I also used in “Lice” and “Flies.” Lyrics:
Insects make me scream and shout!
They don’t know what life’s about
They don’t have blood
They’ve got too many legs
They don’t have brains in their heads
They know they’ll rule the world someday
They bite and sting me anyway
They bite and sting and SUCK
They bite and sting and SUCK SUCK SUCK
They bite and sting and SUCK SUCK SUCK
Dance (Dance)
Those insects make me –
