Category: Animation

The Seventh Plague: Hail (rough) from Nina Paley on Vimeo.

“23 And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven: and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground; and the Lord rained hail upon the land of Egypt.
“24 So there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation.
“25 And the hail smote throughout all the land of Egypt all that was in the field, both man and beast; and the hail smote every herb of the field, and brake every tree of the field.
“26 Only in the land of Goshen, where the children of Israel were, was there no hail. –Exodus 9

Music: Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here by Nat Shilkret, which you can download for free here.

This has many little hailstones and cloud spirals and fiddly little things that get out of alignment easily and slow down Flash with their numerousity*. It’s under 30 seconds. It’s not perfect but I’m tired so I’m just putting it online now so I can move on. I may go back and fix some things before I put it in the final movie.

*I just made up the word “numerousity”. I prefer it to the more dictionarily** acceptable word “volume” because it’s more specific, and I prefer it to “numerousness” because it feels less awkward, in spite of not actually being a word. Update: it is a word, I was just misspelling it! Thanks commenter Joe.

** I just made up “dictionarily” too.

Egyptians running from a plague. Finally got a song with beats every 12 frames, which makes the easiest and most versatile cycles. This animated GIF is only 12 frames long!

This one’s only 10 seconds long! Shortest plague ever.

“10 And they took ashes of the furnace, and stood before Pharaoh; and Moses sprinkled it up toward heaven; and it became a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast.

11 And the magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils; for the boil was upon the magicians, and upon all the Egyptians.” –Exodus 9, King James Version

Music by the Beatles.

Shofar, sho good:

“21 Else, if thou wilt not let my people go, behold, I will send swarms of flies upon thee, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thy houses: and the houses of the Egyptians shall be full of swarms of flies, and also the ground whereon they are.” –Exodus 8, King James Version

Like Lice before it (and Locusts to follow) this Plague has Oingo Boingo’s “Insects” (1982) as a soundtrack. Lyrics:
Flying insects everywhere!
Flying insects buzzing, buzzing, buzzing through the air
Just like little diamonds in the sky
Insects buzzing in my eye!
Buzzing insects make me want to dance!
(Dance, dance, etc.)

This is still rough. Things will change before it goes into the final Seder-Masochism movie, not least by the addition of sound effects. Notice Aharon is in this scene, blowing a shofar with Moses. I might retroactively stick him in a few other scenes too, since he seems OK.