work-in-progress Archives - Page 19 of 30

Crossing the Red Sea

Gettin’ pumped to conquer the Promised Land!

Every country that exists originated through violent conquest. The victims of these conquests were victors and conquerors earlier. Is violent conquest legitimate? If not, then no country or nation is legitimate. If nations are legitimate, then violent conquest must be also. I ask these questions as I animate the mythical Ancient Hebrews’ quest to conquer Canaan (which was already occupied). There’s just no way to make it look good by modern humanitarian values, and I wonder why that is.

Happy Heeb

This Hebrew is getting ready to walk right out of Egypt, bouncing along to a song that has beats every 19 frames (oy!). Here’s how he looked in an earlier scene.

Parted Sea Waves

You think you’re getting closer to the Promised Land, but you aren’t.

Moses parts the Red Sea

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.

Strange Waves

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.

Moses Goes Down

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!

Like this work? Donate here.