Tom Waits for No One

From this amazing film's YouTube description:

An animated film starring Tom Waits. Performed for us live (at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, 1978), and rotoscoped - a process that traces back the live action frame by frame and turns it into animation. The original live action was shot with 5 cameras - 2 high, 2 low and one hand held. The music from "The One That Got Away" blared in the background as Tom sang karaoke style different lyrics on each take. Two strippers, 6 takes and 13 hours of video footage were edited to make a 5 1/2 minute live action short which we turned into animation. A total of 5500 live action frames were hand traced, caricatured, re-drawn, hand inked and painted onto celluloid acitate cels.Produced by Lyon Lamb, directed by John Lamb, the film bore some cool new technology, talent and was created specifically for a video music market that didn't yet exist . But the buzz was out and we went on to create what arguably may be the first music video created for the new and upcoming MTV market. A series of unfortunate events prohibited the film from ever being released or sold commerciallly, consequently catapulting it into obscurity... until now,thanks You Tube! In 1979, an Academy Award was presented to Lyon Lamb for the technology used in this short.

Lots more info at the Tom Waits Library.

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Comments

[joschmoe]

ok, this is the best Friday post ever! (except for that cute baby pic I look forward to every week...)

[Cynthia Closkey]

What would you have given to have been on set for this shoot?

What I really want to know... An aside: TW is playing on the iPod right now. And the song happens to be "How's It Going to End?" Let me say now that I, for one, don't want to know how it's going to end.

Back to the point. What I want to know is how well did they capture his facial expressions with the rotoscoping? Some of the little flickers of smile and eyebrow raise and so on are awesome. I assume they are all based on real bits.

But still and all, I think I would rather have video.

This sure beats "Opposites Attract" though. And "Take On Me."

[Bill Ectric]

Top notch!