IN
Lord of the Ringtones is a critical insight into post-modern mind-control consumerism, exploring the issue of culture-collision between the traditional/classical arts and modern communications technology. Okay, seriously, it's about people with cellphones at a Beethoven concert. You'll find out what it's really all about when I upload the entire movie... someday...
From left to right: The Man, Mulletboy, The Woman.
The Maestro, Helmut Hæffelschöffen.
The Conflict. (Hence the pun title.)Lord of the Ringtones has its conceptual origins in early-mid 2002, when I was posting a tongue-on-cheek rant about "technology these days" on a web-forum. But then I didn't post it, because a little voice in the back of my mind squealed "Hey, that's comedy gold! Don't use it up on some internet forum! It would make a great gag for a film."
So I got the idea of getting together a bunch of people to do this one-gag comedy, but the difficulty of finding actors led me to thinking "Well, who needs actors anyway. I can draw!" So Mulletboy - my default character for starring in animations - became the star of this 6 and a half minute Mr Bean-ish comedy. Due to the importance of facial expressions in this movie, I gave Mulletboy two things that he has thus far managed to survive without: Visible eyes. This makes him more human, for better or for worse.An advantage with making this an animation as opposed to a "live action flick" was that I could add all sorts of cartoonish effects that would be extremely tricky to do in real life. So I added a surprise ending, instead of the LAME ending that I would otherwise had concluded with. Muahahah!
This was my first proper fully animated film, and an experiment with that medium. Now that I know how easy it is, I hope it will be the first of many animated TMST films!
More Mulletboy animations can be found here. (They all predate the Mulletboy movie, so far.)
Duration: 6.5 minutes
Total number of frames: 1325
Animation method: Animagic GIF animator (Ha!)
Production period: About a month or two, around August-September 2002
Awards: The UCSA's Ed Wood Student Video Animation Trophy (and 2 tickets to the premiere screening of Lord of the Rings 2: Two Towers)!
