Saturday, June 6, 2009

Why? Because It's Nuclear

Here's another old, popular one we did for Ka-Blam!

After "Dr. Worm" they sent us another They Might Be Giants track, this a live version of they early cover "Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas)" which was released on the compilation "Severe Tire Damage".

The popularity of this video is completely attributable to the song. After "Hockey Monkey" and "Dr. Worm" our team was sort of coasting.

Again, directed by Jesse Gordon with animation direction by Maciek Albrecht. Todor Radosz did the animation.



Our idea centered around looking at the sun through a telescope. I know, I know, you can't do that. We knew it at the time and figured as long as everybody wore goggles while looking through the telescope, we'd be OK.

Surprisingly, Nickelodeon legal had nothing to say.

The only person who cared was the astronomer at Staten Island University Observatory who refused the use of their facility after finding out our plan. He was a nice guy, and I don't at all blame him.

After that we decided to build a set. Maciek took charge here, and did a pretty good job on limited resources.

Of course we had like $250 in budget for lighting. Scott Levy at Eastern Effects took pity on us and rented an amazing package which allowed us to properly light the stage.

Beyond that, what? The casting. The main kid was cast through Nickelodeon casting. I can never understand why doing something like that is so hard, casting through a network casting office. We're doing a segment for your network, what's the problem? There's always a problem. The rest of the kids were taken from the grade school at the end of my block on 8th Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn.

2 comments:

David B. Levy said...

In this case, "we did this," means, Ink Tank, right?

Just clarifying it apart from your current studio.

roconnor said...

Yes, this was an Ink Tank job. This posting is the third about a "Ka-Blam!" trilogy we did there.

The crew was pretty much the same on all of them, with some variation. Todor animated this, Tissa the other two. Maciek didn't work at all on Dr. Worm. Other than that, me, Jesse Gordon, Alex Reshanov, Matt Salata each worked on all three.