When Digital Whales decided to start their own podcast (the "Brain Circus"), they came to me for help with digital assets for the show. They needed intros for each segment and one for the show itself. There was no budget for material, so everything I used was either from the public domain, footage from my personal library or material I created specifically for the project.

 

The show's main intro features some great footage of a brain transplant and a horrific monster beast from . I added several circus elements like weird clowns, a colorful circus tent, snippets of acts, etc, and made a datamoshed version of the Brain Circus logo to finish the piece.

As they're a band, and content producers, each week Digital Whales will spend some time reviewing music, books and films, as well as covering news and events from the entertainment industry. The intro for this segment is a short, guttural animation comprised of video game controllers, TV towers and transmitters, and a giant, static-y TV that launches droves of VHS tapes into the air like an exploding spider egg sac. The images used were all taken from Wikimedia Commons and animated in Sony Vegas.

The intro I made for the "Weakly Contest" took longer than any of the other videos. The footage was easy enough to find; most of the first game shows produced fall into the public domain. What took forever was moshing everything together. The first step was converting the myriad file types into uniformly sized AVI's. Then, I had to cut everything up and pull the pieces I wanted to mosh into AVIdemux. It's very buggy (partly because you're making it do something that isn't meant to be done with video files) and it would constantly crash. As a workaround, I would have to mosh a few seconds at a time, render them out, join the moshed footage with my unmoshed footage and run it all back trough AVIdemux until I had long enough moshes. I'd really like to make one that melts into complete oblivion, but I doubt I'll be able to keep it stable long enough.

As a bonus, my longest datamosh on record is at the bottom of this page.

Their last segment is called "Hero of the Weak", a short profile of an interesting, heroic person from the news that week. I hand drew this amazing artwork, scanned it and erased one item at a time in Photoshop, saving each new iteration. Then, starting with the empty sheet, I put each image in sequence, in time with the music (I had already figured out how many images I would need based on the guitar riff). It's a simple process, but it would be very time-consuming to sync something longer, like a full-length song.