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Ten years ago I began a series of Throwback Thursday posts in this blog about an animation series I attempted back in the 1990s called The Unicorn With An Attitude. I did the posts after I uploaded each episode on to YouTube. I kept at it for a year until I reached the last episode I did for that series. I’m only mentioning it again because the first episode in that series was a parody of the O.J. Simpson murder trial and Simpson has died today from cancer at the age of 76.
Way back in the 1990s I had this idea of trying to make it as a computer animator. The World Wide Web was in its infancy, there were a bunch of BBS boards that were run by hobbyists plus there were three major subscription services–CompuServe, America On Line (which was later shortened to AOL), and Prodigy. Social media as we know it today just didn’t exist. It was a time when people experimented with being creative online and trying to create all kinds of interesting content. Granted not everything worked out or was even very good but it still counted for something that people were being experimental and that was what made that period so exciting.
I decided to try an animated series of my own. It was called The Unicorn With An Attitude and it was a satiric series. The animation was crude by today’s standards and it was made on a shoestring budget using whatever hardware and software I could afford. The first episode of my series was a parody of the intense media scrutiny surrounding the murder trial of O.J. Simpson. To honor the occasion of Simpson’s death today, here is that animation where I parodied his trial all those years ago.
By the way you can read about the entries about the making of each episode in the series by searching on The Unicorn With An Attitude tag. You can also view my entire series at the YouTube playlist below. And, as for O.J. Simpson, R.I.P. (Rot Into Pieces)
This week Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has totally destroyed his own career by claiming that African Americans were part of a hate group and white people should “get the hell away from them.” That remark has prompted a lot of newspapers across the US to drop that strip.
I am not surprised that Scott Adams is a dickhead. Even though, on the surface, his Dilbert comic strip seems to support white collar workers who are at the mercy of their corporate bosses, in his private life he has favored the same corporate downsizing that his comic strip has lampooned. This was why, back in the 1990s, when I was trying to make it as a web animator with my The Unicorn With An Attitude series, I made an episode that lampooned Dilbert.
You can read more about the making of this particular animation right here. You can watch the playlist of the entire series below.
In the years since I did my Dilbert parody Scott Adams has proven himself to be a total asshole. He has created his own blog where his true colors really came out. He has compared women wanting equal pay for equal work to children demanding to eat candy for dinner. He has come out as a Donald Trump supporter. He also claimed that unvaccinated people came out the best when it came to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
But it’s his statement about white people should stay away from black people that has proven to be his undoing. I’m glad that he has lost his career with so many newspapers canceling his comic strip. He’s been garbage for many years. My ex-husband was such a huge fan of Dilbert that he used to cut out his favorite strips to post on the refrigerator door in the kitchen. He also purchased many of the books that reprinted those comic strips. As for me, while I initially found Dilbert to be funny at first, I stopped reading that comic strip when Scott Adams came out in favor of corporate downsizings in the 1990s. As someone who has held a variety of clerical jobs in corporations that had undergone downsizings (and sometimes I was caught up in a round of layoffs), I was alienated from Scott Adams’ stance on favoring corporations over worker rights. I don’t regret giving those Dilbert books away (mainly to the local PTA, which holds a used book sale as part of the Greenbelt Labor Day Festival each year) when my husband walked out on me in late 2011.
Good riddance to bad rubbish!
I’ve originally purchased this articulated Sonic the Hedgehog action figure doll way back in 2012 and, with the exception of taking him to seeing the blooming cherry blossoms and the annual Sakura Matsuri festival in downtown DC, he’s mostly been sitting on a shelf in my home ever since.
But then I purchased this energy drink that had Sonic the Hedgehog printed on it at Walmart and I was inspired to take my Sonic doll down from the shelf and play with him again. First, I made a short video that was strictly about the many articulation points of that doll. I uploaded it on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
But then I decided to get silly with my Sonic doll by doing this stop motion animation where he seems to drink the energy drink that has his image on it and he has a reaction to it. I uploaded it on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.
Last month Disney decided to release a new Nuimos based on Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who is best known as the cartoon character that Walt Disney originally created and worked on until he lost the rights to that character and he ended up creating Mickey Mouse in the wake of that loss. (Basically had Walt Disney been able to maintain the legal rights to Oswald, Mickey would have never existed at all.)
There are two probable reasons why Oswald is now a Disney Nuimos: 1) This year is the 100th anniversary of the founding of what is now known as The Walt Disney Company and 2) Lunar New Year was scheduled to arrive soon, which ushered in the Year of the Rabbit.
As for the Year of the Rabbit, I already own a Disney Nuimos rabbit character, Judy Hopps. I decided to order Oswald even though I had sworn to myself that I would only purchase new Nuimos if they were on sale. (With shipping and handling, I ended up paying $25 for Oswald.)
Oswald arrived just in time for the start of the Lunar New Year so I decided to do this stop motion animation that’s a combination of an unboxing video (where I had Judy Hopps opening the package) and a Chinese New Year’s celebration where the two rabbits dance together to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit. You can view my short animation online on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
This is the third year in a row that I’ve done stop motion animation featuring a certain plush animal for Lunar New Year/Chinese New Year. Here are the previous animations that I did:
The Year of the Ox featuring a small plush ox I purchased from Walmart (2021)
The Year of the Tiger featuring my Disney Nuimos Tigger (2022)
Today is Lunar New Year. Last year my Chinese zodiac, the Ox, was the animal of the year, which I thought was kind of cool. But, as the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end and the Ox’s reign formally ended today. This year is the Year of the Tiger, which reminds me of the time in my childhood when it was also the Year of the Tiger. That year Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes came up with this TV ad featuring Tony the Tiger and it tied in with the featured animal that year.
Unsurprisingly Kellogg’s is taking advantage of 2022 being both another Year of the Tiger and Tony’s 70th anniversary by licensing Tony on a variety of merchandise that will be available for sale sometime in the near future.
Last year I purchased a small stuffed ox along with a matching box and a pack of matching paper napkins from Walmart and I used them in a stop-motion animation. For this year I did something slightly different.
I have some Disney Nuimos, which are a line of cute plushies that are small and they can wear a variety of fashionable outfits. Unlike most other Disney stuffed animals, the Disney Nuimos have internal wiring inside of them so you can turn their heads and bend their arms and legs. They have a greater range of motion than a typical stuffed animal so you can put them in a variety of realistic poses. For a while I thought that they would be perfect for making a stop-motion animation but I didn’t explore that idea too much. When I found out that 2022 is the Year of the Tiger, it gave me an opportunity to try making a stop-motion animation with Tigger.
For this animation I did something similar to what I did with the stuffed ox last year where Tigger would emerge from an enclosure, dance around for a bit, then go back into the enclosure. There were a few changes. For this year I found a Chinese New Year’s Lucky Cat decoration in a store, which only costs around $3 and it has a small solar panel so the cat can wave one of its arms when exposed to direct sunlight. Instead of using a box to hide Tigger, I found a small red gift bag that was big enough to hide Tigger.
The biggest change was that I opted to just take pictures with my smartphone camera, assemble the pictures in InShot, then speed the video rate so it would look like Tigger is dancing at a frenetic pace. Last year I used Stop Motion Studio but I ended up uninstalling it on my phone because of storage issues. (I also found that I only used Stop Motion Studio that one time for my Year of the Ox animation and my phone was running out of storage space so I ended up getting rid of it.) So I just held the camera in my small Joby tripod, shot the pictures, and did the entire editing in InShot. Once I finished I uploaded my animation in TikTok, Clapper, and YouTube.
For figuring out what kind of dance moves Tigger should make, I looked at a bunch of dance videos on TikTok and tried to replicate the moves as much as possible. Since this animation is essentially a one-person operation, I just don’t have the time or luxury to do something very detailed with extremely accurate and realistic moves. I also didn’t have much of a window of opportunity since Lunar New Year festival in many Asian countries started yesterday (which is Lunar New Year’s Eve) and can last anywhere—depending on the individual country—from three days (in South Korea) all the way to twelve days (in China).
I also wasn’t able to begin work on it earlier because I wanted to shoot outdoors and the weather was too cold with plenty of snow.
The differences between using InShot and Stop Motion Studio is that the former doesn’t have the onion skinning feature so I had to just guess on where to place the Nuimos after I changed his arms and legs. In a way it didn’t matter as much when it came to Tigger because, as anyone who has ever seen a Winnie the Pooh movie or TV special would know, Tigger never seems to stay in one area and he tends to bounce all over the place.
I had originally planned on making my animation yesterday then upload it this morning but I felt under the weather yesterday where I was sneezing at times and I felt extremely tired. I began to dread the possibility that I had somehow caught COVID-19 despite my vaccines and frequent mask-wearing, especially the highly contagious Omicron variant. But I also remember that there are times when my body starts to feel very tired and draggy due to sudden weather changes. And, boy, did the weather in my area change. Last weekend a major Nor’easter went up the East Coast dumping tons of snow in various places like New York and Boston. While the Baltimore-Washington, DC area got a couple of inches of snow, it was spared the worst of that storm. But my area wasn’t able to avoid the bone-chilling temperatures where they plummeted from the usual high of 40-45 degrees all the way down to the low 20’s.
Yesterday I felt too tired and listless to do anything creative and I also wasn’t sure if it was the Coronavirus or something else so I spent most of the day being lazy (with the exception of having to take out the trash and recycling for the regular weekly Tuesday morning pickup). This morning I woke up feeling better. The temperature was also in the low-40’s, which made the outdoors feel very balmy compared to the previous days.
So I decided to shoot my stop-motion animation outside. You can still see some snow on the table while Tigger was dancing but I left it there because I was able to use it to prop up Tigger’s legs at times when one of them was kicked up in the air. (Usually I would use artist’s tape for something like this but everything was still too wet outside to use it.) The snow was pretty much melting around me as I was making the animation. I managed to finish the shooting in a couple of hours then I spent another hour doing a quick editing and I uploaded it online by the evening.
Tigger’s legs and tail got totally soaked. The first couple of hours I had him sitting in the bathtub so the excess water could drain out. Tigger’s bottom half is still a bit damp as of this writing but I decided to take him out of the bathroom and have him lie face down on one of the tables in my bedroom. I expect him to be completely dry by the morning.
Shooting Tigger in the snow brought back this childhood memory. I was born in Baltimore and I lived in the city with my family until I was five. That year my family moved to Glen Burnie. A few months after the move I experienced one of the few White Christmases in my life. I woke up early and I saw the snow. My family had me open my Christmas presents first. One of the presents was a set of Winnie the Pooh toys that were made from a hard rubber material. I remember getting Pooh Bear, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, and Kanga—which included her little joey Roo—which could be removed from Kanga’s pocket. I may have gotten Owl and Rabbit as well but I don’t remember if I did or not. All I remember that after I finished opening my presents, the first thing I did was to grab my Winnie the Pooh toys and run outside to play with them in the snow. I remember for years seeing a photo in the family album of me with my mother along with Winnie the Pooh and his friends in the snow.
Doing that stop-motion animation of Tigger on a snow-covered table kind of brought my life back full circle.
A few years ago I did an animation called The March of Liberty. I made it during the weekly animation meetup that used to be held at the then-called Makerspace 125 (which later changed its name to Greenbelt Makerspace before it closed its doors for good back in 2019). Here’s the original animation below.
You can read my original post about the making of that animation right here. In any case I decided to enter it into the 2017 Light City festival in Baltimore after I saw on Facebook a call for entries of short films that would be shown on the giant screen during that festival. It was accepted and I made the trip where I sat in the cold spring night for two hours until my animation was finally shown. At that point I decided to pull out my smartphone and record myself reacting to seeing my own animation on the big screen.
The following day I uploaded it on to YouTube and I wrote this blog post about my excitement of seeing my own animation being shown on a big screen. I also remember posting the link on social media so my friends could see it. Phil Shapiro, one of my friends who is also my former housemate (he moved out shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived) was the one person who was most impressed by my reaction video. In fact, he would mention it to me every now and then about how he loved the excitement I showed in that video.
I was flattered that he was such a fan of my reaction video, even though what I did was no different than the hundreds of other reaction videos that one can find on YouTube. The reaction video was originally pioneered by a YouTuber known as nuttymadam3575, who was such a major fan of the Twilight books that she used to record her reactions to seeing trailers to the movie adaptations of those books, such as this one where she reacted to an online trailer for an upcoming movie that was based on the final book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, which went viral back in 2011.
Phil was really amazed by my own reaction video so I was flattered that someone had loved one of my videos that much, even though I had literally filmed my reaction on the fly with absolutely no preparation whatsoever. I was very spontaneous when I recorded my reaction to seeing The March of Liberty on the giant screen. He kept on saying that he loved it even after I had moved on from what I did at Light City.
A few days ago I got an email from Phil saying that he was giving a virtual presentation to the New Tech Meetup of Central Pennsylvania on something that he’s currently trying to pioneer. Feeling inspired by both the Little Free Library and the fact that many movie theaters across the United States have closed down due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, he had an idea of doing something called a Little Free Movie Theater. Basically it would be an outdoor film festival that would focus on video work done by local filmmakers. This Little Free Movie Theater would be shown on the side of a building and admission would be free to the general public. He attempted to do this recently and his talk was on what his experiences were and what mistakes he made along the way.
A few weeks before his talk I got an email from Phil where he was expressing his desire to make his idea of a Little Free Movie Theater become a reality. He suggested that I email an acquaintance of mine who is involved in a nonprofit public access television organization about his idea because he needed some help. I sent an email but I never heard back from that acquaintance. When I heard about Phil’s upcoming talk with the Central Pennsylvania group, I decided to sign up for it just so I could hear him speak about it.
Last night I saw Phil give a virtual slideshow called Beyond Little Free Libraries: The Little Free Movie Theater, which anyone can now access right here. When he got to the second slide, he used my Light City reaction video as an example and he admitted that my reaction video gave him the inspiration to consider starting The Little Free Movie Theater because he was so amazed by my reaction video that he wanted to give others in the community the chance for them to see their work being shown on an outdoor screen.
I was pretty speechless. Here I was thinking that I had made a quick video where I reacted to seeing my own animation that I thought was basically a throwaway video that I only made because I wanted a memento of that amazing highlight of my life that I could go back and view if I ever started to doubt myself as a creative person. I honestly thought that only those who knew me personally would ever want to see it. I never realized that my video had inspired Phil to come up with something like The Little Free Movie Theater. As the third slide (which came after the one that had featured my reaction video) stated:
Consider – as a result of the pandemic, many movie theaters have closed.
Maybe we need to re-invent the movie theater on the micro level – with more of a focus on showcasing local creativity.
Every neighborhood has “hidden figures,” people whose creative talents are insufficiently appreciated.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CpmhjyyaXF8wsokAvoc3llf2FAhFuqD5KOKzhQ7mQ6M/edit#slide=id.p3
Anyway, I would suggest viewing his slides for more information about The Little Free Movie Theater (including the equipment he used for his prototype, what he thought worked, and what mistakes he made). Last night I found out that I had become a catalyst for someone else’s idea that he’s trying to make a reality. It’s too soon to know if this Little Free Movie Theater idea will actually take off or not but I’m pretty flattered that one of my videos had provided such an inspiration. It all goes to show that sometimes you can be an influence on other people without even trying.
I’ve been doing some more short videos while I’m living in this Coronavirus limbo. I have a friend named Phil Shapiro (who was my housemate at one point until he moved out shortly before the pandemic began in earnest last year) who frequently jokes about taking naps and his preferences for sleeping in general. One day I was on TikTok when I came across a video using a song that I felt would be perfect as Phil’s personal theme song. It’s called “I Took a Nap” by Gunnarolla. Here’s the original music video but you can click here to see the numerous videos that have used that song for their own TikTok videos.
A few months after learning about that song I finally decided to make a video based on Phil’s love of taking naps. You could loosely call it an “animation” even though there isn’t much movement in that video. It was a quick project for me because I recycled a drawing that I originally did for this video game that I did in Twine as a favor to Phil a few years ago.
As for the rest of the graphics, I used the ones that I downloaded from OpenClipArt.
So I uploaded my completed video online and let Phil know about it via Twitter. He responded positively. What’s really cool was that Gunnarolla himself like a few of my tweets where I wrote about my video.
You can view my version of “I Took a Nap” on TikTok and on YouTube.
Enjoy! 🙂
First of all I want to say that I was born in the Year of the Ox. When I was in high school some company had come out with embroidery kits based on the Chinese zodiac. I remember my mother purchased two kits—one a dragon for herself (she was born in the Year of the Dragon) and an ox kit for me. Each kit came with these frames that looked like bamboo but they were really made out of plastic. We both worked on our own kits. I don’t know whatever happened to my mother’s dragon embroidery but I still have my ox embroidery hanging in the living room of my townhouse.
I wish the plastic frame had included glass because the fabric in the frame has become yellowed with age and it’s prone to getting dusty. I also noticed that the embroidered trim that lines the bottom of the picture had somehow come apart and you can see the original printed lines that indicated where I made the stitches. Other than that, the picture is still in good shape.
Last month, when I went on a shopping expedition to Walmart, I saw that this store had a whole shelf section dedicated to the upcoming Lunar New Year including red paper decorations, red envelopes, red gift boxes, and paper napkins. It was also how I learned that 2021 is the Year of the Ox. I was so thrilled by the fact that my birth zodiac animal was becoming the animal of the year (and the fact that the Lunar New Year stuff at Walmart was priced so cheaply) that I bought a few things. Here’s a cute Year of the Ox box.
And here’s a matching pack of paper napkins.
Finally, here’s a small stuffed ox who’s incredibly cute (and he only costs $3.98).
I also decided to do something special since my animal is the featured animal of the year. A few months ago I downloaded this free app on my smartphone called Stop Motion Studio. I played around with it using my recent Walmart purchases and I came up with the stuffed ox doing a sort of a dance. It’s not high art or anything. It was basically a quick project.
I initially shot the animation in the usual landscape format that is favored by YouTube and has also been long favored by feature films and television. I transferred a copy of the files to my Mac where I imported it into iMovie. I added a title card and end credits along with royalty-free dance music that I downloaded from YouTube itself. I uploaded that animation on to YouTube.
When it came to other video hosting sites that prefer the vertical format, I did some more editing tricks. I took the copy of the animation that was still on my smartphone and imported it into the InShot app. I pinched the canvas in order to get the animation to fit into the vertical format as much as possible. In the process I cropped out most of the background and most of the animation is still viewable.
After I exported that vertical file, I imported it into TikTok. I paired it with a song I found on that platform that’s called “Happy Lunar New Year.” The title of the song is written in the Latin alphabet that’s used in the English language but the names of the people singing are written in Chinese characters so I can’t tell you who is singing that song. But I found it incredibly catchy and it matched the animation so I used it. You can view the results right here.
Afterwards I downloaded my TikTok file (that has the “Happy Lunar New Year” song) and uploaded it on to Clapper, which you can view right here.
I’ll admit that what I did isn’t great animation. It was basically a chance for me to try out the Stop Motion Studio app and I thought the Year of the Ox gave me a great opportunity to do just that.
This past summer a TikTok user known as 420doggface208 did this video where he skateboarded while drinking from a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice and he added the old Fleetwood Mac hit song “Dreams.” Well that video went viral and, before you know it, a whole bunch of people were doing their own versions of that video and The Fleetwood Mac “Dreams” Challenge was born.
I wanted in on this trend but there’s one problem: I don’t have a skateboard, I’ve never skateboarded, and I’m reluctant to learn since I have a hip replacement. I don’t want a repeat of what happened back in 2011 when I fell twice in one week, my hip replacement was knocked out of alignment, and I had to undergo hip revision surgery and months of physical therapy. I then thought about my dolls and I thought they were the next best thing. I couldn’t find any doll-sized versions of the Ocean Spray cranberry juice bottle but I noticed that not everyone who submitted videos to that challenge drank cranberry juice. (I saw some where people drank Starbucks lattes and other drinks. I even saw one guy dressed as a leprechaun try to eat a box of Lucky Charms cereal only to have the majority of the cereal fall to the ground. LOL!)
I was at Five Below when I saw a marshmallow pop that was shaped like Olaf the snowman from the Frozen movies. I decided to buy it and use my Elsa doll, since the videos where I featured her have gotten a lot of traction on TikTok. (It’s mystifying to me since I’ve done little other than to just shoot straight footage of the doll but that’s the way it goes. LOL!)
The hard thing was the skateboard part. I tried looking in Target and other places but I didn’t find a skateboard that was big enough for a 1/3 scale doll. So what I did was to try to simulate the doll riding on a skateboard by shooting footage of the doll from the waist up while I was walking then speeding up the video. The results were okay but the hard part was keeping the Olaf pop straight. I tried attaching the pop to Elsa’s hand using artist tape while keeping the pop straight so the view would see what it is. No matter how much tape I used, I couldn’t get Olaf the snowman marshmallow pop to look straight ahead. Instead I had to settle with a sort of a side view of the pop while I used a rough stop-motion animation to simulate Elsa “eating” Olaf’s head. (I was the one who ate that marshmallow pop and, well, it was incredibly sugar-laden. I definitely wouldn’t buy it for myself again. Sometimes one has to make sacrifices for art. LOL!) I uploaded it on to TikTok and YouTube.
My video got paltry views on YouTube while on TikTok it got a pretty decent amount of views but they were a far cry from what 420doggface208 got on his channel. I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the video since I had a hard time keeping that pop in alignment despite using artist tape. (It didn’t help that it was big so it was hard to maneuver to a decent position.) I decided to try again using a different doll. This time I used one of my American Girl dolls. Since Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was originally released in 1977, I used Julie, my historic 1970s doll, for this next video. While the original Julie books never mentioned Fleetwood Mac, she definitely would’ve heard “Dreams” on the radio in her timeline, especially if she was riding in her mom’s or dad’s car and the car radio happened to be on at the time.
I found a miniature Icee candy at Five Below that was shaped like the Icee frozen drinks that one can buy in various convenience stores across the United States and it was small enough that it could function as a doll-sized prop. Icee has been around since 1958 so Julie definitely would’ve heard of it in her 1970s childhood.
Once again I filmed the whole thing at normal speed then speeded up the video in order to simulate riding a skateboard. I used a rough stop motion animation to simulate Julie drinking from the Icee cup. I was better able to balance the Icee candy cup in Julie’s hand (while using artist tape) but the hard part was getting the straw to align to her mouth. I literally could not do it after trying over and over again. I got frustrated and I really didn’t want to spend an inordinate amount to time on this video (especially since I wasn’t going to earn any money from doing this, I was only doing it for fun) so I took artist tape and attached the straw to her mouth in order to show her “drinking” the Icee. It wasn’t the most elegant solution but it worked. I uploaded it on to TikTok and YouTube.
I got a fair amount of views on TikTok. I got fewer views on YouTube but they were more than what I got for the Elsa video.
I have a friend who’s crazy about dinosaurs so I shot this photo of some dinosaur planters that are available for sale for only $5 each.
I also saw this DVD that was all about dinosaurs so I shot that photo and tagged my dinosaur-mad friend on social media.
I saw this new Fingerlings penguin on sale. I currently have a monkey and unicorn Fingerlings even though I haven’t touched either of them in a while. This penguin comes with a surfboard and it looks like (based on the package) that penguin can do more than just perch on someone’s finger where it can move, make sounds, and respond to its sensors being touched.
The penguin’s name is Tux, which reminds me of something. There is a penguin named Tux who is the mascot of Linux and he has also become the mascot of the open source movement. In fact, I did this animated music video of Phil Shapiro’s song “Open Source is Yours and Mine” which features an appearance by a penguin (who’s unnamed in the video but one could infer that he is Tux).
Sagittarius Dolly 
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