Bear vs Alien (2003) (Sound Version 2004) - While not initially too mind shattering, Bear vs Alien was produced in almost its entirety over the course of 15 hours. Though it had been storyboarded the week before, the actually drawing and photographing of the animation took place during the majority of a Sunday evening that ran into a Monday morning.

Bear vs Alien is totally gratuitous as a class assignment. The assignment was to make an animation that had some animal motion and behavior in it. Most of the other student animations were less than ten seconds long (this was true of all of my animation assignments, back to the first day of the class).

One thing to keep in mind while watching the video is that for the class we were not allowed to use computer techniques for compositing or moving the frame of reference. If I wanted to simulate a camera move, I had to move each frame slightly under the camera before capturing it and moving onto the next frame which of course, also had to be laboriously moved into place. This is also true of the end of the cartoon, where the bear bounces around like a coin before falling flat. Because of these factors, and the general length of the animation, it took over an hour and a half to photograph this animation.

When it was viewed by the class, the instructor said that it would make a pretty good animation rough for a finished product. At the time I didn't realize how much this was a huge compliment.

Most of the title cards were drawn at the end of the animation process, and I was very exhausted so there were several mispellings.

The sound was added almost six months later. All the sound effects, music and narration were made by me with my mouth over the course of a few hours and mixed together in Final Cut Pro. There were two or three different final mixes and this was the one I thought worked the best. The musical background track that plays when the giant robots are fighting is mostly backwards sounds.

I would later realize that Bear vs Alien was my existential artistic reaction to my grandfather's death, for whom I had not allowed myself to grieve. The animation features two lifeforms competing at absurd tasks for their entire lives, and then at the end they are killed off by diseases associated with rot and old age. Inherent in it is my anger at his death, and my frustration at the loss. He had Alzheimers, I hadn't seen him for years and we knew it was coming, but I was still much more affected by it than I had realized; I love him and he's gone. For this reason, while this video became a fan favorite at the University, for a long time I had a difficult time watching it.

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