Production Notes
December 17, 2003
When Gary
Kremen contacted me to produce a Flash holiday
E-card for 2004, I was excited to help him tell his
facinating story in the form of an animated cartoon.
Then I got nervous, because it was a Thanksgiving
week, leaving me just three short weeks to produce
the cartoon before Christmas break! By the time I
wrote the story and we finalized the storyboards,
I only had two weeks left. I locked myself in my
apartment, and went to work.
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How the Grinch Stole Sex Dot Com!
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The original working title for the story was "How
the DICK Stole SEX DOT COM". However,
it was decided that DICK was too offensive,
and did not evoke images of the holidays. So we went
with Grinch, feeling safe with the knowledge
that other people have gotten away with using the
word Grinch in their Dr.
Seuss parodies.
The first draft of "How
the DICK Stole SEX DOT COM" was 16 stanzas
long. While it was more informative and sounded more "Seussical",
it read more than twice as long as our 30-40 second
goal.
We successfully cut the story down to 6 stanzas, while
still conveying the main points of the story.
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Every kid in Silicon Valley made a buck on his
own ... |
When designing the backgrounds, I tried to use color
schemes that symbolize the theme for each scene. I
used yellows and golds to represent the Internet "gold
rush" in Silicon Valley; blues to siginfy having "the
blues" in prison; green to represent money and
greed; and red to symbolize anger ... and velvet pimpitude!
Incidentally, the original script read, "All
the kids in the Valley made a buck on their own ...",
but I was told that in L.A. "the Valley" refers
to where all the porn flicks are filmed. We managed
to squeeze in "Silicon Valley" without disrupting
the meter too much, thanks to the talented Brian Dewan's
skillful voiceover.
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"I'll steal SEX DOT COM from that punk, Gary
Kremen!"
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It was difficult to come up with a caricature
of Steve "The Grinch" Cohen, because the only
reference material I had was one small
photograph taken in court, and a few fax copies of
surveillance snapshots taken in Kinko's, where Cohen
allegedly forged his letter to Network Solutions.
To make him look more Grinchy, I gave him
bad-ass orange eyes!
There's a bit more info on Gary,
considering he is the founder of not only sex.com, but
also match.com, where he is still listed under the user
profile, thefounder!
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They handed it over without blinking an eye. |
The bouncing Net-Worth Solutions monkeys were cycling
Movie Clips, displayed in the Stage as looping Graphics.
With past animation projects, I didn't realize that
I could display a Movie Clip as a looping Graphic—which
allows me to view the MC cycle frame by frame, instead
of just the first frame of the MC. Viewing as a looping
Graphic really made editing much easier this time around!
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The Grinch was found GUILTY! |
I was very pleased with the outcome of
this court scene, which lasts less than 2 seconds. Each
wooden panel in the jury section is a graphic Symbol
Instance, repeated four times. The back was is the same
graphic Symbol, squished together and stretched tall,
repeated a dozen times, and darkened.
One detail I was particularly happy with is Gary's
shadow, which shrinks and follows him as the background
shifts. I did a lot of shadow experimenting with this
project.
|
With the Grinch on the lam, Gary's doing quite
well ... |
No one knows exactly where The Grinch
fled to, but it is suspected he is hiding out somewhere
in Mexico. At one point, Gary was even offering a $50,000
reward for information leading to the arrest of Steve
Cohen. The fellow behind the tree apparently thinks
the reward is still
available.
In this scene, I made the tide ebb and flow with two
layers: one layer is the foamy white translucent water
which moves forward and back; and the darker sand color
follows below that layer follows just behind, giving
the illusion that the sand turns dark with moisture
for a moment, and then quickly dries in the sun.
|
From South of the Border, while hiding in fear
... |
This Mexican desert night and Kinko's
are blue, just like The Grinch's jail cell, because,
in a way, Mexico is Cohen's new prison.
At first I designed this scene as if it were daylight,
and then overlaid a blue box with 50% alpha reduction,
to make it translucent. I figured it would work just
like a blue filter on a camera, to give the illusion
of night when the real footage was filmed in daylight.
It turned everything blue okay, but the colors looked
washed out. So I re-drew the desert elements all with
blue hues, and it looked more vibrant.
|
The Grinch wishes, "Happy Holidays, and
a Prosperous New Year!" |
An interesting side note, Gary told me
that he occasionally receives an e-mail from the elusive
Steve Cohen! He's like the Riddler sending untraceable
messages to Batman! I wonder what they chat about, and
if Gary is still as angry with Cohen as he is with Verisign.
Funny thing is, Gary still has sex.com registered with
NetSol, just to piss them off.
I figured that The Grinch sending a holiday e-card
to Gary would be the perfect ending for the e-card.
It's an e-card within an e-card!
Read the original unedited "How
the DICK Stole SEX DOT COM"!
|
Since my old PowerBook G3 "Pismo" 500Mhz
recently started exhibiting symptoms (beeping
four times at startup) of a main logic board failure,
I borrowed my friend's TiBook G4 800Mhz 512MB RAM running
Mac OS X 10.3 for this project. The animation was produced
entirely with Macromedia Flash MX 6, and audio was sequenced
with Emagic Logic Platinum 6.3.1. The project took approximately
3 weeks to complete. Amazingly, the original music, composed
by John
Avarese, was written in just 24 hours, the day before
the animation went live!
Special thanks to Gary
Kremen, for hiring me to do this cartoon. And
also thanks to Jeff
Edsell for his excellent Flash
Snow tutorial!
If you would like a Flash cartoon animation for your
company, and you like my style, please get in touch!
-- Macboy
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