The Fetish Islands: The Final Chapter! - Ursula Hitler's Head ep. 113

The Fetish Islands story concludes, with an episode that marks a transition of sorts for this series. As much as I enjoy doing these longer stories and updating every week, I just can't justify the time and effort anymore. My audience isn't growing, and actually seems to have dwindled quite a bit the last few months. Apparently a lot of Youtubers have experienced a drop in views recently, so maybe my shrinking audience is a part of that general decline... Or maybe people just weren't interested in my serial stories. I honestly don't know.

Whatever's going on, it feels silly to keep regularly cranking out these long serials for an audience in the low hundreds. I'm extremely grateful to the handful of fans I do have, but I just can't keep doing this.

Almost all of the ideas I have for this series are serials, and I do plan to do some more of them in the future. But a lot of people seem to prefer the stand-alone episodes, so I'm going to try to focus more on those for a while. I don't know how regularly I'll be updating... Right now I don't have any stand-alone ideas, but hopefully I'll think of some soon.

This definitely isn't the end of the series, and I hope you'll stick around for what's to come... And please, if you like this series, do what you can to get the word out. Tell your friends, post on forums, accost strangers in the street! And as always, don't forget to follow this series at www.UrsulaHitler.com.

The making of LIGHTNING SQUARED, part 2

Time for another look into how I made the cartoon music video for the Abby Travis song Lightning Squared. This time, we'll examine the characters...

The video almost had a very different look indeed. My original plan was to animate the whole thing using dolls brought to life with stop-motion, with distorted photos of old monster movie stars for the heads. It would have looked something like this rough. I actually got as far as trying to animate a couple of shots using the dolls, and gave up. It was too much work, and it looked crappy. I was also worried about the rights issues. I didn't want to put a lot of work into something only to get a cease-and-desist from the Karloff estate.

Lacking a working scanner, I used my cell phone camera to take pictures of the monsters I doodled in my sketchbook.

Once the doodles were uploaded I could take aspects I liked from one drawing and combine them with another. Then I would shade the drawings and fiddle around with the colors. I hadn't been drawing much for a while before I started making this cartoon, so I was pretty rusty and character design was a challenge.

The Mad Doctor was one of the characters I really struggled with. I kept coming up with designs that just didn't work.

Some of these designs got pretty far along before I aborted them. This Doctor was rejected for being too Nixonian/Bob Hope-y.

For the Angry Mob, I used the heads of a bunch of Confederate generals. That's some cutting-edge political satire, sticking it to John Bankhead Magruder!

The making of LIGHTNING SQUARED, part 1

In the coming days, get ready to learn everything you could ever want to know (and more!) about how I made the cartoon music video for the Abby Travis song Lightning Squared. First off, let's pay a visit to the Frankenstein place...

The castle looks like a drawing, but it's actually more of a photo collage pasted together from the parts of various miniature golf castles I found online. There are little spires and turrets from mini-golf courses all over the world, all twisted, tweaked and painted a spooky blue. (Click all photos to embiggen.)

I went through a lot of castle designs before I settled on one I liked. For a while I was planning to just use images of the Robert Burns Memorial in Scotland. I think it's a fascinatingly funky little building, and I liked the idea of the castle seeming much larger on the inside than the outside... But in the end, this building just didn't fit the frame right! Since the video was widescreen and this building is tall and thin, I had to make the building really tiny or it wouldn't fit the frame at all. Also, this building was a little too realistic... It's the first thing you see in the video, and I thought it was better to start with something more cartoony to establish the style of the rest of the clip.

Another photo collage, heavily worked over. The walls and pillars are actually from a photo of some ancient temple in the Middle East, and the door is from the front of a fancy crypt in South America, if I recall correctly. (And isn't that door awesome?) I actually designed a lot more of the castle antechamber than I ended up using. I thought I was going to show the Angry Mob running down this corridor for a long time, but I ended up having to cut the scene down to like a fraction of a second.

The antechamber once had a very different look, and I was planning to use this old art print (I've forgotten the name of the artist.) The original has a bunch of people in it, and I'm kind of proud of the job I did removing everybody and putting in that checkered floor! I ended up junking this scene because I thought it was looking a little too Monty Python. (I kept having a feeling that Terry Gilliam actually used this print in an old cartoon. Does anybody recognize it?)

Another unused image of the castle interior, assembled from various photos. This was another instance where I decided it looked too "real."

A preliminary drawing of the castle entrance. It just wasn't working, but there was something I kinda liked about it.

A better look at the lightning raygun thing in the lab. It's put together from all sorts of weird elements: an old plastic toy raygun, a brass bell for the base, the folding arm of an old desk lamp, the tip of a bullet for the "bowl" on the firing end. I designed a lot of other lab equipment that I never ended up having room for in the final cut.

An image from a finished but deleted scene. As something of a novice animator, I jumped into this video without timing everything right... So I ended up with a couple of scenes I had to cut, including this shot where the Angry Mob storms the castle. If I ever make another music video, you better believe I'll time that sucker to the nanosecond before I animate a single frame!