Ballmer's iPod

NOVEMBER 4, 2003

This is my second Apple iPod ad parody, and Apple still has not sent me a free iPod to stop the insanity! Read below for some brief technical notes on the background and production of Ballmer's iPod.

Apple iPod ads

It's easy enough to come up with a Flash animated spoof of Apple's new "silhouette" iPod ads. They are simple, elegant, and involve only two colors on the screen at any given moment. Black shadows dance in front of a colored background, which changes from red, green, yellow, and purple. The shadow dancers also cast a shadow of their own on the floor, and shiny items on the dancers' bodies will occasionally shimmer, reflecting the same color as the background. Simple enough, but in order to be funny, we need a twist. How about combining Apple with Microsoft in a parody? Why not? It has worked for me in the past.

Buy the tools used to make this animation:

Macromedia Flash MX

Apple Logic Pro

Apple iPod

Special Mac deals:
Amazon Mac Page

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Music:

Get On Your Feet by Gloria Estefan

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Now, trying to come up with a parody of Microsoft is a far loftier task. After all, what is there to make fun of with Microsoft? Well, the words "micro" and "soft" uttered during some intimate and vulnerable moment could be quite insulting, but other than that, I was at a loss. Seriously, though, there are so many aspects of Microsoft that I'd like to parody, I don't have the time! This is, in fact, the most difficult part: choosing from an endless supply of spoof material.

So, this time I decided to pick on Ballmer. What's not to laugh about? There's plenty of footage of Steve Ballmer going crazy at developer conferences, and his lumbering form is easy enough to compose in Flash, especially in silhouette form.

After listening to the Ballmer footage in the original clip, I decided that the audio quality was too low to faithfully represent a commercial for high fidelity iPods, even if it was just a spoof. So, I blew the dust off of my Best of the 80's CD and used iTunes to rip the actual Gloria Estefan song, Get On Your Feet, in stereo AIFF format. Once I had the song file, I imported both the high-quality AIFF and the low-quality Balmer audio into my new Emagic Logic Platinum 6. In the main Logic Arrangement window, I synchronized the stereo song with the mono footage, accurate to the micro-sample. Too much variance in the samples would have resulted in a phased sound.

Once the song and footage were synchronized, I added the Ballmer "YES!" scream, and his "I LOVE THIS COMPANY" sound byte. To compensate for the abrupt audio clipping, and to make the samples sound supernatural, I added reverb using Expert Sleepers free Ping Pong AU Delay.

There is some Logic in all this

The complex layers of the Flash Symbol Ballmer

The final audio was Bounced in Sound Design II format and imported into Flash. Audio is rendered in Flash as a 128Mbps stereo MP3 for decent playback quality.

The graphics in Ballmer's iPod were pretty straightforward. Arms, legs, torso, and head were mostly Symbols that could move by Motion Tween. The iPod wire moved more realistically with Shape Tweening, as in my previous American iPod animation. The most complex aspect was creating duplicate Ballmer Symbol for each of four underarm tints. I figured that since the original Apple ads have some shimmering reflections, I'd bring Ballmer's soaked armpits to life by tinting them the same as the background!

Unlike my previous animations, I've started composing in 15fps, instead of 12fps. The extra three frames per second provide much better timing ability with musical beats, and still allow for a small file size.