American iPod

American iPod took the shortest time to produce of all my Flash animations. Not counting the weeks I spent waiting for my buddy, Paul Barnett, to come visit me in Brooklyn for a recording session (you know how Borough-phobic Manhattan folk can be!), the total time for production was only about 20 hours. Most of the time was spent drawing caricatures of the players—Steve Jobs, Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul, and Ryan Seacrest. Since the commercials have all-white backgrounds, there wasn't much else to illustrate.

The only other Object that took some considerable effort was the iPod itself, and its dynamic headphones wire! If you watch the animation closely, you will notice that the headphones wire moves naturally and follows Steve's movements. The wire is actually a single line vector with a few Bézier curves. Using Shape Tweens (instead of the usual Motion Tweens used for the caricature Symbols), I was able to make the wire sag with gravity, move with momentum, and stay connected to both the iPod and earbuds at all times.

Remember, you cannot apply a Shape Tween to a Symbol. The wire had to remain as a non-Symbol object throughout the timeline.

After I had illustrated the characters, the next step was recording the song. It was difficult to decide which song I should do. I thought maybe I'd do a Barenaked Ladies song, since that is one of Jobs's favorite bands. I was considering If I Had $1,000,000, but figured that would be better for a Bill Gates spoof one day. Various rap songs also crossed my mind, like Nelly's Hot In Herre, and Mystikal's Shake Ya Ass, but I didn't want to be too cliché with a nerd doing rap ... much like Apple's original white boy rendition of Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back, which was mysteriously removed from Apple's web site, along with the kid who sang Eminem's Lose Yourself. I finally chose ABBA's Take a Chance On Me for a few reasons. I felt that the lyrics worked nicely with the theme of Apple entering into a new industry, and customers should "take a chance" with the new music downloading system. Also, it was a fun song to sing in that silly voice!

At the time I had not yet purchased my Emagic Logic Platinum 6, and my trial versions of BIAS Peak and Felt Tip's SoundStudio had expired. So I was forced to launch my old Macromedia SoundEdit 16 v2 in Classic Mode. Surprisingly, it worked fine!

The song was recorded in three tracks, which were mixed down into a final stereo version. That 44.1 KHz AIFF was imported into the Flash Library. In the final product, the audio was exported at 128Mbps Stereo MP3.

Friends Paul Barnett (that's his real British accent) and Andrea Praet joined in to do the voices of Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul, respectively.

Once the audio was recorded, I did the animation. Nothing really fancy or complex for this cartoon, except for the headphones wire, (see above). Steve Jobs is always so cool in his blue jeans and black turtleneck ... kinda' reminds me of the Fonz from Happy Days. So I made Jobs do a dance move from the Happy Days episode in which the Fonz was dancing like a mad man, doing those crazy Russian jump splits. That same Happy Days episode was spoofed and digitally altered in the 1995 music video for Weezer's Buddy Holly, directed by Spike Jonze.

Lip syncing was a breeze in this project, and improved over my previous project, NYMUG. With NYMUG, I made the mistake of not altering the various mouth positions enough for each sound. As a result, the lip syncing looks a little stiff and robotic. This would normally be cool because I like robots. In American iPod, I was more relaxed with the mouth shapes, and therefore it looks more natural.

The entire illustration and animation process was done with Macromedia Flash MX on my Powerbook G3 500MHz Pismo, running Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar". No need to go out and buy a G5 yet, because things seem to be working fine on a modest G3 system so far. Plus, I'm confident Steve Jobs will like this animation so much, he's going to call me and personally offer me a free Power Mac G5 as a sign of his gratitude!

Well, he may offer me a free computer if I promise not do do any more animations.

I guess that means no free G5 for me.

-- Macboy

Please feel free to post questions about the production of this cartoon in the MacToons Animation Forum!