wEirdWorld

director's commentary

i am honestly surprised that this animation ever got finished.

i have a tendency to plan projects a little over-ambitiously and end up burning myself out to the point that production halts entirely, or becomes so scarce and slow-paced that it might as well have halted entirely.

there were many points that i felt i had made the same mistake with wEirdWorld. it was a year, full of set-backs and rewrites and exhaustion, in the making and almost the death of Soi Animatica as a whole.

by some divine providence, however, wEirdWorld was completed. i don't know what happened that gave me the strength to pull through, but i am loath to take credit for it lest i be struck down in umbrage by the amply-motivated creature that evidently possessed my being during the last months of production.

i'm sure other, more talented, people could have made a similar animation in a fraction of the time, but it was no easy undertaking for me and i am proud of myself.

as for the actual content of the video; pretty much all of the backgrounds in wEirdWorld were made in Bryce3D, a 1994 rendering program that specializes in fractal landscapes. it's a fun, comparatively simple, program to learn and runs on modern windows hardware without needing a VM - i would totally recommend it to beginners interested in 90s era CGI.

the choice to make jackie mouthless and instead have him speak through speech bubbles was an idea originally conceived to save time, as i wouldn't have to lip-sync his lines.
i believe animating the speech bubbles and ensuring the text was always legible actually took longer than it would have otherwise. that's what i get for trying to cut corners, i guess!

the original concept was for jackie to attend a show at a theatre rather than a circus, and his ambition would have been to become an actor rather than a clown - this would have tied jackie a little more closely to troy and put emphasis on the admiration felt.

i think it's kind of a shame to have lost that more nuanced relationship between the two, but i felt that clowns and circuses were much more interesting visually and thematically. i love little jackie paperfingers, and i just don't know if he'd be the same if he weren't an aspiring clown.

using the circus set-piece also meant that i got to revive a previously abandoned video idea. long before wEirdWorld was conceptualized i had the idea for Mr. Blueboys Big-Time Big-Top Bonanza Hour, which would have been a thirty-minute video exclusively featuring mr. blueboy being animated to various Tiny Tim songs. i'm sure you can understand why, and are incredibly grateful that, it never came to fruition - instead being re-tooled for mr. blueboys scenes here in wEirdWorld.

in the Rainy Days and Mondays montage there is a scene of jackie bombing at a comedy club called the gaffe factory, this is of course a parody of the famous american chain the laugh factory; it is not, however, a reference to the kramer at the laugh factory incident. after wEirdWorld's release i had a few friends of mine asking if that's what was being referenced. again, it's not. that is not the kind of thing i would want to joke about in these animations.

the song playing as jackie walks to the train station is an original composition that i commissioned from the immensely talented Ketchuro.

troy2000 is, regrettably, not an original creation of my own (as much as i would love to claim him).
his design was actually taken from a freeware PC game released in 2000, which my dad installed on the family computer when i was a child. i fully believe that the 3D model i made of troy is the best thing i have ever modelled.

for a brief moment, before even the first draft of wEirdWorld was written, i was contemplating using Barry White's voice for troy. it was after i recounted some moments from a few Orson Welles interviews which i thought would work perfectly story-wise for wEirdWorld that i decided against the Walrus of Love. it also gave me an excuse to slip in some voice clips from the Frozen Peas recording, which i have been obsessed with for years.

the clip that plays in troy's thought-bubble when he laments all the animals he has killed comes from the only surviving footage of 1918's The Ghost of Slumber Mountain; the movie in its entirety lost media.

the yellow poster that appears on the wall of the station is for an Obayashi movie called
さびしんぼう; or, Lonelyheart. it is one of my all-time favourite movies. jackie's human design later in the video was inspired by this character. mr. blueboy is watching the movie on his CRT in the final scene of wEirdWorld, and the credits feature a video of Lonelyheart's lead actress Yasuko Tomita performing a song from the movie's soundtrack.

jackie's dream of the farm was rendered twice. once, with the entire scene in full colour, and again with just jackie visible. i did this to remove all saturation from the world around jackie, leaving only him and a few select objects in colour. it occurs to me now that it may have been easier to use monochrome textures where i needed them and just render the whole thing once, but there are some visual effects i don't believe i would have been able to pull off if i had done so.

this sequence uses Patti Smith 1975 song Birdland as the principle mode of story-telling. the album that the song comes from, Horses, is one of my favourites; french baker samples a clip from another song off the same album: Land: Horses / Land of a Thousand Dances / La Mer.
i also used footage from Sabin Bălașa's 1973 short Galaxia, and Fred Wilcox's 1956 movie Forbidden Planet; among various other pieces of stock-footage.

the morning/sun train scene is built heavily around showcasing some of my renders from the aforementioned program Bryce3D. the only background that isn't one of these renders is a clip of Caparezza performing his song Jodellavitanonhocapitoun-
cazzo live.

the egg of truth is another idea that was originally going to have its own video, but that i felt couldn't really stand well on its own. the idea actually dates back to the same day i came up with french baker, under the influence of some... jazz cigarettes.
the little pink freak sat next to the egg of truth is based on the streamer BeardPrincess; they have shown oozeboy on their stream many times, so i asked if they wanted something thrown into my latest project as thanks.

the song playing in this scene is greg53jones' I dream of St John, which i personally got permission to use.

also, the fact about Rasputin and Bobbie Farrell is actually true and i will never shut up about how crazy that is.

in the original draft of the script, the ending was to be drastically different.
after jumping into the big mole's big hole jackie would have fallen into Brighton, UK in the real world, and met me (in live-action). I would have said "Hello, Jackie PaperFingers! I am C.G. Soisa - from the real world!" and then credits would have rolled over footage of us both dancing.
this was a stupid idea and completely irrelevant to the narrative, it was cut and re-written almost immediately.

in the actual version, jackie sings a cover of Stephen Sondheim's Send in the Clowns. the amazing job of tuning jackie's vocals was done by the previously mentioned Ketchuro. i think this might be my favourite moment in the entire Soi Animatica project and i cannot thank them enough for making it possible.

i don't have too much to say about the final scene before the credits, everything that isn't intentionally left up for interpretation is pretty self-evident.

the reception that this video has received kind of blew me away. the performance of the video itself has been pretty typical in comparison to the rest of my animations (which in itself is surprising, considering i hadn't uploaded anything in a year) and i knew that a twenty minute animation full of ugly visuals and TTS voices wasn't going to appeal to many people, but the comments people have left are what i truly treasure.

i never expected that people would so thoroughly engage with and analyse wEirdWorld, and it makes me so happy that at least a few people have understood the message and connected with it. i have a few comments screenshotted and kept in a special folder to read when i need to smile.

thank you all :3

original description

don't you love farce?

special thanks to ketchuro for composing an original song and pitch correcting some TTS vocals for this video!!

and thanks also to greg53jones for givng me permission to use their song "I Dream of St John" in the video!