The official music video for "The Faster the Treadmill" by I Fight Dragons is out! Watch it here!
I began work on this for the band shortly after completing Grumatorium and later finished it in April. I Fight Dragons utilizes a lot of game controllers and NES era material into their music and performances so I approached this video from a similar perspective; I started by designing and animating gameplay footage from a fictional 8-bit game that the video would take place in.
The result was "the Adventures of Puddlenaut," in which a shark-armed diver hero does battle with deep sea creatures in order to mine mystical power crystals that are abundant in the underwater kingdom. The main grunt enemies, one of which is the protagonist of the video, were modeled after drowned fetuses since I couldn't find any deep sea creatures to fit the image I was looking for. Thus I ended up calling the main character "Fetusaur" throughout production.
After designing and animating the fake game footage digitally using a set of hand drawn sprites, it was a long process of animating the rest of the video traditionally and then compositing the two types of animation together where they overlapped.
There were several games that I drew inspiration from/stuck homages in for, but people's guesses as to what these are have been all over the place. To clear things up, the following are the only ones I intentionally inserted homages to:
Super Mario Bros
Inspiration for the level design, plus considering its status as the best known 8bit platformer, it seemed wrong not to include it.
Megaman
The original series is a favorite of both myself and the band. I included homage to these games in the final boss scene, in
which the chamber has the same time pausing shutter style doors.
Final Fantasy
A favorite of the band, but a game I know hardly anything about (on account of my distaste for RPGs). Every game seems to
revolve around magic crystals according to my brief research, and so the story of "the Adventures of Puddlenaut" is centered
around glowy crystals.
the Katamari series
The first two games are some of my favorite, if not my favorite, games. In a group shot of enemies there is a vaguely Katamari
shaped, green plant in the back (unfortunately it got pretty cropped out in post production).
Portal
The sequel looks like Pixar-inspired garbage, but I adore the original. There is a certain cuboid cameo for all of two frames
during a camera movement early on that is virtually invisible without obsessive pausing.
This is the first and last time I'll ever incorporate video games in my work however, as the internet's over-saturation of crappy video game animations is frankly nauseating.
Stay tuned for BarfQuestion Games debut title "Hitting Stuff at a Building" and a new installment in the SuperVillain series during the next few months! Check out the previous entry for more information because I am all full of hectic and busy and it is difficult to write more things for you when I am moving around this much.
