TOM WAITS For No Man

An animated film starring Tom Waits. Performed for us live (at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, 1978), and rotoscoped — a process that traces back the live action frame by frame and turns it into animation. The original live action was shot with 5 cameras — 2 high, 2 low and one hand held. The music from “The One That Got Away” blared in the background as Tom sang karaoke style different lyrics on each take. Two strippers, 6 takes and 13 hours of video footage were edited to make a 5 1/2 minute live action short which we turned into animation. A total of 5500 live action frames were hand traced, caricatured, re-drawn, hand inked and painted onto celluloid acetate cells. Produced by Lyon Lamb, directed by John Lamb, the film bore some cool new technology, talent (David Silverman, producer and director of the Simpsons, and director of the NEW Simpsons movie to be released in July of 2007, was our head animator and also his FIRST job as an animator) and was created specifically for a video music market that didn’t yet exist . But the buzz was out and we went on to create what arguably may be the first music video created for the new and upcoming MTV market. A series of unfortunate events prohibited the film from ever being released or sold commercially, consequently catapulting it into obscurity… until now, thanks You Tube! In 1979, an Academy Award was presented to Lyon Lamb for the technology used in this short. To learn more about this amazing lost film, go to ….TomWaitsLibrary.com and Wikipedia.

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