Code Red Velvet

The news is pretty much common knowledge at this point, but last week the TSA confiscated a woman's cupcake on the grounds that the frosting was a "safety hazard"... I probably don't need to elaborate much on this, all you have to do is type in "TSA CUPCAKE" on Google and you'll get a billion articles.

My good friend Kevin over at Wolfmantis is friends with the owner of the suicide bombing pastry, Rebecca Hains, and worked with her and a local band to create a little jingle about the cupcake in question titled "Code Red Velvet". Seeing a good opportunity to have a collaboration between Wolfmantis and Six AM Comics, Kevin asked me to create an animation for said jingle... Naturally, I jumped right on board.

The following is the result:

This was the most fun I've had in a while. The animation/jingle was meant to mimic old Sesame Street animations from back in the day. Only we combined that with terrorism and an old game called "Scorched Earth" (iShoot if you have it on an iPhone). Anyway, hope you enjoyed!

Code Red Velvet!
~ Mark

Motion Comics

I do love me some animatin'! Only thing is, I'm an incredibly lazy human being, and the thought of pursuing any kind of professional animation like Loony Toons or Ren & Stimpy makes me feel lethargic. Luckily for me, there's a whole sub-genre of animation devoted to animating comics, Motion Comics if you will. The first time I had ever heard of this technique was with the series "Broken Saints" back in 2003. Since then, you see this sort of thing done all over iTunes, and it's pretty amazing people didn't do this more back in the day (or maybe they did and I just didn't may attention... because I'm lazy).

Anyway, I figured I'd dabble in this a little by animating two of my favorite Scholars comics from back in my earlier days of illustration. The first was about how Stan seemingly breezed through his educational career by cheating*:

*If you go to sixamcomics and type in the Konami Code, it'll bring you to this video.

The second video is a tale of the greatest "guy moment" ever witnessed in the history of men:

So yeah, there you have it. Watch em', love em', pay me money.

Seriously, pay me.
~ Mark

Keith vs Mark: Battle for Donahue

A few days ago, my good friend The Keith wondered what would happen if we fought to the death outside Donahue Hall (a dormitory at UMass-Lowell)... This was the simulation he came up with. Evidently our duel is interrupted by yet another... The dreaded Jacktopuss!!




In response to this video, I (Mark) decided to continue this epic battle...



Here's hoping The Keith chooses to continue the saga...
~ Mark

Bad Things

So I was digging up some old files on my PC and discovered this precious memory of a Video Editing class I took... This video was on Youtube for a while until the audio was disabled... You wanna know why they disabled the audio? Because it used a guitar solo from a Dream Theater song ("Fatal Tragedy")... And I ain't playin', that's a sick guitar solo. So yeah, 2 minute sample from a 7 minute song is obviously considered some kind of copyright infringement... BS.

There's some old footage mixed in here from High School where Dan and myself beat up a bunch of kids in the snow... And it's just great.

Anyway, feel free to enjoy this disturbing video until Blogger decides to cut the audio out too... Although, their "terms and conditions" page isn't working, so I didn't know better...



Also featured in this video are my good friends The Keith, Jackabeez & his lovely wife Stephanie (nicknameless, sorry Steph).

Bad, bad things,
~ Mark