Guy teaches himself 3-D animation on his Mac. Guy makes animated movie of green, karaoke-singing alien. Guy’s animated movie takes the Internet by storm. Guy winds up with a job at Pixar Studios. You know–that old story.
That’s what happened to Victor Navone, a San Francisco-area artist who used his G3 to create Alien Song, an abbreviated version of the disco anthem “I Will Survive”–as sung by a three-fingered, one-eyed extraterrestrial named Blit Wizbot.
Navone worked on a 333MHz G3 for many of the 250 hours it took to produce Alien Song. Relying on Adobe After Effects for compositing, Navone did most of the texturing work on a Mac so he could take advantage of his Wacom ArtZ ADB tablet (800/922-6613, www.wacom.com ). He tapped the Mac version of Hash’s Animation Master (360/750-0042, www.hash.com ) to create some of the actual animation.
After doing design work for video games, Navone parlayed his Alien Song success into a job on the movie Titan A.E. He’s since moved on to Pixar. Still, the popularity of Alien Song puzzles him. “I look at it today and just see the things that aren’t perfect and still need tweaking. But people send me e-mails saying they loved Alien Song, and it made their children laugh. That’s very satisfying.”
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