Tom Waits Rotoscope “The One That Got Away” (by John Lamb, 1979)

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 5,500 frames were caricatured and then re-drawn, inked and painted by hand onto celluloid acitate to produce this film. Produced by Lyon Lamb, directed by John Lamb, the film bore some cool new technology, talent ( David Silverman, producer and director of the Simpsons TV series, 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. In 1979, an Academy Award was presented to Lyon Lamb for the technology used in this short. The production materials (character sketches, layouts, storyboards, animation drawings and cels) are still amazingly intact and held in private hands. However, a few of the production elements managed to slip away over the last 28 years.

Official Site: http://www.tomwaits.com/
Official Store: http://tomwaitsstore.com/
Facebook:   / tomwaits  
Twitter:   / tomwaits  

#tomwaits