Channel Frederator Blog

Episode 77

There’s nothing better than watching some dancing doctors in a labor room! Face 3 Media brings us all sorts of musical goodness, and Creative Director Gino Pagliuca answers some of my interview questions!

MELISSA: How did you come up with the idea for this film?

GINO: We didn’t want to do anything visually-literal to go with the song, but rather something complimentary. We set guidelines for ourselves, being that it would only take place in one room and there would have to be a lot of dancing. Once we came up with the idea of a woman giving birth in a hospital being taken care of by two goofy doctors, the rest worked itself out.

MELISSA: How long did it take you to animate this?

GINO: It was a full time effort for a little over 4 months, with limited man power (meaning Alex Fellows did all the animation frame by frame on his own, with a little help from volunteer students to clean and color). But considering there was no budget, we’re pretty happy with the results.

MELISSA: What do you do when you get stuck creatively?

GINO: We would usually recycle something, like an aluminum can or scraps of paper. Best thing to do is get rid of that negetive energy by doing something positive.:) Bad joke aside, it was never a question of getting stuck since the whole point of the scenario was that anything could happen. So once we saw where it was going we would just discuss what to add or remove from the video. And truth be told there was so much work to do on this project in various stages of production that if we were ever jammed we could do something else entirely… which brings me back to recycling. Sigh.

MELISSA: What was the most challenging part of the short to animate?

GINO: I’ll let Alex (Fellows) answer that…

ALEX: Any of the parts that had the characters interacting. More specifically the part at the beginning where the bald doctor falls on the floor, gets back up and starts dancing with the orange-haired doctor. Also, trying to find a balance between not making the baby look too cute or too creepy was pretty tough too. We’ve had mixed reactions.

MELISSA: What are you working on now?

GINO: We’re actually creating a few animated video intros for something I can’t talk about just yet. Fun stuff!

MELISSA: Who are some of your influences?

We’re big fans of traditional animation… The old Looney Tunes stuff mostly, as well as the original Superman Cartoons… Alex’s influences are…

ALEX: Don Hertzfeld, Cordell Barker, and the Fleischer Bros., especially for the dancing skeleton parts.

Thanks so much guys! This video was supremely strange and good all wrapped into one.

Face3media is Gino Pagliuca and Enzo Palermo. Alex Fellows is their in-house illustrator / animator.