A special treat from Boing Boing tv for your New Year's eve revelry, we're gonna sneak this one last episode in before the clock strikes 2009 here! Enjoy this music video for Sydney, Australia-based band The Herd, directed by the phenomenally talented Mike Daly. More about the band's "glam/folk/tropical" music here. Every time we played this one in the BBtv editing bay, we all ended up dancing around the Final Cut windows. Mike Daly did incredible work here, there's not a frame of this I'd do differently, and it says so much about the year we're ending tonight, don't you think? Dig it, TRY not to dance, keep the faith my fellow mutants, and Feliz Año a todos ustedes, from all of us at the Boing Boing blogs, and the Boing Boing TV team! Peace.

This short work is a music video he created for the Swedish electronica band Minilogue. The track is "Animals," and the video features colorful critter-blobs wreaking hyperfun havoc all over an urban real-life-scape.

We asked Kristofer to tell us a little about how this came together, and he explains:

In late 2007 we (me and the band Minilogue) started talking about making a followup to the very popular "hitchhiker's choice" video. At the same time I was doing some VJ-ing for them and found that those little animations i made for that could be characters in their next video. So I started producing a lot of loops of creatures. I hooked up with bart yates, nicholas wakeham and erik buchholtz, and our first thought was to put them all in an animated world... but i didn't really feel it. Then Erik showed me a test of my characters motion-tracked onto some footage -- and there it was. So he went out shooting some spots, rough cuts without the creatures, then we added those little fellas in the footage. Voilá! A longer version will be found on the minilogue DVD, coming this fall, finally! The longer version of "hitchhiker's choice" will be on there too. Some other stuff can be found on our temporary web site: http://varelsen.com. Link to Minilogue's YouTube features. (Special thanks to Claire Jones, and to Cocoon.)

Each year, David Silverman (director of the Simpsons Movie, and longtime director of the TV show) illustrates holiday cards for friends and family. Xeni visits him in his home studio for a re-enactment of the craziest years in holiday cheer, complete with tuba carols.

Butterflies, wah-wah pedals, and one-eyed yeti, ahoy! The Boing Boing tv crew is proud to return to the work of one of our favorite multi-media savants, Bill Barminski of Walter Robot Studios. The filmmaker, composer, illustrator and animator shares this new video work, a hypnotic flight of fancy for his music project, the Subatomic Nixons. Enjoy the "Hazy Day," and happy weekend, everyone. Special thanks to Barminski and Christopher Louie, and all of the Walter Robot team. Here are previous BBtv episodes featuring their work.

This short work is a music video he created for the Swedish electronica band Minilogue. The track is "Animals," and the video features colorful critter-blobs wreaking hyperfun havoc all over an urban real-life-scape.

We asked Kristofer to tell us a little about how this came together, and he explains:

In late 2007 we (me and the band Minilogue) started talking about making a followup to the very popular "hitchhiker's choice" video. At the same time I was doing some VJ-ing for them and found that those little animations i made for that could be characters in their next video. So I started producing a lot of loops of creatures. I hooked up with bart yates, nicholas wakeham and erik buchholtz, and our first thought was to put them all in an animated world... but i didn't really feel it. Then Erik showed me a test of my characters motion-tracked onto some footage -- and there it was. So he went out shooting some spots, rough cuts without the creatures, then we added those little fellas in the footage. Voilá! A longer version will be found on the minilogue DVD, coming this fall, finally! The longer version of "hitchhiker's choice" will be on there too. Some other stuff can be found on our temporary web site: http://varelsen.com.

The video was directed and animated by Syd Garon and Eric Henry with illustrations by Doug Cunningham (of Morning Breath), Lee Ballard, Cristie Henry and The Clown's daughter, who was 6 years old at the time.

Part of what makes this so interesting to us is the crazy backstory. Syd explains:

The record was produced by Rick Rubin and had some pretty good Beatles-inspired tunes on it if memory serves.

The Clown had a bizarre list of things -- completely unrelated to our treatment -- which we were required to have in the video. The items were so strange we decided not to even try to fight it. That is why the final video has a pilgrim and a turkey, a rubber dog head, and a rat eating a taco among other oddities.

In addition to "the list" we had to incorporate a bunch of black and white drawings made by his 6 year old daughter. Oh yeah, the drawings had to be playing dodgeball.

We actually had a conversation with an assistant at the record label and spoke the words, "yes there is a rat eating a taco in the video".

One of the band members refused to have his cartoon likeness anything other than completely realistic. That is why a goddamn imaginary band has a robot with bunny ears, a three eyed Rastafarian and one totally fucking normal guy.

In retrospect, having one normal guy makes the band even stranger in a way I never would have thought of. So, hats off to you, normal guy.

To our surprise the video didn't totally work. The kids drawings were actually awesome and if I had a time machine I might go back and try making a video just around them instead combining our ideas with The Clowns.

We made this video with the mighty Doug Cunningham at Morning Breath and it was fun to get the Wave Twisters crew back together again.

Today, we feature the work of animator, filmmaker, and music video director Bill Barminski, a longtime Boing Boing fave.

Above, "Drive In," a soothing ambient work I like to watch before bedtime.

Another beloved Barminksi joint is below, S.E.X.Y. R.O.B.O.T.: Pinker Tones music video by Walter Robot.

Here's a link to all of the BBtv episodes which have featured Barminski's work.

My favorite appears in the second half of this BBtv episode: the "Fuji Apple" animated short from Barminski's production team Walter Robot, with music by Boards of Canada (song: Roygbiv, from "Music has the Right to Children.") I could just watch that over and over again, and I often do.

Jon Berrett of Yo Gabba Gabba explains:

This spring the Aquabats completed a pilot for a new television show based on the misadventures of rock and roll's greatest super dude men. The Aquabats have been a band for over a decade, have toured the world, and put out 5 full length studio albums.

The AQUABATS! SUPERSHOW! TELEVISION PILOT will have a special screening at the San Diego House of Blues show on July 25th, 2008 [during Comic-Con].. If you already have tickets, you are STOKED!

(Huge thanks from all of us at Boing Boing to Jon Berrett and the crew at Yo Gabba Gabba, and to The Aquabats for allowing Boing Boing to share this first with the non-subterranean world!)

Previous BBtv episodes featuring Walter Robot Studios and Bill Barminski:

Previously on Boing Boing tv:
Joaquin Baldwin's short, "Sebastian's Voodoo."

Music in this episode by Residential Sails.

Next, an animation based on work by illustrator Jon Burgerman for his forthcoming book Pens are my Friends, produced by Jason Arber and Wyld Stallyons.

Related Boing Boing tv episodes:

Gaeta explains how he used VR "bubbles" and a mysterious team known as the "world unit" to create the film's "poptimistic photo-anime" feel. The live action Speed Racer is saturated in a candy-colored palette so rich, audiences may just leave the theater with a contact sugar high.

View interactive samples of the digital building blocks behind the movie in a related online feature in VRMAG, "Speed Racer Uncovered."

And Gaeta adds a special message for Boing Boing tv viewers, who are already well accustomed to all things digital -- "For optimal viewing experience, see Speed Racer at a digital cinema or IMAX theater." He's not kidding, with a feature like this, analog projection just doesn't do the work justice.

(Special thanks: John Gaeta; Andy and Larry Wachowski; and David Pescovitz)

Chick, born in 1924, is the most published comic book author in the world. Over decades, his publishing company has released some 500 million fundamentalist evangelical "Chick tracts" warning of the eternal consequences of a life lived without salvation.

One of these cautionary cartoon gospels, "Somebody Goofed," attracted the attention of animator-directors Syd and Rodney a decade ago -- and they transformed it into the mixed media pastiche Boing Boing tv presents to you, dear viewer, today.

This 8 minute film debuted at the DFILM Digital Film Festival in San Francisco on November 7, 1997. DFILM founder Bart Cheever tells Boing Boing tv:

We showed it all over the world. No other film came close to provoking the kind of intense, gut-level reaction that we saw with Goofed -- people really loved it or really, really hated it. Religious people called it blasphemous and threatened to organize boycotts of our shows. Anti-religious people called it religious propaganda and wrote angry letters to theater owners where we screened the festival.

To me, Goofed was the Birth of a Nation of After Effects films, and was really the aesthetic blueprint for much of what you see on TV today. So many people have copied their cool 2D photo-animations, and their style is used so heavily today on VH1, E, MTV, and so on -- it's easy to forget how groundbreaking the film was. No one had ever really done anything like it before.

I loved the way Goofed is this rich moving collage of newsprint religious tracts, album covers (can you spot Paul's Boutique?), clips from 70's gangster films, cigarette ads from old magazines etc. To me, Goofed represented a whole new way of collaging various forms of media.

UPDATE: We reached out to the filmmakers for some thoughts on this amazing piece of work, 10 years after its creation -- Rodney Ascher tells us...

Making Somebody Goofed was 50% art experiment and 50% self-designed AfterEffects tutorial. It was the first digitally animated project for both of us (I think...). It took at least 6 months to make the thing, maybe close to a year. I was running a Powermac 7500 (Syd's always had a model 1 or 2 levels faster than mine so he was probably behind the wheel of an 8500) and we got a gasp during a Q and A when we explained that rendering some of the QuickTimes took more than a day or two and transporting the uncompressed files demanded about 12 Jaz cartridges!

It was designed to be something of a Rorschach test: we followed the original comic as rigorously as we could, resisted any temptation to change things around (for pacing, content, whatever) and allowed the audience to interpret however they liked. During its premiere at DFilm, the audience was mostly quiet and thoughtful but at a screening at the SFMoMA it played pretty much as a spoof with a lot of appreciative laughter. On the other hand, when it was shown at a screening for the Television Commercial Industry, the awkward, confused, slightly hostile silence was deafening. Happily enough, we've gotten very nice responses from both Chick Publications and The Suicide Girls.

(Special thanks to Pesco, and to Syd Garon)

Together, they are probably best known for the animated hip-hop classic DJ Qbert's Wave Twisters -- and Garon directed the opening animation sequence that appears in each and every BBtv episode.

First up in today's show, "Bear Witness III, Ego Trippin'" an animated music video for Dan the Automator. The video includes work from illustrators Lucasz Ataman, Aaron Piland Joshua Ellingson. Co-director Eric Henry describes the video as "[A] four-part study in hubris. Each section explores a different 'ego trip'— military, cosmetic, scientific, and engineering/industrial — and takes it to its logical conclusion. Pride cometh before the fall."

Part two of today's BBtv is an animated video for Buckethead, the eccentric metal guitarist who wears a bucket on his head. For his song "Spokes for the Wheels of Torment," Syd & Eric brought the hellish Rennaisance paintings of Hieronymus Bosch to life. Sinners are plucked apart by demon birds; unrepentant souls are tortured, sliced, and diced, in an epic headbanger's nightmare.

First, "Food Fight," a stop-animation piece that provides an abridged history of war, told through the foods of the countries in conflict (Ed.: the original work has been edited for time, and captions have been added to assist the history-impaired). Next, "My Dog Impersonating Orson Welles," in which a pooch clutches a bottle of champagne, and attempts to form sentences.

Gabe and Max, who have taught so many of us how to achieve the dream lives of our dreams using the internet. Today they answer questions from the Bing Bong audience. Then, aliens discover Mark Frauenfelder's book, "Rule the Web."

BBtv co-editor David Pescovitz takes a trip into the alternate reality of pop surrealist artist Tim Biskup. And it's definitely a trip. Then, sculptor Chris Yates demonstrates how he makes a Diesel Sweeties wooden Red Robot from start to finish, slightly faster than normal.

His quest leads him to new and increasingly more ridiculous casting calls, each one weirder than the last. And they lead him somewhere he never thought he'd end up...

Mauvais Rôle was produced by a team of students at ESRA Sup' Infograph, in France. Authors: Alan Barbier, Camille Campion, Dorian Février, Frédéric Fourier, Frédéric Lafay, Min Ma, Jean Francois Macé, Emmanuel Repérant, Jérémie Rosseau and Olivier Sicot. Full credits here, and the project's website is here.

I was originally introduced to 3d animation by a great freeware program call Anim8or way back in 2000. Soon after, I discovered a program called 3d Studio Max and I have been working with it up to this point. I now work for a company called MAKE.

So, I have several years experience with 3d Studio Max, and am familiar with everything from modelling to texturing to animation.

First up, the classic "Fight Fight," a Mortal Kombat spoof in which the director performs the role of both vanquisher and vanquished. Next, an all-new exclusive for BBtv -- "Blingee IRL," in which all is pimped out and glamtabulous.

In part two of today's episode -- what's the secret behind For Tax Reasons' terrific work? They make those fancy animations with hard labor coerced from underpaid, non-union robots. Robots with simmering resentments that might! just! blow! up!

Candy canes glisten, green frosted hills sparkle, and battered steel weapons glint in the setting sun. Tensions flare on both sides of the battlefield. Gumdrops glare with hatred at the Chocolates. Chocolates wait with confidence, eager to slaughter their opponent. High above in the crimson sky candy corn vultures circle in anticipation of the devastation to come. On a far away hill bright white eyes wait. They wait...

First, regular BBtv contributors monochrom from Austria give us The Void's Foaming Ebb, a hallucinatory retrospective of ancestral media -- from the eight-track to the VCR to long-extinct PDAs -- and a meditation on dead data-forms of the future (created by: Frank Apunkt Schneider, Christoph Sonnleitner, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Stefan Scheder, Roland Gratzer, David Dempsey). German version here.

Next, 198090 by BBtv favorites Peppermelon from Argentina -- a sweet short suggesting new forms of luminous eco-erotica (created by: Fernando Sarmiento & Tomás Garcia).

Link to BBtv post with downloadable video, and discussion. Previously on BBtv:
* Text-o-possum / Your Psycho Girlfriend
* Compubeaver (It's a computer! And a beaver!)

Special thanks to Kasey McMahon of yourpsychogirlfriend, the creator of Compubeaver. Thanks also to Scott Beale for photos.

10 performers outfitted in medieval/space/fantasy armor re-create Bruce Nauman’s 1973 work “Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down”. Performed in slow motion and combined with movements based on computer game death animations, this piece is accompanied by a high volume binaural beats reputed to induce out of body experiences.

In part two, an impressionistic montage of iPhone snapshots taken among those living, slow-mo dead.

In part two of today's episode, "Sometimes I Feel Like This:", an animated short by Eric Henry.

His quest leads him to new and increasingly more ridiculous casting calls, each one weirder than the last. And they lead him somewhere he never thought he'd end up...

Mauvais Rôle was produced by a team of students at ESRA Sup' Infograph, in France. Authors: Alan Barbier, Camille Campion, Dorian Février, Frédéric Fourier, Frédéric Lafay, Min Ma, Jean Francois Macé, Emmanuel Repérant, Jérémie Rosseau and Olivier Sicot. Full credits here, and the project's website is here.

"Pappy" illustrates cryptozoological wonders from his hobo past with a sometimes-malfunctioning robotic hand. Don't miss the second segment in today's episode, in which "Pappy" and Adam head out into the wilderness to spot cryptid tracks in the dirt. What do Sasquatch footprints taste like? You don't wanna know.

If you dig this, feel free to Digg this.

Related Boing Boing tv episodes:

Next, Pour Nos Jeunes, a surreal and eco-funky animated short by award-winning motion graphics studio PepperMelon, from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Directed by Martin Dasnoy.

The port city of Lhek is on the brink of collapse. A Pacific Rim state in a not too distant Asian future with no borders, no meaningful government and little law and order.

Corruption and crime are out of control in the dark alleys of Eda, Lhek’s slum district. Most sectors of the city are controlled by the army of dictator Khaan. The most underprivileged parts of the city are infested with dark Demons, ferocious creatures that spread fear and death amongst the city’s inhabitants. Rumor has it that the Demons are controlled by Khaan in order to keep his people in check.

[This work was] inspired by William Cronon's article, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," which argues that the concept of wilderness is a historical and cultural construct and relying on it as the basis of environmental ethics fails to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and the environments they actually inhabit.

Editor's note: This BBtv episode is sponsored by Dell's regeneration.org project -- but purely by coincidence, a Dell PDA appears in the opening sequence of "Wilderness Trouble." This is not product placement or advertorial. EcoArtTech produced this film in 2007, and the air date of this excerpt was not planned to coincide with the sponsorship campaign.

... a technological research and development organization dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination. Our mission is to study the forces and structures which affect self-determination and to provide technologies which extend the autonomy of human activists.

Next in today's episode: animated square-headed beings from the beautiful genius minds behind Peppermelon.tv.

Previous BBtv episodes featuring the mighty Ape Lad and his kin:

Next, we feature some floating, mobile, hobo homes, in Walterrobot's short film Moon Avenue Box Man.

Part two of today's episode: more animated awesomeness from O'Reilly, with music composed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. It's for MeeBox, a net-video-themed BBc3 TV pilot featuring Adam Buxton.

Previously on BBtv: David Silverman's Flaming Tuba