DMX Meets David Bowie (Patreon)

Here's a cartoon I made in ten days using photos and audio of DMX and David Bowie, to make a silly little story about them hanging out and becoming friends.

I'm a big fan of David Bowie and DMX. I find them both endlessly compelling, in different ways. I had found some DMX a capella tracks on youtube and started using them to make mashups, most of which you can find on my Soundcloud.  I thought the brutality and dark humour of his lyrics would contrast well with stuff like ABBA's glossy 70s productions or the cutesy J-pop  group Perfume. The mashup I did with Bowie's "Heroes" was probably my favourite because of the poignancy of the production and Bowie's passionate performance juxtaposed with some of DMX's sleaziest rhymes  about laying pipe for the hos.

After attending one of Sam Gurry's Animation Brut screenings at the Echo Park Film  Centre in LA, I was being excited by the idea of making something that didn't have to be 'good' or polished, using different techniques from my usual stuff and focusing on a fun, loose process.

Creatively  it was a nice 'vacation' project in that most aspects were at least  partially determined by outside factors. The plot was dictated by the available audio I could find, and came together organically as I found more clips and edited the audio (like finding a clip of Bowie talking about monopolies, or DMX using kool-aid as a euphemism in a lyric).  There were a lot of potential story options I had to cut or abandon to  keep the cartoon somewhat focused.
The visuals were also limited by what angles and poses I could find photos of. I ended up 'cheating,' as I suspect is inevitable in this kind of project-- a lot of the hands are  not actually theirs, nor the bodies in the over-the-shoulder angle of  them playing Sonic 2.

In some ways it was liberating to not actually have to draw anything, but it also gave me a  new appreciation for the flexibility and freedom I usually have creating  everything from scratch and being able to draw exactly the poses you need to tell the story, rather than trying to fudge some existing janky  assets into place.