Bent supplies stop-motion poop for Triumph - Animation

Post, Dec, 2003 by Randi Altman

PORTLAND, OR -- Triumph the Insult Dog's new music video for the single I Keed, off his "Come Poop With Me" CD, stinks. That's not so much a criticism of the music or the quality of the video as much as the content--in the video, likenesses of the artists Coldplay, P. Diddy and Justin Timberlake are sculpted in, well, dog poop.

Robert Smigel, the man behind the fecal-obsessed Triumph dog puppet, a regular on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, called on the artists at Bent Image Lab (www.bentimagelab.com) to provide "poopmation" for his first music video, which aims to remind three of the music industry's most popular artists that their poop don't stink.

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According to Bent's partner/director Chel White, the studio provided: 30 of stop motion animation for the mostly live-action puppet-focused project.

After some research ... ok, they worked from memory, Bent artists set out on making some poop. "We worked with clay," explains a relieved White. "We did some things to the clay to give it more of a texture than clay usually has, like adding sand, gravel and corn in a couple of places."

The biggest challenge, he says, was trying to get the clay to look like poop and still get the likenesses right. "Bartek Prusiewicz, our sculptor/character designer, did a really nice job on that," says White.

"We started with P. Diddy, or Poop Daddy as we call him, and we tried to figure out what was going to be our approach, not just for him but for everybody. So we started with something that was more on the side of poop and less on the side of a likeness." Bent was in communication with Robert Smigel, and once they felt the poop was okay, they moved on to the pop stars' likenesses. "We tried to find the right balance," says White.

According to White and Bent executive producer/producer Ray Di Carlo, this was a "down and dirty" stop-motion project. "There were wire armatures inside and we built clay up on it," says White. "In the case of some of the clothing, we had to modify some of the existing clothing we could get a hold of. And that was actually a little more difficult than some of the sculpting."

Other Bent credits include DP Mark Eifert, principal animator/associate director Jeff Riley, designer/animatic Pascal Campion, Adobe After Effects artist Orland Nutt and project manager Andrea McDowell. The music video was edited at Three Fingered Louie in Los Angeles.

Looking back fondly on the project, Di Carlo says, "We've had more puns in two weeks than I have in my entire career."

"Yes, our careers are really in the toilet," sums up White.