Wood Zeppelin is a toothpick rock and roll band animation created by world acclaimed toothpick artist Wayne Kusy. It is rock music, internet technology and Folk Art combined to create toothpick music videos. To lampoon the world with toothpicks and music in the vane of the Monkees and MTV.
Folk Art
All the characters, musical instruments, backgrounds, and props are made from toothpicks, wire, used clothing, and other household utensils. The band members have toothpick stage names with the exception of the lead singer: Burch Reynolds on 1st guitar, Chris Wikipix 2nd Guitar, Slim Pickin Bass, Saul Mills Drums and Hortents Byrd vocals.
Rock & Roll
The tootpick characters are modeled after actual musicians who perform and record the video sound tracks. The band plays live, and in the proces of recording a full length CD entitled Wood Zeppelin I.
Internet Technology
Folk Artist Wayne is a web development programmer by trade. The video backgrounds and efects are generated by applications he developed incliding a “Toothpick Typewriter” and a frame compiler called “Frame Padder”. He also used cheap conventional video editors found online.
Wood Zeppelin is musical, humorous, amazing, entertaining and fun for the whole family. It takes a little from all things television and creates a paralell toothpick universe with it. Anti-reality? Hmmmm...
Since 5th grade, artist Wayne Kusy has always focused his talents constructing ocean liners from toothpicks. Stop action animation is something completely new to him. Wayne is also a song writer and guitarist. By trade, he is a professional web developer and programmer, and understands how to build animated gifs for the web. Wood Zeppelin combines all these talents into something unique and powerful, and just as impressive as his 25 foot ocean liners.
For more info on Wayne Kusy, click here.
Enlisting the help of his ship photographer and friend Ed Lines Jr., the artist was given a quick lesson in shutters and exposures and how to take a picture. Using a borrowed Nikon and tripod, Wayne took 4200 photos of the entire construction of the Algonquin, including close ups, moving he camera, experimenting with camera angles to accent different phases of construction. He compiled them 100 at a time using his Ubuntu box, then converting each segment to an MP4. The MP4 segments would be sewn together with a cheap video editor. It became clear in the beginning that certain repetitive parts had to be sped up to avoid a useer turning the video off. As a time lapse, the video would run for almost an hour. When the artist sped up the frame rate, it became more of a stop action animation that a piece by piece time lapse. Suddenly, there were now other possibilities, and other things to replicate with toothpcks other than ocean liners.
It took a whole year to get to this point, but now Wayne Kusy is going to create his first pilot video powered by Wood Zeppelin and a whole lotta toothpicks.
Wood Zeppelin is a real band of real musicians! And in no particular order, here they are... Mouse over the faces below and find out!