Bob Industries has signed San Francisco-based animation directing duo Syd Garon and Eric Henry.

The pair only recently completed Wave Twisters--The Movie, the animated sci-fi and dentistry-themed visual accompaniment for the eponymously named album from scratch DJ legend, DJ QBert. Starring a bizzare range of characters, including a demented dental commander, his robotic assistant and a number of parasitically controlled midgets, the roughly 45-minute-long piece took three years to complete. The characters were designed by Bay Area graffiti artist Dougone.

"We listened to the album, no exaggeration, at least 10,000 times. It's so specific to the music because the animation is on the beat level so it's all we listened to for the last year in one-second snippets. I'm glad it's over so I can get back into other music," says Garon. "It feels like the visuals were already there and we uncovered them. We would work out a concept and try it out in a storyboard concept. Once you saw the pictures with these crazy sounds it seemed like the only way it could go together. It seems obvious he is fighting a robot through break-dancing."

QBert wove children's story records into the album's mix, which served as a consistent narrative thread for the film's dialog. Syd and Eric used the same storyline and characters as embedded in the music in a visual way.

"The plot points were dictated by QBert in a broad form. If you look at the album liner notes, there is a description of the action for the video for that song and we stayed faithful to that for each song," says Henry. "Then it was a question of listening to the music over and over again. Some of it was obvious, like dialog mixed into the record that points the way, but a lot was more abstract. That left us free to use our imaginations and steer things back around so the story would make sense. But I don't feel like we added a whole lot that wasn't on the album itself."

Adobe After Effects was the primary animation engine for the film, which despite some 3D animation, ends up as something of a lo-fi animation and musical masterpiece.

Webfiles>

Wave Twisters> www.wave twisters-themovie.com