A local restaurant called The Rock Cafe called and wanted our station to promo free WiFi access for their customers. I had already been experimenting with some neat effects in Avid, and I desperately wanted the chance to use them when this project came along. I'm calling this a loving tribute so as to avoid legal problems, but fans of Kubrick's 2001 will note that my version of HAL is much more animated than his. Some might say I was overzealous, but I'd like to think I was merely accounting for how nutty HAL would be after all this time... It gets lonely in space.
TECH NOTES:
The opening scene is three simple .PSD transparencies moving at different rates to give that classic look of animated Disney depth. HAL's faceplate was an Adobe PhotoShop composite adapted from a desktop wallpaper jpeg. The exagerated voice flux animation was a vocalization from Windows Media Player that I filmed and brought into Avid for effects work (including a kaleidoscope, iris, and motion-blur). HAL was voiced by myself, and I put a little Flange effect on it to tin it up a bit.
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