Hello Amherst CMS!

You can find out much more about me at my web site.

http://www.winglmui.com

You can also, of course, just read my plan.

The Lord Jeffery Amherst Musical w/ Bunnies

Throughout the years, the most common question that I get from Amherst students, prospective students, alumni, faculty and staff who find me on the greater Internets is "where is your Lord Jeff animation?!!!". It seems that in over five years this animation had delighted many members of the community and convinced at least one person to become an Amherst student (and eventually an Amherst employee!) as opposed to a student at Harvard (or was it Williams?).

Now that the good folks in Converse has upgraded the CMS and is allowing Shockwave uploads, I thought I should post it back on amherst.edu. So I suppose that instead of scrambling for the URL to my latest rearrangement of my web page every time Roz Foster '05 wants to show it to perspective students, I can just send her over here. Without further ado, click on the crab:

 

 

There is a version available on YouTube as well. Please leave a kind comment there if you like this.

In 2009, a pile of 08s and 09s and 10s had this scavenger hunt. One of the items was to make a video of a life action version of this video. This is one of the entries featuring Izzy Mahoney'09, Mike Chernicoff '09 and some other folks I do not know.

History: This animation was made during finals week of my first semester at Amherst. I recall that my first semester was horribly not-busy compared to my classmates'. So instead of pulling all nighters studying or writing I made a Flash video involving bunnies and Lord Jeff instead. Also, Maryna Gray '05 made fun of me for not knowing the lyrics to the most famous Amherst song ever and I decided to listen to it repeatedly for five days while animating this thing. There is no sequel to it because starting the next semester the Theatre and Dance department claimed my life.

Answers to FAQs: So, the first question, I suppose, is why Lord Jeff is depicted as a samurai. There is a very simple reason: I already have stock drawings of bunnies and katanas and bunnies in simplistic ancient Chinese court outfits. Yes, I know samurais aren't Chinese. Whatever. I also know that the correct cheer is "BRING IT HOME". But this is not football. This is a rabbit dressed as a samurai called Lord Jeffery Amherst doing battle with a turkey on a bridge persumably over a lake that is next to a waterfall I was too lazy to animate. So I modified it a bit. This whole thing was done in a Japanese-comedy inspired irreverant style, so things don't really make sense.

The Future: There were plans to make one of these for Paige's Horse, which came about as my then girlfriend made fun of me for not knowing the words to Paige's Horse. While she did. She went to UMass. Anyway, that project was quickly scrapped due to the lack of hilarity in the song and also my two theses. There is, however, a very, very incomplete version of a Hand Me Down My Bonnet animation somewhere in my files. I think I had the first three lines animation. Do you have any idea how hard it is to draw calico dresses on cartoon bunnies when you can't draw?