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Featured Director - Bryce Van Patten

Bryce Van Patten

My deep passions for art and music have been the driving forces throughout my life. At Man In Black Studios, I bring a longtime love of both 2D and 3D animation together with my fondness for monsters, the macabre and science fiction to create music videos and film shorts.


My video 'The Black Tuesdays - When the dogs come home' will be a part of Spike & Mike's Animation Festival Gauntlet of Animation at the upcoming ComicCon. It would be great if we survive and are added to the annual Animation festival on tour, all thanks to Reallusion's amazing tools.

Artist, musician, animator, filmmaker and creator of The Black Tuesdays

Q: Tell us about the Man in Black music, band and studio. How did this all start?

Back in the year 2000 I formed an online record label called Man In Black Music which promoted both local and international heavy metal recording artists. At the time I was also in a band called Jesters Moon and I had my own recording studio where we recorded our albums and a lot of local talent as well. It was a very exciting time also due to the expanding role of the internet in music promotion and publication.


Man In Black Music was originally created as a publisher for my own music and then mostly known for putting out The Defenders of Metal albums which were compilations of unsigned bands from around the world. The albums were well received and I am still threatening to produce a Defenders of Metal III album.


Defenders of Metal I - The Seduction and Defenders of Metal II - The Dark side are both available at CDBaby and Amazon.com.

Now I am focused on my project The Black Tuesdays, the group is playing original heavy metal as well as classic cover tunes you might not expect from a metal band.


Q: How many members in your Heavy Metal band? Care to talk about any particular songs or albums that you especially like?

The Black Tuesdays are a four piece studio band with the members represented by images originally created in and for Crazy Talk Animator. The characters have since been re-defined in DAZ3D for use in IClone and DAZ.


So far we have released the music video for 'When the Dogs Come Home' which was done in my own recording studio with all the video imagery created from scratch in CrazyTalk Animator.

The video is my homage to the wolf man and all the classic werewolf films I grew up watching as a kid. Incidentally the main wolf was sketched based on my friend's cocker spaniel named Jasmine, though she is nowhere near as scary even if she thinks she is.

This was my first full length video done in CrazyTalk and it was definitely a lot of fun to have such freedom to put anything I could imagine on the screen with relative ease, and get such good results.




Q: In your animations you use both CrazyTalk Animator and iClone. When and how did you start using these tools, and why?

Ok, so when I originally came up with the idea for The Black Tuesdays, I was thinking of packaging the music in a bubble gum card format with the band members being cartoon characters. At this time I was working under the project name of 'Bazooka Joe' which is pretty funny now that I look back at it.

Then one day I was sharing this idea with a close friend who showed me a website which was using some simple animations for musicians, which gave me the idea to create the band as animated figures like 'The Archies' or even 'Metalacolypse' for the metal equivalents.

I searched the internet for animation software to see what might be possible and I was seeing a lot of programs that just didn't appeal to me creatively. Then I came across Reallusion's site with the free trial of CrazyTalk6, and I was simply amazed at being able to animate faces so quickly. From there I purchased CrazyTalk Animator and found out that I could create any scene I wanted with real depth and unlimited potential for art and creativity.

So you could say that CrazyTalk had a real role in the creation of The Black Tuesdays.



Q: Besides using them for music videos, are there any other projects where you plan to use animations in?

Yes, I am working on a micro series called 'A Visitor from Space' in iClone, which features some old school style aliens and flying saucers that are up to no good. I really enjoyed building the flying saucer in iClone just by using geometric props and then skinning them with textures. I feel I was able to really capture that classic UFO look that I was going for, like I'd always loved in classic sci-fi films such as 'The Earth Versus The Flying Saucers' and 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'


I am also currently producing a Robert E. Howard short story called 'Rattle of Bones'. The film is being done in iClone with all custom actors created lovingly in DAZ3D Studio and imported using iClone 3DXchange. I currently have all my sets built and all my actors created and imported into iClone, and all the dialogue recorded so now it's time for some animation fun. That's another thing I love about iClone, the ability to set up a scene with multiple cameras- really making the work so much easier and faster, and a lot of fun in the process.

I have always been a huge fan of stop motion animation and cell (2D) animation so when I discovered Reallusion and their software I found out that I am now able to make films and cartoons that I previously could have only dreamed of doing, especially when I am working on an artist's budget.

Thanks Reallusion for making it a reality.

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To see more, visit >>
Official Website: http://theblacktuesdays.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/maninblackmusic
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