Birth of an Intro

I found it appropriate today to put the intro for the first Bolts of Thunder video on our blog today. Don't ask me why, I just found it extremely appropriate. A little background on this minute and a half bit of work will help you appreciate it more as you watch it. No, actually, it probably won't. But it might make for good reading. But still, probably not... So most movies and videos have intros. I guess there are a couple that don't, but most do. So as me and Matt were putting the video together, we had a traditional intro for the video: a fast song with people flying on skateboards and stuff like that. Just standard modus operandi, if you will. Nothing new, fun, or exciting. I'll be the first to admit this, Bolts of Thunder is not on the same playing field as major skate videos. And I'm ok with that. I'm actually really happy about that. That means we can do our own thing and have fun. If we were to even try and make a cool intro with a fast song and people wrecking and landing tricks and all that, it would just really fall short of anything cool  or exciting that you see in your little skate videos and all that. So Matt and I were thinking of what to do with the intro, and we watched what we already had. Matt said, "I don't like this. We should just have drawings or something..." That hit me like a ton of air, floating above me in the atmosphere, pushing down on my tiny little body, and my tiny little body pushing back with an opposite and equal force. Newton's 5th law. Yeah, I was pushing pretty hard. So I rolled that over in my mind for the entire day, thinking of how we were going to do this. I had been kind of sick for a day or two, so I took NyQuil that night to help me sleep. NyQuil makes me tired, delirious, and a little loopy, but it doesn't help me sleep. So at about 2 in the morning, an idea popped up into my mind. "PAINT!" I don't know if it was pure genius, or the adverse affects of NyQuil on my mind, but I had the idea that I could draw out everyone on the Paint program on the computer. Yeah, we're talking Paint from the old original computers way back when. The for-runner to Adobe After Effects and all those high tech programs. So I got out of bed, sat on my blue exercise ball chair, typed "paint" into the search engine on the computer, and up the program popped... So I started that night drawing what turned out to be a tree getting struck by a lightning bolt and starting on fire. I wanted to have something that might offend small children or sheltered adults, like a burning tree, so that's how it started. After a couple hours, I had the beginning of the intro drawn. I knew exactly what song I wanted to use, I had used it a long time ago in a VHS video that we made. The next day I showed Matt the first couple seconds of the intro, and he laughed really hard. That's when you know if you're on to something, Matt will laugh. That's a good thing with having Matt as pilot on these little operations we run. If something is no good, he will not patronize you and say it was. He will stare blankly at the computer screen, then stare at the ground in disappointment for having wasted his time watching whatever it was. He's a tough critic to pass, but whatever does pass him, you know it'll be good. And that's how your intro was born...