Now playing at Bushin30Seconds.org

For the past month and a half, my good friend Tom Neely and I have been working on this top secret project. Now that MoveOn.org’s contest has launched, we’re proud to present our short, “Brother, Can You Spare A Job?”. Here’s the description that will be appearing on the contest’s site :

“Following in the footsteps of Max Fleischer, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones, ‘Brother, Can You Spare A Job?’ is an original, fully-animated look at the underbelly of Bush’s economy which juxtaposes a depression-era style with modern-day quotes from Presidential radio addresses.”

You can view (and vote for!) the commercial by clicking on the picture below :




If you’d like to help spread the word about our commercial, please click on the “Continue reading…” link below.

To my regular readers, you know I don’t ask for much, but if you enjoy the commercial, could you please send a link to this post to any family or friends who may also enjoy it? With 1500+ entries in the contest, positive word-of-mouth is the only thing that will keep “Brother…” from getting lost in the shuffle.

Also, for those of you with your own sites, if you’d like to help spread the word as well, we’d be eternally grateful. You can either link to this post directly, or if you’d like, you can add a button-sized version of the poster or a banner ad to your site by inserting the following code into your HTML :

Code :

<a href=”http://www.bushin30seconds.org/vote/view.html?ad=0yDF9XY7Ly6wA7e7EShbqHZpZXctODIx” target=”_blank”>
<img src=”http://www.thetalentshow.org/images/bush30_button.jpg” width=”200″ height=”133″ border=”0″></a>

or

<a href=”http://www.bushin30seconds.org/vote/view.html?ad=0yDF9XY7Ly6wA7e7EShbqHZpZXctODIx” target=”_blank”>
<img src=”http://www.thetalentshow.org/images/bush30_bannerad.gif” width=”486″ height=”60″ border=”0″></a>

Displays :



or



On behalf of Tom and myself, I’d like to thank you all in advance for your support.


posted by greg on December 17, 2003 @ 12:42 pm

12 comments

  1. Great job! I actually followed the link and watched it before I even realized it was yours.

    Are you not able to use Bush’s actual voice for some reason? Or was it, and I just can’t tell on my crappy speaker?

    I like the old-school narrator voice, but I think Bush’s voice might have more impact.

    I am forwarding it along.

    Comment by Mr. Furious — December 17, 2003 @ 9:45 pm

  2. it is bush’s voice… the recording was kinda crappy (downloaded off the government’s site)… but i think the low quality of the recording ads to the ’30s feel we were going for.

    thanks for the compliments… forward it to everyone you know.

    Comment by tom — December 18, 2003 @ 1:39 am

  3. It took me a relatively long time to download it, and I’m on a cable modem. Are you required to use a high-bitrate MPEG, or are you allowed to use Windows or Realmedia? At any (bit)rate, I liked it. I thought it was really good. I actually had been trying to concieve of an idea for the contest, but none of my ideas were as good as this.

    Comment by Earnest — December 18, 2003 @ 2:14 am

  4. Good work, fellas

    Greg Saunders of The Talent Show and Tom Neely have put together an anti-Bush commercial for moveon.org’s contest. They’ve done good work. Tom Neely also has a series of cartoons over at Ostrich Ink. They really made my day, especially…

    Trackback by Mellifluence — December 18, 2003 @ 2:21 am

  5. thank you, earnest… i know it takes a bit of time… i’m on a DSL and it still takes over a minute to download each commercial… they wanted quicktime movies or MPEGS for their site.

    unfortunately i think the long downloads will deter some of the voters… but oh well.

    i’ve been through 100 of them, and i still haven’t been able to vote for our commercial yet.

    Comment by tom — December 18, 2003 @ 8:01 am

  6. I went on last night to vote… it only let me view 20 b/c of the high volume, but yours was one of them… dumb luck- you got all 5’s. congrats- it’s awesome

    Comment by erin — December 18, 2003 @ 8:50 am

  7. You should have encoded in quicktime using MPEG-4. It will give you about the same compression that WVM9 or DiVX will give you. Of course it can sometimes be hard to find something that will encode in that.

    Comment by andrew — December 18, 2003 @ 10:41 am

  8. “Boop-oop-a-doop.”
    A wonderful short.
    I fly the banner proudly.

    Comment by Nathan Callahan — December 18, 2003 @ 10:54 am

  9. For some reason (check the html code!) this clip does not stream as it loads.

    Comment by sam — December 18, 2003 @ 5:41 pm

  10. As someone who also submitted an ad, I know that our ad at least got re-encoded to Mpeg 1. So final format appears to be out of our control. Click on my name to see our ad.

    Comment by Eric Iverson — December 20, 2003 @ 4:39 am

  11. Wow. Beautiful animation. I’m a fan of old B&W cartoons, and yours really captures their essence. Good luck with the contest!

    Comment by Peter Basch — December 20, 2003 @ 5:44 pm

  12. to andrew- actually i did an MPEG 4 version, but it had to be converted to a quicktime mov file for the move-on site. we had no control over what the final file-type would be.

    thanks to all of you for your kind comments on the ad. we worked hard on it for the small ammount of time we had.

    and thanks, in advance, to any of you who get a chance to vote for us.

    Comment by tom — December 22, 2003 @ 12:43 am

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