This month, Adam's imaginary penguin was embodied in the form of an animated felt system and it forced him to sing a song based on whatever turned out to be the top post in the Funny subreddit.

Here's the result.

The felt creatures were made with the help of Laura on a lazy day while watching TV, with scissors and felt and glue. Though the glue mostly didn't even work really and the bits are in fact held together with simple friction. Pictures of the finished creatures were edited in the Gimp to remove the background leaving us with PNG files with transparencies.

The video was shot in one continuous take from two cameras, though not the first take, certainly. The finished video streams were loaded into Cinelerra and synchronised by ensuring the clap at the beginning (later removed) happened in the same place on both tracks.

Playing this through earphones, the penguin voice was added (and the script adjusted to make his words more or less fit into the inadequate spaces Adam had left in the video shoot).

Next the pictures of the animals were added, dragged out to be visible for the entire length of the video tracks, and then scaled and translated into position with Cinelerra's projector automation.

Then we come to the tricky bit: moving the beak and the trumpets. Cinelerra has a 'rotate' video effect which can be applied to clips, setting the key-frames at various points gives the beak the ability to move when the penguin talks, and the trumpets to move while the brass band play.

With all this in place, we rendered the front-camera complete with animation.

To move the animals into the correct place for the side-camera, a perspective transform was applied to each of the animal PNGs. Luckily, this kept the rotation data in place so there was no need to redo the animation for moving the beak etc. and the side-view with animation could be rendered quite easily.

The closeup view for the brass band was taken in a separate shot of the cushion and simply zooming on the PNGs with the projector automation again.

At last, all three shots were in place and a new cinelerra project was started with a track for each of these three completed video sources. Playing through while creating key-frames for muting each of those tracks got the first rough cut of the video finished, and that was refined more later.

Andi came in to play the kazoo for us, which we recorded twice and overdubbed for the brass band.

Finally, the camera automation keyframes were tweaked to do a bit of panning and scanning over the video sources to make the shots seem less static and dull, and a little animated perspective effect done over the little jingle at the end of the brass band playing.

The final result: Adam gets to talk to his penguin, and /r/funny gets to see it's top post rendered in song.

As Adam says in the video: we're really not terribly interested in doing this again, but we can be bribed to do so if enough people chip into the tip box.

People have indeed done this for "Upload", which gathered enough tips to make part two this month, and so next month we will have the next chapter starring Kaye Conway and Adam Priest as Eve and Sam, her dead uploaded granddad.