u seen this?
Cool Pool Fool is an animation made by Tissa David and John Hubley for the show The Electric Company around 1973.
I first saw it in 2022 when one Marty Daniels reuploaded the original Cool Pool Fool to his channel, and Marcy sent it to me.
i loved his vibe so much that i set it as my home tab at work, and i would see it every time i opened my web browser.
a couple years later i started thinking about recreating it in blender. since the quality of the video was so rough, i felt like it could even be useful as a preservation effort or something lol. So i started doing some tests
At this point I decided to add the “stop motion” aspect to my remake to give it a life of its own. In my fantasy world where Cool Pool Fool was a stop-motion production, everything was made by hand and shot on a tabletop. There was some reimagining on my part, but I thought the differences would make it more interesting.
First I made a key frame from each shot. (full body, portrait, pool table) I looked into a bunch of different methods like grease pencil, converting Illustrator vectors to geometry, more hands-off stuff like that. The only time i was able to get the Fool to look good was when I modeled it manually. i knew once i started down that road, i would not be able to easily change things.
I didn’t want to keep messing around with the technical side, so i just started making frames of animation.
Even after spending an exhausting amount of hours on it by the end, i feel like this was the best method. During production i would occasionally see blender artists doing claymation stuff in different, faster ways, but my ways was easier than drawing or vectoring every frame. I became well acquainted with how to shape the curves. I didn’t need to open a different program or set up my tablet. I even did half of the frames on my laptop on the fuckin bus!!! So i just stuck to my guns.
i made a template model collection that i would duplicate when making a new frame, but a lot of times it was faster to make the character from scratch rather than modify an existing one.
The process:
1. duplicate model collection
2. model the body, face, letters
3. auto uv unwrap everything
4. render
5. ingest frames to After Effects
that’s about it!!! All i had to do was line up my meshes with the reference layer.
My creative liberties: in the original, the surface of the pool table is the same color as the edge. i figured the same felt as the hat would be more suitable. I also didn’t like how the shape of his pointy teeth looked in 3D, so i gave him round Simpsons teeth. unfortunately he loses a bit of his feral demeanor this way, but it’s less distracting to me.
my favorite parts are where the pool table and letters translate across the screen. all the other animation is frame-by-frame, and i thought it might look lame to have a clean keyframed motion when the table slides across the screen. instead, i moved the table to line up with the reference layer, but without locking it to the X axis. in the final, i LOVE how imperfect the movement is. very rankin-bass, i think.
I also like the forced perspective of the shot with the two balls bouncing around. In my imaginary world where this was a real stop-motion production, i think that would be the most practical way of doing it.
CHAPTER 2:
INDELIBLE HUBRIS
originally, I was also going to remake the song, but in a different style. I thought that a Moog-sounding synth version in the style of Wendy Carlos or Mort Garson would be fitting for the time period. I started over 3 times but it was depressing how bad it sounded. idk, maybe blues with only analog synth just doesn’t work? i felt so uninspired that it killed my motivation for months. here’s a graph showing how many frames I rendered every day:
i don’t even want to share the music WIPs, so just imagine the song in the style of Plantasia, but really really bad.
Eventually I decided that maybe making a new version of the song was prob tasteless anyways. I decided to just lock in, finish the fuckin thing, and call it complete
My average time to complete a unique character frame was around 30-45 mins. ones with just lettering took maybe 15 mins. By the end of the production, i probably spent 275 hours on it.
One problem i was excited to fix was the frame rate. in Marty’s upload, it looks like the analog signal is recorded to 30fps, causing some weird (interlaced?) frame blending every 5 or 6 frames of video
i manually did the frame timing in After effects in 30fps, but once i switched the comp over to 24fps, the keyframes lined up perfectly on threes and twos, and i was really pleased.
lastly, it looked just a little bit 🤏🏻too clean. i didn’t want to invalidate my “restoration” by re-corrupting the image quality, but just a little bit of analog color bleed and “cel wiggle” helped bridge the quality gap for me.
that’s it! thanks for reading. this was a true test of patience, but i liked having a mind-numbing art task to come back to.
i’m sure it was only a fraction as challenging as 2D animation, so i have an even deeper respect for indies who do that shit on their own. thanks again to Marty Daniels for keeping the original online, and to Marcy for sending it to me. also i love blender and i kiss it on the lips.
cheers, ψ / colin
…… p.s. SIKE i made it FOR REAL with playdo!! haha
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