Polka never dies
Added 2021-03-13 14:09:03 +0000 UTCOne of the many literary inspirations for Love of Magic is Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I just finished the latest book (Battle Grounds), and like Love of Magic he's gradually taking a darker turn. To celebrate, I wanted to recreate a sequence from Dead Beats.
Needing a necromantic source of energy to protect him from a necromantic ritual Harry Dresden decides to resurrect the biggest, oldest and meanest undead he could get his hands on. A T-Rex from the nearby Field Museum of Natural History.
Riding on a T-Rex into with undead necromancers Harry's one-man-polka-band sidekick, Butters, is perhaps understandably nervous:
“We are not going to die."
Butters stared up at me, pale, his eyes terrified. "We're not?"
"No. And do you know why?" He shook his head. "Because Thomas is too pretty to die. And because I'm too stubborn to die." I hauled on the shirt even harder. "And most of all because tomorrow is Oktoberfest, Butters, and polka will never die.”
The short started its life as a still image:
One challenge here was getting the smoke to loop; the smoke is stock footage, it's actual smoke filmed by someone (not me) and provided for movie studios. As such it's inherently chaotic, and does not loop cleanly. Especially not in a 4 second GIF. So that required a bit of trickery. Normally particle effects suffer from similar issues, but in this particular case it's chaotic enough that the flicker isn't noticeable.
This clip was never *meant* to be canon. But it's awesome enough that I think it maybe needs to be. I'll spend some more time pondering, and see if there is a way to weave it into the story.
