Tag: foley

I love the writing of Haruki Murakami. His stories take simple, mundane elements and make them sublime, and they frequently brush against the metaphysical.

He’s written about Spaghetti several times. I was inspired years ago to cook it quite often, like a character from one of his stories.

I’m not going to admit how many hours I spent in the following video, but it was more than seven. It’s a WIP, and is rough, and I see things that I should fix, if I decide to develop it further.

I started with the sounds. I recorded them in my kitchen (as mentioned before) and then put together the soundtrack, with the idea it would be about someone cooking spaghetti. In fact, I recorded myself cook spaghetti that night.

I wanted to to keep it simple and for this to be a “quickie,” which, after the hours started to spread over several days, it was not a “quickie.” My original idea was to have a pot of water boiling. Not so interesting, so I thought someone should fill the pot with water, put it on the stove, start the burner going, and check the spaghetti. These scenes definitely pushed this past “quickie,” and I actually drew several characters that might be my cook in this one. I settled on this bug fellow, and I like his reach. As you can see, I started with the pot on the stove, already filled.

I drew each frame by hand, scanned them into my computer, and touched up the drawings in Photoshop. I rendered the final video with Premiere. And I have to thank my friend Dusten for the steam and boiling sounds, recorded on my phone in our office at work.

I hope you like it.