The Mouth Project

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Here's one for track 15 of Mouth Sounds, a sort of gap to fill in this weird little cluster of songs I'm doing first for whatever reason. This was another one that I knew what I wanted from the start, but it took a little tweaking, especially since the song is so short.

This video has some scenes that might count as flashing quickly, but nothing full-screen. There are also sharp implements and fire, but it's not violent.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

I knew from the start that I wanted this one to be full of How It's Made type videos of objects being manufactured. It was actually pretty hard to get the timing right, so it's a little sloppier than I would prefer, but I wanted to finish it rather than spend forever on the timing and rhythm. If I really want to, I can remake it later. I'm trying to just make what I make with these, and keep moving forward with them, as a sort of challenge to my own OCD.

I wanted a little variety besides just playing clips from How It's Made, so I thought about other shows I enjoyed in this genre as a child. Unwrapped was of course the next pick, but then I realized a show with a strange industrial aesthetic would fit too: The Most Extreme. A show on Animal Planet that covered animals with abilities that far surpass humans' corresponding abilities, it's well known online as a meme for its surreal CGI segments of humans doing weird things and in weird shapes. It was a favorite of mine at about the same time period as How It's Made and Unwrapped, and it added the perfect little bizarre flavor that made it more personal than just some machinery.

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Here's the last one in my backlog of videos I made before I made this thread, set to track 3 of Mouth Silence, and it's about furries.

I really can't think of any common warnings for this one, except there are two very short clips of a well-known horror game with a robot fox character, used for comedic effect and not horror.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

So, I'm a furry. I have a very complicated relationship with the furry fandom, especially things that are popular within the furry fandom. However, it's still been a major part of my life for at least a decade now, and I wanted to pay tribute to the weird group of (largely non-straight and non-neurotypical) people on the internet that share some vague common art interests that I happen to be part of.

I didn't want to have the cruel edge that a lot of furry-focused comedy on the internet seems to have. A lot of people know furries exist now, and a lot of people hate them. I think there's room to poke fun at furry culture without being mean for no reason. As silly as my videos come across, they're all genuine in some way. I really do respect the art of appreciating an anthropomorphic fox woman. I mean, just look at my girlfriend. Sometimes he's an anthropomorphic fox woman, and I certainly appreciate him.

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An actually new video, wow! This one is also from Mouth Silence, as the 8th track on the album. Sometimes I rely on Discord polls to tell me what I should work on next, and this one won my last one, so that's what I did. Thank you, Art Haters.

This video contains some footage of police/military style "K9" training, which involves a dog being encouraged to act violently, and a human threatening and sometimes hitting the dog.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

This one is kind of hard to explain without noting that I am a multiple system, and have alters/system members. Anyone who didn't know that already probably doesn't know me personally, so I'll leave the explanation at that. This video was created in cooperation with Cobalt, one of my system members, who happens to relate to dogs, in particular German shepherds. This is a breed of dog often known for their association with police, and a lot of fictional depictions you'll find of them glorify police in some way. I am strongly against dogs being trained for use in intimidating and hurting the marginalized people that police harm every day, especially since those dogs are not treated well in the process.

As part of his relating to these dogs, Cobalt uses their symbolic struggle to connect to his own experiences. However, I didn't want to have a video that was just extended cuts of dogs being trained to hurt others, because that's not fun to watch, and also because things are not just one thing. German shepherds are also trained as service dogs and kept as beloved family pets. There's stress and struggle involved in all of these things, even those that are not inherently abusive.

This is also a song that has pretty clear lyrics, and I tried to match cuts to lyrics as much as possible. Some take the lyric more literally than others. One that I want to point out specifically is the "create another fable" lines, which I used to show situations that weren't so bad, turning the words into more of a metaphor for escapism than just describing a flat-out lie.

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This is a special one, made to commemorate the end of the Summer of Dinosaurs (a series of movie nights in the Eggware Discord). It is, of course, set to Dear Dinosaur, track 6 of Mouth Moods.

This video contains some non-graphic dinosaur violence, and apocalyptic visuals related to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

On the surface, this is just a silly reminiscence about a bunch of dinosaur media we watched over the past couple months. And that is what it is, to some extent. I used only clips from stuff we watched in the Discord server, and I tried to use everything we watched, but unfortunately I forgot about a cool old stop-motion documentary that was one of the first things we watched. I could have maybe cut out some of the Alpha And Omega footage to put it in, but I'd already rendered the video and shared it, so oh well.

On a deeper level, this video is reflective of my long-time interest in dinosaurs, especially in their extinction. Have you ever noticed that dinosaur stories are always about grief? It's hard to find a dinosaur story that doesn't at least acknowledge that they don't exist anymore, and often they are defined by their inevitable end. Not a lot focuses on how we do still have dinosaurs around today, in the form of what we call birds. The ending of the original Walking With Dinosaurs series used clips of real-life birds, and that was something I really appreciated (and used in this video).

Also, did you know the song Walk The Dinosaur is about nuclear war? I learned that while making this, and it made it even more poignant for me.

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Man, this one was a tough one. It was the next voted on by Discord, and I had a good idea for it, but it proved to be considerably more effort than I thought it would be, especially for a song about piss. Yeah, this is Piss, the final track of Mouth Silence.

This video has some minor flashing at the beginning thanks to some rendering weirdness, and some fast sped-up clips. Some toys get thrown off a roof. Also, there's pregnant toys, toys that piss, toys that cry, and toys with snot, I guess? It's all cartoony and stuff that aired on TV, but I figured I'd warn for it anyway.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

Originally, my only idea for this one was "those weird baby dolls that drink and pee." They always seemed to be a fixture on TV commercials targeted at girls, and they were never something I wanted for myself, but they were always around. While putting together the video, I quickly realized that there was a lot more in the song than there were clips of weird baby dolls on YouTube. Plus, I like these to be fun to watch, and I would not want to watch 5 minutes of just that.

As I was putting this together, it started to become something way more than I was expecting. Yet again, a stupid joke video has become an ominous warning about the dangers of nostalgia. Two of the Barbie commercials I used were toys that had controversial gimmicks - pregnant Midge, and Growing Up Skipper. I found it interesting that both were about "growing up," in a way, and I decided to run with that. All these weird baby dolls mimic "growing up" by way of making the child playing with them act as a mother, after all. And that's not inherently good or bad, it's just what you make of it. So is all of childhood and growing up. As I was gathering sources for this video, I kept finding people in the comments talking about how life was just better when a certain commercial was airing. The lyrics in the song, when not talking about piss, talk about wanting something else out of life. Then I realized, since this was the last song on the album, it matched with Goodbye, which I had already made a video for. Instead of analog sign-offs, I decided to make the final moments of the video channel switch-overs, particularly two I remember. I reversed the Adult Swim clip, as a sort of acknowledgement of the video itself finally admitting to growing up.

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I promise I didn't forget about this thread, I just have ADHD and a full-time job, and making new videos was more fun than writing about them, so I have a bit of a backlog to share here again.

This one is for Close to the Sun, track 15 on Mouth Silence. Kind of a random pick, but I had a really specific idea for it and the song was short, which I really needed after almost burning myself out trying to bring Piss together. What a sentence.

This video doesn't have any major warnings, unless you have scopophobia, I guess, because there's an extended close-up on (non-realistic) eyes.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

It's kind of hard to explain where the idea came from, because this is one of those that kind of just appeared fully formed in my head. I was thinking about birds, and getting close to birds, and how they scatter when you run at them. And I thought about how that's a thing in video games, these little incidental birds that you can never really get close to, because they're not meant to be looked closely at. That also got me thinking about video game distance models in general, and things in games that you're never meant to see close-up, but how there's a whole community around trying to see them.

Shoutout to Shesez and Boundary Break, by the way. Those videos were a major inspiration for this one, and I used a lot of footage from them in this.

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This is one that was voted on by the IHA Discord, and I had an initial concept for it very clear in my mind, but it took a while to compile sources, especially since I try to limit sources for these videos to things I am at least tangentially familiar with for the most part. It's track 6 of Mouth Silence, simply titled Pokémon.

This video has some very brief clips showing realistic, but not real, guns.

Artist Statment:

Spoiler

Hopefully you've watched the video already, because here's the main gimmick: there are no Pokemon in this video. The song itself is a tribute to the effect of Pokemon on society, and what people thought of it. So what better to do with that than make a video showing how Pokemon affected my own life?

I actually didn't get into Pokémon until I was about 12, and that was at the very end of the DS era of games. For most of my childhood, Pokémon was just kind of a background influence informing more than I could even comprehend. To this day, people are using the inspiration and ideas imparted on them by Pokémon to make their own media, in varying degrees of sincerity.

There's also a strange religious component to the world's reaction to Pokémon. In fact, the big reason I wasn't into Pokémon when I was younger was because of the religion I was raised in. The one clip used in this video that I had no knowledge of prior to making the video is that of a Christian trading card game that was advertised on Kickstarter as a Christian alternative to Pokémon. I didn't look too much into it, since all I really needed was the trailer for footage, but just the concept I felt was so emblematic of my constant childhood battle to find something like Pokémon that wasn't considered demonic. Fun fact: the clip near the beginning with the little purple thing turning into a knockoff Lugia is from Johnny Test, an incredibly mediocre cartoon that had a Pokémon parody episode that I watched repeatedly as a child in a desperate attempt to be part of the Pokémon craze that was still sweeping elementary schools well into the 2000s.

This statement is already pretty long, but I do also want to note that pretty much the entire Digimon season 1 opening is in there because the timing happened to work really well, but also because once my parents finally decided to give in and let my sibling and I enter the world of the demonic, my younger sibling got REALLY into Digimon. I didn't watch it much, but it was playing around the house pretty much constantly for a couple years.

Oh, and one more thing: the final clip of the video is someone scrolling through all the pet battle achievements in World of Warcraft. I tried to get those, once. All I can say is it tested even my tolerance for monotony.

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This one was also voted on by the IHA Discord! They really had no idea what they were in for with this. All the information I provided was a bowl emoji on a poll with the track title, Best. It's track 5 on Mouth Silence, contributing to the weird clump of songs I decided to focus on first for whatever reason.

This video doesn't have overly bright/rapid full-screen flashing, but has some clips that might be a little tough on the eyes if you're sensitive to fast-moving or flashing video, especially the segment around 2:15.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

I'll be honest, the initial gimmick of this video was just because of the "best part of waking up" line, but it started to become more and more relevant the more I put into it.

Cereal mascots are a fascinating sub-genre of advertising. They exist solely to promote incredibly unhealthy clumps of sugar to children and their parents, but the competition is fierce and varied. Something I noticed is that there's a few different types of cereal mascot - the main ones being the "hero" who children can trust to provide them with a tasty cereal and exciting life, and the "victim" who acts as a strange "lesser" to the children being advertised to, letting the kids feel superior by keeping the mascot from eating its own cereal. The song itself is goofy and wacky-sounding while exploring themes of temptation and superiority...just like cereal mascots. Huh.

The secondary theme in this video, which was going to be more of a major point before I got overwhelmed by cereal commercials, is the spectacle of televised competitions. Both sweepstakes and game shows are about the same level of random chance in the end, and there's something addictive about watching them, thinking that could be you. They feel a lot like commercials in their own way.

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The Mouth albums have a bunch of random super-short jokes interspersed with the actual songs, and that seems like it should be easy to work with, but it takes just as much consideration to make a joke work in 10 seconds as it does in 4 minutes. I was inspired when I'll Be There For You by The Rembrandts came on in Dairy Queen of all places, though, so I decided to go for it. This is Friends, track 4 of Mouth Silence.

I don't know how to warn for triggers in a 10-second clip, so just take the thumbnail as a warning if it means anything to you.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

I actually had a video saved of the Discovery Kids changeover to The Hub that I planned on using in Piss, but ended up not having room for. For being a 10-second joke, this video is weirdly personal to me. I was a big fan of Discovery Kids before The Hub, and mourned the changeover, especially since all the old shows were gone to make room for toy commercials.

I watched the initial premiere of MLP:FiM with my sibling in 2010, though, and I knew it was the start of a new era. A really, really strange one.

I choose not to explain the Starscream clip beyond that Transformers Prime, also on The Hub and premiering in 2010, was also part of a weird era for me. Indeed, no one told me life was gonna be that way.

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This is another one I had to spend some time finding sources for, since I really only had a central concept that I kept reworking in my head. Thanks to a few perfect coincidences, though, I think this came together just the way I wanted it to in the end. Behold track 7 of Mouth Silence, titled Sexual Lion King.

This video has some very minor cartoon animal death at the beginning.

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

Something I've been trying to do in these videos is to minimize or completely omit videos that are directly used in the actual song. Hence, no The Lion King in this video. I felt like it would be too easy. Amazingly, when looking for clips for this video, I happened to find that there was a perfect The Lion King parody in Pinky and the Brain, which provided the exact bookends I wanted.

Anyway, we all know the Heterosexual Cartoon Animal Couple. They're everywhere. They're unavoidable. That's how animals work in real life, right...? Well, if you're here, you probably know that's not right. Gender and sexuality are not static, nor are they binaries, no matter what species you are. Cartoons are a way to explore that, and cartoon animals are even more abstractified. The obligatory heterosexual cartoon animal couple has always both grated on me and captivated me. They put on such a performance of their own genders, their own roles. The designated female animals sporting exaggerated decorations and eyelashes are their own sort of drag to me. And as a lesbian with a weird relationship to gender, I understood these cartoon animals as something more than a man and a woman doing what men and women are expected to do. That's right, folks. I'm saying Lady and the Tramp, Spirit and Rain, Stitch and Angel, Donkey and Dragon, they're all lesbians to me. That's my truth and I'm living it.

Then there's the more obvious non-straight clips. There's the legendary Arthur wedding between Mr. Ratburn and his husband, of course, and Pinky and the Brain are one of those classic "ambiguously gay duos" of cartoon animals, but I also included Snagglepuss, a character who isn't necessarily stated to be gay, but certainly was a role model for plenty of people who saw themselves in him. The clip I found of him slicing up a sausage isn't exactly...subtle...the way I used it, but I thought it was too funny to leave out, especially amongst all the clips of cartoon animals in drag (which I owe tremendous thanks to a single YouTube account for compiling). There's also the clearly-intended-to-be-gay-for-jokes characters from Ice Age, who I placed alongside the clearly-intended-to-be-NOT-gay-for-jokes main characters from Ice age. I could go on about the bizarre heterosexuality of the Ice Age franchise, but this is already my longest artist statement yet, so I'll save it.

I initially planned on having more video footage of real life gay animals, but I wanted this video to focus more on romance than just humpin', so I ended up narrowing it down to two examples I felt exemplified what I was going for the best: a lioness that spontaneously developed a mane and took on normally male lion behaviors, and a pair of albatrosses in a long-term same-sex relationship. There are way more examples in nature of animals not following strict binaries, but those require either more context to understand or are the aforementioned humpin'.