Fooly Cooly: in VHS!!!

Fooly Cooly (FLCL) is a Japanese animation centering around a boy by the name of Naota who befriends a older woman named Haruko. That's basically the gist of the story that most people know but its also prone to including a bunch of hidden meanings and symbolism.  Not only that but unlike other animes which are prone to having cheezy story lines followed by a direct meaning to the audience, this hides most of its meanings behind a wall of cheezy dialect followed by funny scenes, so people laugh rather then find out the meaning.  As I may have been directly drawn away from other Japanese animations over the years, due to their rising popularity and incredible power to decrease the amount of people who copy the american animation style, this one stuck with me.  No its not from its soundtrack, (although I do constantly listen to the first cd, yes no vinyl or cassette made of this, it almost every day) but its idea to compact so much meaning, emphasis, unity and more into 6 small, compact episodes.  Might I also add, it has a great way of adding a feel of abstraction, surrealism, various mediums of style (wait'll you see the one where they try to copy south parks style,  its only a few seconds, but a few seconds really mean a lot.  I seriously am amused the creators of South Park didn't try to make fun of them for that by now.)  Not to mention NO ROTOSCOPING! even though I would say that doesn't matter that much as I still am a fan of Ralph Bakshi's films (PETES THE MAN AND WE DELIVER!).  

Anyways this project involved me taking an old tape, I chose titanic as it's the most common, and making 3 episodes fit on each VHS, (yeah, a 2 set titanic).  After that I would create custom covers for the VHS tapes along with some custom labels for the inside VHS tape....Sadly what happened was my good old blogging camera got lost one time as I was longboarding, which included all of the steps, and the original titanic VHS tape I used as a medium.  Yeah, I did get pics of recent photos, but that wasn't till I found one of my old crappier cameras in my dvd cabinet and an old sd card I used to stock my graphic novel on (luckily I didn't have to format it)...so yeah, the steps are lost. so you may have to go through the pain of reading and trying to visualize the steps I took, along with a stock photo of the Titanic VHS (no real problem with that I hope).  But hey, at least I have pics of the end result :)

Anyways here is how it went about:

1: The medium.

So, what the medium consisted of was, again, a 2 set titanic VHS set, the most common VHS you can find (and when I mean common, you will find this wherever you buy vhs tapes now days)...Mine, I was in a little better condition.  When I went to goodwill to find the medium, I found it unopened, still in its shrink wrap (not to mention it came with and expired contest raffle from Sprint.  Darn, should have entered, I think I was off by 16 years :( ).  So yeah, I was lucky because if it were to be used and opened, the recording quality would be horrifying

Sorry decaprio :(  Im gonna have to run you over with a vespa

2: The recording:

What I did for the recording was I took an old cord I used for my ps1 to hook into a coaxial-only tv and used it as the input for the vcr, channel 4 to be exact.  So the ps1 cord was able to actually be hooked into my ps3, using a legacy cord connection, I think its called like av multi out or something (instead of a hdmi to rf converter).  This was good that it connected because if I had to use a brand new hdmi to rf converter, it would have to be hooked into a wall to supply extra power as well it would cost me some extra money.  Besides I had it with me and whats the point  of buying an extra cord, if another already works :) (yeah extra quality, but not as convenient).  Anyways it was also beneficial because of the ps3's ability to playback Blu ray, so I was able to directly play and record the blu ray disc to the VHS.  It did require some tape to cover up the copy protection seal, but hey, its as easy as doing it to a cassette (hehe, so devious right?).

3:The Splicing (whoo, scary!)

Now this may have been one of the hardest steps in the process.  So I did know it wouldn't perfectly record onto the tape, heck I was sorta afraid that 3 episodes would not fit onto each tape.  So what really made it hard was I had to hand wind the leftover tape onto an empty reel, and splice the end back together with the ending leader.  No air bubbles and almost perfectly straight...took me almost 20 minutes for each tape!  How it worked was I cut the tape after blanking 10 seconds after the 3rd and 6th episode on each tape, then I opened each tape, cut the tape after rewinding a bit to make sure there was no titanic to be seen, (only freezing cold water, lol) and placed the leftover tape onto one side of a reel, and a blank reel on the other. Then as I didn't have an electric winder, or motor, I placed some duct tape on the top of the blank reel so I could grip and wind the leftover onto the blank side.  I had to rewind it onto another reel because most reels are different, and by playing back the tape onto two different reels, the tape would not play...no Idea how that works, but that's what I found.  It did require me to disassemble and open up both tapes, as well as look up the anatomy of a VHS so I could place the tape back the right way (trust me, its a lot harder then it looks.)

4:The Blanking of the covers:

This was sort of an easy step.  To summarize it up, I painted over the tapes covers with light brown acrylic paint and sanded as well as unpeeled the labels on the plastic tapes.  

5:The illustrations:

This varied, some were personal illustrations, created by me (Text, roman numerals, FLCL front labels, front and back of tape B, Back of Tape A, VHS shell of tape A), then some were traced, (VHS shell of tape B although I personally created the stencil, the cover of tape A, the FLCL label on both tapes tops, and the side label of the tape spelling FLCL again)....Anyways the color scheme was original at least for the traced images.  But I do want to give a shutout to the animators, as I did sort of trace the covers for some of them, anyways thanks everyone in the GIANAX department for creating such an influential animation :)

6:The end result:

After all of the hard work I put into the design, cover, etc. I resulted in creating this:

 

Front:

Side:

Back:

Inside of tape A&B:

Top:

Anyways, that's my latest project I have worked on and I am open to any criticism, Either comment down below or email me at hancocktom41@gmail.com, Anyways yeah, thats FLCL on a VHS tape, almost a months worth of work, but it paid off in the end :)