Production Notes

While digging boulders out of my brother's yard and filling my lungs and sinus with dust, I heard “She Drives Me Crazy” on the radio. Naturally, I was reminded of Weird Al's parody. I had recently finished Surfing with the Eagle, which I thought would be my last Carmageddon video for a while, but the song got me thinking about driving, and I realized that a music video for Die Anna would be perfect!

(TIP: The best time to dig the bazillion stones out of your yard, so that you can lay sod, is between the hours of 9 PM and 7 AM.)

Because “Let Me Be Your Hog” and “She Drives Like Crazy” were so tightly intertwined on the UHF Soundtrack, I decided to rip both tracks as a single wave and use the first song as the introductory music. I wanted to show Annie's Hawk running down some wild boars during the introduction, so I did a lot of hog chasing on the first Inca level of the Splat Pack. I lost the first good sequence because the game crashed while screen-capturing. (Let that be a lesson: Turn sound OFF while capturing a sequence!) I eventually got another good sequence of hog-hits that ended with a great crash to go with the song's scratched record. Starring Die Anna

The Pig Cop that dances at the beginning does get hit, but I decided not to show that becase the camera angle sucked.

Since “She Drives Like Crazy” begins with an engine starting, I thought it would be cool to incorporate Carmageddon's videos where the car starts in the garage. (I did NOT insert any sound effects into the song, bytheway.) I used the RAD Game Tools to decompile GARAGE2.SMK. I'm really proud of how well I synced the switches and blinking lights with the music. And then going immediately to an internal view of the Hawk as if it were just starting was a nice touch, too.

I worked really hard to get footage that went well with the music. The only scenes that were really “engineered” (i.e. through cheat codes) were the burning Hawk, the Electro-ped Ray, and the Pedestrian Harvest scenes. To get the rest I pretty much drove around until stuff happened. (Got a little boring sometimes, though.) There were a few other scenes that I tried to engineer, but they just didn't look good. Like when I inserted a Cow pedestrian next to a 50 MPH sign. I kept reposition the cow, driving in from a different direction, but I just couldn't get a good shot of the Hawk speeding past the sign.

All of the Nascar-type scenes are from the same sequence. It was a quick, seamless battle--I never had to recover the car, so it was a cool sequence. Hm, I should have compiled it into an AVI before I burned the source files to CD. Crap! I already burned a second disk because I forgot to include a file. Double crap!

I captured 6232 screen shots (not to mention the other few hundred I deleted because the game crashed part way through or they just looked bad) but used only around 3200.

Throughout the video you might notice cars that don't belong in the scene (like in the picture above--Annie should be driving the Hawk II on that race track). This is because I combined all the cars and races from Carmageddon and the Splat Pack just before I began this project. I like the old Hawk better, so I decided to always use that one. I coudn't drive the old Hawk on the race in Hell though, because you have to have completed all the races to access Hell, so rather than taking the time to play all those races, I just played the unmodified version of the Splat Pack, for which I had done all that.

For the end credits scene, I originally intended a non-animated still. I wanted to make two verions of the still: A 320x200 version to match the rest of the video, and a 352x240 version for if I ever got around to putting the video on VCD. But I couldn't remember the VCD resolution, so I inserted Shino Lin's She Knows VCD and dragged the video shou tai xiao at random into Win-d'ohs' Mediocre Player so that I could measure the resolution. I took a screen capture as the camera was driving away from Shino, then measured the resolution. Then I got looking at the scene, and I thought it would be cool to use it played backwards, as if Die Anna were driving down this road only to be stopped by Shino. I don't have any programs that can decompile MPG's, and I hadn't yet discovered WinDVD, which will step (some) videos one frame at a time and allow you to take screen captures, so I had to UNPAUSE-PAUSE to get my screen captures. (It was especially a pain in the butt if I didn't pause quick enough and had to replay the video and watch for that one bush or tree in order to pick up where I left off.) From the original “shou tai xiao” video

Anyhoo, once I got the road sequence from Shino's music video, I went to paste in the Carmageddon logo to cover up the Avex Trax logo, but since I had now captured the entire road sequence, there was more screen clutter; as the camera drove away, Shino's name and the song title appeared down the middle of the screen. It was in Chinese, which most people who will see my video can't read, but I still thought something should be done about it. For the most part, I can't read Chinese, but I know a few coarse grammatics, and how to use a dictionary. (But most importantly: How to compliment the cooking.

) I covered up the Chinese titles with “ta jia xiang kuang ren a!” which should translate into “she drive like crazy-man [spoken exclamation mark]!”

To kill the boring silence of the end sequence, I created a short, looped version of Weird Al's “Waffle King” to act as a theme for my name. Hm, the last time I ate waffles was when I was in Germany...

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Legal stuff:
Carmageddon / Splat Pack ©1997 SCi | Let Me Be Your Hog by Al Yankovic | She Drives Like Crazy by Al Yankovic ©1988 Virgin Music, Inc. (ASCAP) | Waffle King by Al Yankovic ©1993 Scotti Bros. Records | shou tai xiao by Shino Lin ©1999 Friendly Dog Co., LTD. Juicy Music | RAD Video Tools ©1994-2001 RAD Game Tools, Inc. | This page ©2002 Wally Waffles Last Updated: 2002.11.22