After Thanksgiving, I go all in on Christmas songs and the Italian-American classic sung by Lou Monte, with a beat that stays in your head for hours, is one of my favorites. It's the story of how a donkey helps Santa deliver presents to the children of Southern Italy because the hills are too steep for his reindeer.
There is no official music video and, because none of the YouTube fan videos are worthy of its stature, I decided to make one...in 2008.
Finished in 2020.
Here's how it happened.
Character Design
I prefer a simple, cartoon look so the shapes were drawn clean and simple to avoid any realism. The hat is based on my own coconut porkpie and the the cart's design (the skis didn't make the final cut) is a mural from Amalfi, the town where my great-grandfather emigrated from. I modeled and animated the first version in Maya.
Hiatus
Life got in the way and the production stopped.
I would sporadically make incremental progress. For instance, I visited E. Rossi & Company in Little Italy, to ask the owner, Ernie, if he knew who had the rights to the song. Of course he did and he also told me that Dominick was originally blue, showing me some shirts in the back of his shop to prove it!
Another time, when I was freelancing at a studio that had a sound engineer, I had him make a click track that I could animate to.
Research
I love the look of Italian food labels, especially the olives on the fingers as that's how I ate them as a kid, and and began collecting them, thinking they could inspire the design.
Production
Work started anew when I had to teach Cinema 4D, a software package I had only used a few times. I used the opportunity to remake "Dominick" from scratch. Being a Maya user for many years helped tremendously as knowing the 3D process flattened the learning curve.
Putting It All Together
Modeling Dominick didn't take too long as I imported an FBX from Maya as reference and quickly remodeled it. Rigging took longer then expected, mainly because donkeys have 4 legs. The gifts bouncing up and down and the teeth connected to a point because of the morph shapes, for which I had to use XPresso, C4D's node based expression system, also took some time. But once it was done the animation began.
Starting with a Muybridge horse loop, I copied the movement's as best I could (shorter legs) and then timed them to the click track.
Road Block
Figuring out the technical problems was easy because I knew the questions to ask and how to find the answers among the plethora of online resources available. But the design problem was different. I had a vague idea of what I wanted but looking at my wall of food labels never produced the hoped for inspiration.
Luckily, there was a graphic design professor who worked in the same department. I asked him for his thoughts on what made the graphics so interesting and he figured it out in no time. Before he left I had the structure I needed.
Thanks Jason!
Version 1 and Not Everything Can Be Done In 3D
Hand-painted ceramics from Southern Italy (and my kitchen) were used as design elements for the borders and the background for the chorus. I used photographs took during my visits to the Amalfi Coast for the backgrounds and decided, knowing how long it would take to create, rig and animate a tarantella dancing family in 3D, to make them in Photoshop and After Effects.
I really began cooking after Thanksgiving and tryed my best to get it all done by Christmas. And I did it.
And it wasn't very good.
Version 2
Not everything had to be redone, just most of it. Seeing how it took 12 years to get this far, I wasn't sure when I would find the time. Then Covid-19 hit and all of a sudden I was working from home and I had the time.
After an intense period working by myself to finish it, spending a few months away gave me a new perspective. The paper texture look wasn't working so I removed it. I added a North Pole shot with reactive snow using C4D's collision object, finessed the graphics and camera moves and redid the family's animation, thanks to the ParentToPin script in After Effects. The borders were brightened and the Google Earth Studio camera move was updated.
Finito!
Seeing Version 1 with fresh eyes and then having the time to finish it made a huge difference in the final product. I never pursued getting the rights because I just wanted it to be seen.
Even though the Italian is a dialect, most of it is easy to understand.
But here is a translation for those "who only speak British" (a line from a different Lou Monte song) for the few words that might not make sense:
Cummares e Cumpares- Godmothers and Godfathers
Sanna Nicola- Saint Nicholas
Ciuccianello- Little Donkey
Sanna Nicola- Saint Nicholas
Ciuccianello- Little Donkey
la la la-la la-la la la la la la la la-la la-la la-ee-oh-da....