Exclusive Borat Cartoon

Many thanks to Sohail for creating the excellent clip. Please visit his website www.sheepnut.net. Thanks again to www.thatwasme.net for hosting the clip.

The clip is 1.2MB and can be watched using QuickTime or Real Player.

A 3.4MB higher quality version of the clip can be watched at the website: http://homepage.mac.com/darkscooby9/iMovieTheater2.html

I let Sohail describe the animation in his own words...

I guess my reason for making this little animation bit is due to my religious following of Borat from the Ali G show. I felt it was my very own personal way of paying homage to our Kazakhstani friend......other than offering small animal sacrifices or trading in my girlfriend to a Kazakhstani farmer for 15 gallons of insecticide in true Borat fashion.

Anyway, this was my final project for a 3-d animation course, every student had to animate two characters to 8-20 seconds of dialog. After showing my professor the two pieces of dialog I had chosen (both from the Ali G show) for the animation, he advised me not to do either of them. He explained it may be offensive to some people that might be looking at my demo reel in the future. Knowing Borat would be very displeased with my disservice of not making him an animation, I used one anyway.

Originally I was going to use some dialog from the Etiquette episode.. you know, the .. "Last night I have a sex" "With woman from Gambia I do a ......" clip. I really wanted to animate Borat's infamous hand gesture in reference to "vagin entry". Though I later changed my mind because there was very little interaction between Borat and the seniors. So I ultimately decided to use the dialog from the Guide to Hobbies episode. I felt with this segment not only would I be able to get some good interaction between the characters but I could truly capture Borat's perverted nature and also his trademark expressions , like "Wowaweehwah" and "High Five".

Before I even started animating, I modelled the set (chairs, tables TV etc.), and their arrangement as it looked like in the original video clip. With the actual animation I swore by the video as reference, I used two computer screens right next to each other so I'd be able to time the animation as close as I could to the video literally frame by frame. I tried to capture all the subtle movements, foot tapping, face scratching etc. In the end, even though this animation is only 16 seconds long it took me somewhere between 60-75 hours to complete. Animating takes a ridiculously long time, that's why it usually takes Pixar around 4 years to whip out a future length film! Wowahweehwah! Well that's my 2 cents, I would love to hear feedback on thoughts and what I could improve.

If you would like to give Sohail any feedback, please do so on our message board by clicking here.

Sohail, when you're working for Pixar and earning a six figure salary, please remember BoratOnline and send a few beers through!