Another cut out animation video: Ben Franklin's Advice

Lately I decided to start recording songs that, for whatever reason, I never put out there before. It's a bit mortifying not to sound the way I did a decade or two ago, but this is where I am now. Here's my rendition from last month (just finished the animation this morning):

Ken Bloom and I were hired to do a presentation at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich for their Ben Franklin exhibit in 2006. I wrote a couple of songs for the occasion. One was "Downfall of Piracy," lyrics by Ben Franklin as a 13 year old (note the "purple gore") and published on his brother's printing press. Bob Vasile and I recorded it that year - Bob regaling us with Franklin's enthusiastic history of the pirate Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard. 

The other song I wrote was this one, Ben Franklin's Advice (I actually called it Ben Franklin's Aphorisms at first, but too many people didn't know what an aphorism is). I googled up a handful of his pithy comments as printed in Poor Richard's Almanac, and shook them into five verses. I always thought this song would be good for re-enactors and historic events, but we never got a chance to do many of those events so the song got forgotten.

The animation took weeks. I have tried several lighting setups and none of them have worked well so far, so it turns out all the time it took cutting out the figures with little tiny scissors and an X-acto knife was wasted - I had to finish it all in photoshop.