Water Heater This, Water Heater That
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▶fig.1youtube ▣fig.2 · Mark Knobfixer: turnaround, expressions, mouth shapes, and the evidenceimg ▣fig.3 · The first chorus, filling in on the water heater. Days since last water heater incident: 1.img ▣fig.4 · The crawl space: boots, a flashlight beam, a Band-Aid, and the possumimgor rss. no spam, one-click out.
My dad turns 65 this year, so I made him a music video. It's a pub-rock song sung by Mark Knobfixer, a cartoon guitarist with a red Strat and a headband, who gives a tour of Gramps's life and his house.
The jokes were already there
Every family has its running jokes. Ours are that Dad is always in the crawl space, up in the attic, or at Menards. One of his projects is always a water heater, a water softener, or the dryer. My daughter Emmie sums it up as "water heater this, water heater that." And Dad has a saying: "I'm not working hard unless I bleed."
That's a chorus. The verses are the rest of his life: twenty years in the Navy reeling out a five-mile antenna wire on a TACAMO plane, meeting my mom at Barbers Point on O'ahu, a string of moves, a string of jobs, the Boeing documentary that made him cut up his Southwest card, a Costco fireplace he runs only for the crackle, and a flashlight every single birthday.
Seven songs to find one
The music took the most tries. The first version was country, and it was too country. The second was pub rock in the style of "Sultans of Swing", because Dad owns everything Mark Knopfler ever made. It was better, but I said it "sounds too right... like an actual song vs a fun thing at a party."
So we tried a polka, a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, a barbershop singing telegram, an 80s list song in the style of "We Didn't Start the Fire", and an Irish pub-punk drinking song. Claude generated each one in Suno through the Chrome extension, transcribed every take to catch any that skipped a verse, and opened the best one in QuickTime for me.
After hearing all of them, I went back to the pub-rock one.
Mark Knobfixer
Like Captain Quorum, the host started as a character reference sheet, the idea my friend Eric Scharnak gave me. Claude drew Mark Knobfixer as a rigged vector character and rendered the sheet from that same rig: turnaround, expressions, nine mouth shapes for lip sync, and the props that stand in for Gramps.
His default face is deadpan. The joke is that he sings about water heaters with total seriousness.
Gramps is never on screen
I didn't want a cartoon of my dad. So he only shows up as evidence: a flannel arm reaching up out of the attic hatch for a wrench, work boots sticking out of the crawl space, a flashlight beam sweeping under the floor, and speech bubbles. My kids and my mom aren't drawn either. Emmie's line comes from a speech bubble at the edge of the frame, and my mom is a hibiscus and a lei.
Words in the world
Same rule as the last video: no captions. The lyrics fill in letter by letter as they're sung, but they live inside the scene. The chorus is stencilled on the water heater. "Unless I bleed" is written on a giant Band-Aid. The moves are green highway signs, the Medicare verse is fine print under a magnifying glass, the no-heat fireplace line is written in the flames, and the warm last verse is written in the sand at Barbers Point.
There are running gags too. The Menards bags pile up from one at the first chorus to three, then six, then an avalanche during the guitar solo. A possum lives in the crawl space and head-bangs through the solo. And the flashlight that's on in every scene finally clicks off in the last verse, on "put the flashlight down tonight."
How it was built
I picked the song and approved the character, and Claude did the rest:
- Aligned every sung word to the vocal, then turned each word into phonemes and mouth shapes: 1,683 of them in four and a half minutes.
- Built a small world kit for this video: a cutaway house with an attic, crawl space and utility room, plus the water heater, Band-Aid, Tullamore bottle, Menards bags and the possum.
- Wrote the first scene itself to prove everything worked, then had eight subagents build the other 30 scenes in parallel from one brief, with the depiction rules and the running gags written into it.
- Checked a frame from every scene, then rendered the whole thing in about ten minutes.
It was made with my lyric-film skill, Suno, and HyperFrames.
Happy 65th, Dad. Put the flashlight down tonight.