Neil Cicierega

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Neil Cicierega performs live as Lemon Demon with bassist Alora Lanzillotta, guitarist Charles "Chooch" Sergio, and drummer Professor iPod (on top of the keyboard)

Neil Stephen Cicierega (born August 23, 1986), also known under the aliases Trapezoid, Trapezzoid, Deporitaz (an anagram of Trapezoid that can be pronounced any way and created by Cicierega for legal reasons) and Lemon Demon, is an Internet personality and artist. He is the creator of a genre of Flash animation known as "Animutation". He also performs as a musician. Cicierega lives with his parents and two of his siblings in Kingston, Massachusetts, United States.

Neil Cicierega is the creator of a genre of Flash animation known as "Animutation". Animutation features arbitrary scenes and pictures influenced by pop culture. These scenes are accompanied by (and are usually in time to) foreign or novelty music, often Japanese. Most of his early Animutations used music from the original Japanese version of Pokémon. His style, seen in his 2001 work "Hyakugojyuuichi", has been imitated by other artists on the Internet. These works were originally known as "fanimutations", but due to some creators thereof feeling that their work should be viewed as art in its own right rather than fanart, the term "fanimutation" has fallen out of favor. Cicierega's most recent Animutation, Rugrats, was released in January 2008.

1 Potter Puppet Pals
2 Music
- 2.1 Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
3 Discography
4 Filmography
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Potter Puppet Pals

See also: Parodies of Harry Potter

Potter Puppet Pals

The Potter Puppet Pals is a series of flash animations and live puppet shows about Harry Potter. Episodes so far have been about annoying Snape (titled "Bothering Snape") and killing Lord Voldemort with machine guns rather than spells (titled "Trouble at Hogwarts"). Due to the complexity of Flash animation without physics (it was introduced in later programs), several further non-animated movies featured real puppets ("PPP Teaser", "Potions Class", "Wizard Angst," "The Mysterious Ticking Noise," "Wizard Swears", "School is for Losers", "Awakening of the Incorruptible" and "The Vortex"). "Wizard Swears" features Neville Longbottom as a butternut squash on a stick with his face drawn on with a marker. The videos have been released on the popular video sharing site YouTube. The episode "The Mysterious Ticking Noise," based around the concept of a musical ostinato, has become the sixteenth most-viewed video on YouTube with over 45 million views. The video was nominated for,^[1] and won in the Comedy category in the 2007 YouTube Awards with 33.6% of the votes in that category.^[2] Cicierega promised a video of himself "caressing" his trophy for ten straight minutes in a promotional video for the show. On March 29, 2008, he added a video that was ten minutes long to YouTube of himself with romantic music in the background and the trophy. Due to the popularity of Potter Puppet Pals, Neil performed a live musical show at an called The Yule Ball, which is a Harry Potter-related show mostly based around wizard rock in previous years. Also on the local news, Cicierega revealed he was going to make a new puppet, which hasn't been shown in any episodes yet. The puppets were going to be featured in a music video for Weezer, but never made it.

An Easter Egg can be found in "Trouble at Hogwarts". By pausing the movie as Voldemort kills Snape, a star shape appears in the spell. This is a link to a short movie of Ron following the butterflies with a surprise ending.
A running gag in a few Potter Puppet Pals films has been Dumbledore stripping completely naked except for his hat randomly in the story. ^[3].
There was also a cancelled episode, The Potter Puppet Pals Adventure, that still exists in audio form, and has been animated by a member of the Lemon Demon wiki. In it, Rubeus Hagrid, the Dursleys, and Draco Malfoy were originally slated to appear.^[4]

Neil annouced a competition in early January 2008, to have members on YouTube make a video of making a death threat to Neil, explaining how he is captured, tortured, killed, how they dispose of his body, and how they will feel after his death. Many people responded and Neil announced that since so many people entered, he could not decide a winner. Neil had said that the award for winning would be a restraining order on the winner.

[edit] Music

Cicierega's music is influenced by They Might Be Giants and similar geek rock bands. His lyrics tend to have a surreal, humorous slant, though he has said he rarely writes songs with "jokish" intentions. His songs are distributed under the name of "Trapezoid" and "Lemon Demon". Following a notice from a trademark holder, Trapezoid was changed to "Deporitaz" (an anagram of "Trapezoid"). Outside of music distribution, Cicierega is still known to sometimes use the nickname "Trapezoid" or "Trapezzoid".The popular music channel VH1 was going to use his song "Dead Sea Monkeys", and offered him $1000, but ended up canning it.

He also produced the music for a number of AGS adventure games, and contributed to AGS forums. [1]

[edit] Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

"Good guys, bad guys, and explosions, / As far as the eye can see."

Main article: Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

On December 22, 2005, Lemon Demon and collaborator Shawn Vulliez released the Flash music video Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny on Newgrounds.com. The video features dozens of famous people and fictional characters, largely from 1980s pop culture in a large century-long brawl where "...only one will survive."^[5]

The video was featured as the Newgrounds daily feature on December 23, and the weekly user's choice on December 28; it has since been released on Flash Portal, Albino Blacksheep, Transbuddha, Weebl's Stuff, and eventually its own fan-created site at UltimateShowdown.org. The song topped the weekly "Funny Five" and became #1 of 2006 on the Dr. Demento Show. The song's popularity resulted in a significant increase in sales of Lemon Demon's earlier albums Damn Skippy and Hip to the Javabean, and Cicierega encountered difficulty meeting the sudden demand. The song itself was later included on Dinosaurchestra, his fifth album as Lemon Demon.

[edit] Discography

As Trapezoid/Deporitaz:

"Outsmart" (2000)
"Microwave this CD" (2001)
"Dimes" (2002)
"Circa 2000" (2007)

As Lemon Demon:

"Clown Circus" (2003)
"Live From the Haunted Candle Shop" (2003)
"Hip to the Javabean" (2004)
"Damn Skippy" (2005)
"Dinosaurchestra" (2006)

[edit] Filmography

In addition to his animutations, Cicierega has created several original live-action shorts under the name of Cinema Rocketry. [2]

He has worked on videos with fellow internet film makers and close friends Kevin James of Not A Tad Bad Flim Co., Ryan Murphy, of Rojhelio Studios and J.L. Carrozza of Gen-Y Films, recently collaborating to create the short films "Neil Saves Christmas" and "No Place Like Home", in which Neil helped write the script, co-wrote an original score for the film with Jake Quilty-Dunn, and starred as the Scarecrow.

Neil's short film "Filed Away" was aired on the first episode of the CW network's TV show Online Nation.