graticule

The comic...

Well, the comic has really taken off. It's been a solid month of work, and find myself producing far more than is the industry standard (that is, a full-color, full page narrative strip every weekday) while still keeping house, home and job together. I obsessively check the stats and so forth, but it's more of an annoyance. I know that one day the strip will go through the roof because it's good. The characters are unusual and there are some cool story lines. The fact that I am now using Mirage to draw them means, too, that much of the art can be used in the animation.
As for that, I've not done any work on the cartoon itself this month. My new approach was to focus on the animatic again, getting the drawings up to the new soundtrack. I know now, though, that the accents I used for two guys from Birmingham (Brummies, they're called) were wrong. I've found a repository online that has examples of many accents (ranging from the American south to South African) and it's been a great help. I speak to myself in Brummie all the time, in fact. The brits consider it the funniest of accents, a point in my favor.
As they stand now, they sound like they're from Manchester. Just like Karl Pilkington, whom Cheese resembles more than a little.

CRASH

Well, it happened. I was cleaning and hit my Lacie 250GB external drive and BAM, down it went. With it went the last five months' worth of work. All the animation was hosed. I still have the backgrounds and, most importantly, the soundtrack.

The disc was a casualty of my need to figure out how to balance a full-time design job with a family and a developing cartoon. My studio reflected the chaos in my life, gradually fillng up with detritus, disorganization and an air of spurious neglect. One of these days, I said, I'll start.

So I started. It was overwhelming. Nothing was where it should be. Computers, instruments, workspaces, all of was haphazardly placed, totally wrong. I started, but was soon overwhelmed. It was in this disorganized state that I knocked over my drive and started a new chapter.

It's scary, but I realize that I was going to redo most of the stuff anyway. It wasn't really working as I hoped... I want a compromise between overly animated work and Dr. Katz-style talking heads. I need physical comedy too.So I'm starting fresh. Not over, but fresh. Same story, same sound, but a new and more efficient approach. Time's a-wastin', jack. Get on it.

time out!

Golly, it is always this way. Start a new job and suddenly you lose track of your project, lose time and maybe even lose motivation. I hear this especially from people who work in something that is very close, such as graphic design. Lord knows there is more work doing graphic design than doing animation, especially in Iowa City.

setbacks

There are bound to be some setbacks with any project. Sometimes they come in bunches: computer crash, car accident, etc. In my case it's been a case of pernicious flu. First my daughter, then my wife and then I all were stricken. It's amazing how it takes the wind out of you.

It's something to toil on a sequence for days and then let it rest for a while, watch something really excellent in the interim period, and then go back to your work and all its amateurish shortcomings. I made the mistake of watching Emperor's New Groove this morning and was once again humbled by the sheer excellence of the animation. Every sequence is superb, some of the best ever to come from Disney. Great story, too.

Something to strive for, as I am no quitter. Today, though, I will take off. The slick currents of fever-induced fatigue are welling up in me again. Maybe this is what it is like to be old.

10 seconds

Here's ten seconds of animation, about thirty hours of work. Much of this time is due to inexperience and experimentation, and the result is (not surprisingly) a bit uneven. Still, it's a start. The clip is in BW... I want to keep the full color for the final addition.

Be sure to check back in another month for the next ten seconds! (Just kidding. Oh god, I hope I'm just kidding...)

sound and motion and time

Having completed a fairly polished scratch track, I have now moved on to the animation itself. I'm breaking the tasks into fairly managable parts to keep myself interested and also to maintain sense of progress (to keep motivated). The backgrounds for the first few scenes have been redone to better incorporate the changes within the soundtrack. I've also redone some of the keys, as the movement of the characters has changed somewhat.

Doing pencil tests to the soundtrack has been an extremely illustrative process (so to speak, ahem). I've noticed that the pacing of the drawings and the pacing of the sound are often at odds with each other. Each has a rhythm of its own, and it's the very devil to get them so they synchronize properly. Mirage is a great animation tool, but the sound aspect of it is pretty spare. Bauhaus says that they have designed it for scratch track purposes only, so it's pretty limited. Still, you can use it fairly well within its confines. I'm still exploring the many features of the program, some of which will be really cool when I get them to work.

Pose to pose animation is really the best way for me to do some of the scenes, so I'm working out the methodology that will best enable a high rate of production.

It's truly staggering, though, how much time all of this takes. Ask my wife if you want further proof!

time, time, time

I read that Miyazaki sleeps four hours a night and works every single day. I can see it. I wish I could function better with so little rest. I keep going: "One more thing," I tell myself, and then one more, and on and on and suddenly it's 2:30. At least it's not alcohol.

The improved sountrack is coming along well. I recorded some disturbing background ambient/industrial music with Ableton and spent a fair amount of time goosing up the background noises. I also worked out several more gags, both visual and aural. It's amazing how much tighter things can be pulled.

I'm not sick of it yet, but then I've not started animating yet, either.

drawin'

Lord, I've been so wrapped up in highly technical methodology and production that I clean forgot until tonight the restorative power of drawing. And not purely artistic drawing, either... I mean drawing on paper as part of working on the project (martinet that I am, I seldom allow myself time to relax and not work). In just an hour, I was able to redraw the characters so they more closely match the voices and so that they'll be easier to animate than their representations in the animatic.

This is one I did in Mirage. My scanner is not hooked up, and I seem to have lost my installation disk.

reworking

After getting some initial feedback on my animatic, I've pulled the post and am reworking the entire thing. The sound needs quite a bit of help: uneven recording sessions and a variety of odds-n-ends software contributed to an inconsistent result. I also need a far more organized approach for laying out the tracks in Nuendo. The reworkinbg should take a few days, after which I'll repost it and get to work on the animation itself.

back after a long break

Well, after a long break that included the holidays I'm back to both this journal and my current project. I've had one little thing after another, as well as a few non-animated projects. I've been getting my studio finished up, working particularly on the sound applications and equipment. I've just gotten a Lexicon Lambda that will serve as an excellent USB interface for both my PC and my Mac. I've got a great deal more PC software, but the soundcard on the Mac is superior.

Another thing that I've been doing is helping my older daughter Olive begin her first claymation project. She's in the early stages and is coming up against the all-too-familiar problem of structural integrity with her models. They don't have a skeleton, so they tend to fall apart after a few hours. We're slowly working on this to get things better.