Mayerson has a great post pointing to a great post by Kevin Kelly about artistic financial success on the internet. He posits that there is a happy middle ground for artists live off their creations between obscurity and super stardom. I completely agree. I think this is the natural place for an artist anyway. Direct connections with your niche of fans that truly appreciate your work. Looking at the success of Trent and Thom even with the extreme “piracy” of music these days gives hope to this direct model.
Happy Leapday! So much has happened over the past 7+ months. Anyway, here’s the most recent test render of Chicken feed. Timing is off and so are the shadows. Currently working on the sound.
Live from Portland. Man I was hoping to be able to post everyday, but this is the first chance I’ve had all week to even boot up my laptop. The screenings start at nine and the party has gotten me back to the hotel around 1-2am all week. Christ, who knew that festivals would be so exhausting. Obviously it’s been fucking brilliant! Until I can get back to may laptop here’s a quote from Bill Plympton:
“Negotiating with Disney is less Good Cop/Bad Cop and more Bad Cop/Anti-Christ.”
Alright I’m late to my next screening. Catch you all soon with TONS of stories, pictures and anecdotes.
So I am working on a new short. My original idea was a twist on the Jack and the Beanstalk theme. I really like the idea, but it just got more and more complex. Too many characters, too many sets for lil’ ol’ me. It’s turning into a straight fiction story which is good. I haven’t written fiction in quite some time.
So now I’m going back to the Ungeheuer well. The short will be titled “Miscommunication” and is based on the Tower of Babel myth. Thanks to Grant and Tak I have great ideas for new armature. I’m also renovating my office to make it a full blown studio. No more bending over my small two foot end table.
During the past week, when I wasn’t sick as a dog, I’ve been helping out Tak with his stopmotion short “The Corn Woman”. He received a grant from the Atlanta Center for Puppetry Arts. The story itself is based on a Cherokee myth. Fantastic stuff and it’s a pleasure to work with him.
Production shot
Working on the layout for my next short. Very promising, but now it’s time to get ready for the Atlanta Animation Workshop.
Well, after a lot of thought and research I’ve decided to make the jump back to Linux. I’m sick of Windows from both an ideological and practical stand point. I’m sick of having to pirate software I can’t afford because it’s only targeted at a commercial audience. I’m sick of the boot times and bloated apps. So, yeah, I’m making the jump.
From an animation standpoint what does this mean? Well OSAlt has been a fabulous resource for finding open source alternatives to the commercial software I’ve been using. I’ve also been using Linux in VMWare to make sure the software I’m looking at works well and my current hardware will be supported. So here’s a list of what I’m planning on using after the jump.
The most important package, Stopmotion:
Currently using AnimatorDV simple+ to stream a live feed from my camcorder via firewire. Onionskinning is important to me as is frame flipping. I’ll be replacing it with with Stopmotion which supports the same features. Thanks to Stop Motion Works for the tip.
Image editing:
Currently using Photoshop. Will be moving to GIMP.
2D animation:
Currently using Moho 5.4 (now Anime Studio). Before Moho was sold to Anime Studio they supported Linux. I have both the package and the license still. so…Yay!
Sound editing:
Been using Audacity and will continue to do so.
NLE video editing:
Using After Effects. I’ll be moving to Kino. Definitely not as full featured as AE, but more than suits my needs.
Video Conversion:
I convert a lot of different media types for animation screenings. SWF to FLV to DIVX to XVID to MPEGII to VOB to MOV…… Actually the conversion software I use most under Windows like ffmpeg and VirtualDub are ported from Linux. sweet.
DVD Authoring:
Good god. Too many options to even choose from. I’ve been using DVDAuthor under Windows which is, can you guess?, ported from Linux. I’ll probably stick with it.
Burning DVDs:
Using Roxio. Moving to K3b. Works flawlessly.
Hardware:
I have a Dell Latitude D820 and all the underlying hardware is fully supported. My new Samson microphone works. My Canon Elura 100 works. My external projector works. Playing DVDs works better than under windows (so no more DVDshrink before the animation workshop). Other concerns were my Sony Ebook and IPod. Both are fully supported.
And the winning distribution??? Ubuntu! I used to be a Debian diehard, but looking at Ubuntu I’m a convert. Besides Feisty Fawn is due to be released next week.
I have a USB external drive due in the mail to back up my current data before the migration. Then it’s full speed ahead. BTW, for those interested, Amazon has an incredible deal right now. 320GB external USB 2.0 drive for 99$. That’s a friggin’ no-brainer.
So the big thorn that still sticks in my side about MUDH is that damned soundtrack. As my buddy Jeremy said, “if you did some work on the audio you could definitely raise the whole thing up a notch.” Luckily J also gave me some audio advice. He suggested I move to a USB microphone instead of using my chintzy RadioShack mic. Well I didn’t even know they made USB mics, but after some back and forth with J and a little research I went ahead and purchased a Samson C10U mic. It came in yesterday and I’m impressed. It’s still going to take me awhile to tweak the levels and get it the way I like it, but here’s a small comparison I did last night.
Well, I got my hotel reservation and plane tickets. I’m going to Platform! This is the first big international animation festival to happen in the US in decades. A week of animation and animators. The only drawback is that I have to wait until June!
Am I thrilled with it? No. Am I happy with it? I have to say yes. Here’s some Q&A I did with myself one lonely evening:
Why do you consider it “done”?
Leonardo da Vinci was quoted as saying “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” and this is a project that I’m ready to abandon. There are some obvious flaws and things I don’t like. Unfortunately the things I consider flaws are things that aren’t easily fixed without major work like a total reshoot. It’s time to move on to a new project. My father is quoted as saying “Well I’ve done all the damage I can do here.”
So what don’t you like about it?
The armature is an obvious flaw. It was created with 24 gauge florist wire spun four thick. It was very hard to work with and had a springy bounce to it that made smooth movement nearly impossible. Luckily I’ve gotten some great feedback from the folks over at stopmotionanimation.com and my friend and fellow Atlantan animator, Grant Goans, who has some great posts on the right way to do stop-mo armature.
The timing is awful in many parts. I’d love to blame it on just the armature, but impatience was definitely another reason. In After Effects I attempted to correct this by stretching the time of some of the sequences (sometimes down to 4-6 frames per second). It looks terrible. This is most obvious during the part when Uncle is chewing on the onion.
The sound is flinch worthy. I really tried to score some voice talent or at least some friends that could record some lines for me and they all fell through for one reason or another. This left me to fill in for all the voices. I was also recording directly to my laptop and that left me with a lot of static and noise. I tried to clean it up with Audacity with some limited sucess.
The over-all story itself just didn’t work out the way I hoped. It’s based on a short story (flash fiction) I wrote years ago for my other site cockroach.org. It seemed like a good idea. The story was SHORT. It had a limited set of characters and a single set. I’ve discovered that independent animators are often under the same limitations that playwrights work under. Unfortunately there was just too much narrative. I was hoping for an Adam Elliot kind of thing. But without the humor and visual punchlines, it didn’t work out that way. At only 2 minutes it’s BORING. I added the line “And there she was.” at the very last minute to break up some of the monotony and it actually helps some. I learned that the shorter a piece is the more of a punch it better have. This story was just too reflective.
So what did you like about it?
I love the puppets. Despite the armature issue I do dig how they look. I love the replacement eyes. I think they worked out very well. Especially in the one shot where Uncle rolls his eyes at the ceiling and shakes his head. I also like how Uncle twiddles his fingers at the very beginning.
I think the lipsync worked out alright. Considering I didn’t have the sound to work with up front I was able to retrofit the open and closed mouth movements pretty well in After Effects. Speaking of software, all of this was done in either After Effects or Moho (now Anime Workshop) and I learned a lot about how such animation packages work. Moho was an especial pleasure. I love how the Tooth Queen segment worked out.
From a more logistical stand point, I’m proud of some of the concessions I made (See “Things I don’t like”). I’m learning that you have to fine tune your vision if you want to keep moving forward. I originally planned on having Emmy animated as a cut-out and it became a HUGE stumbling block. One night I decided to just do her voice “off stage” and suddenly I was animating again.
The decision to change cameras worked out very well. I was initially shooting everything with my Fuji Fine-Pix but picked up a camcorder in Nov 06. The initial scenes were all done with the Fuji and the bulk of the rest was done with the Canon Elura. I think the difference in quality is barely noticeable. The difference in my work flow was tremendous. With the Fuji I had no way of previewing what I was shooting until I downloaded all of the pics. With the Canon I could use Firewire out to my laptop and use the wonderful AnimatorDV package for live preview and the glory called Onionskinning. I’ll never look back until I decide to go HD.
The other difficulty I think I handled well was balancing my day job and social life with getting this done. My day job often has me in strange cities living out of a suitcase and finding time to work on this was difficult. This article on living a creative life changed me entirely. I also have some smart damn friends. I once said to a friend of mine that I was too tired on the weekend to work on animation and he said, “If you really enjoy it I think you’ll find that after you put some work in you have more energy than you did before you started.” Truer words are seldom spoken.
So that’s it. “My Uncle’s Dental Health” is in the can and I’m off to my next project. Thanks to everyone that helped to keep me motivated over the past YEAR (god, really? Yeah, really, get over it K).
Well it ain’t perfect but I’m done “My Uncle’s Dental Health”. There are many things I’d do differently if I were going to reshoot it, but I’ll mark it down to experience. There’s also quite a bit I like about it. I plan on posting it soon.
In other news I’m planning to head out to Portland in June for the Platform Animation Festival. I’m also ready to start a new short currently titled “Jack and the Docks”. ASIFA-Atlanta is going strong and we had a great screening of some international animation for the animation students at SCAD.
