Missing discs 8:05 AM

Can't find any of my Corn Pone Flicks discs. Can't find a lot of show discs. What the heck?

Ripped The Hyp-Notic Eye episodes 5&6 and encoded the mess to DV, fixing all the time code breaks. The plan is to take the DV, put it in Vegas and make some kick-ass menus for it.

Edited by Joe Riley 3:00 PM

Massive Encoding 12:10 PM

Encoding videos to DVD. Lots and lots of them. This'll take a few days.

63 days 9:50 AM

To the next OtakuHELL.

YOUR ALBUM COVER

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. Make sure you hit the new random quotations button at the bottom.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together (http://www.picnik.com/) works well, online.

5 - Post it with this these instructions.

I wonder what Gondry would do? 9:36 AM

It occurs to me that Sweded movies, or Sweding, is a response to Dogma 95, in a way. I wish that Michel Gondry had written a Sweded Manifesto to actually study and compare to the Dogma movement. It may not have been a conscious decision, but Sweding does have a kind of anti-Dogma 95 thing about it.

Of course the original website for the Be Kind Rewind movie is now gone, so I can only dig around for archived versions of it in hopes of finding something of substance. There is a YouTube channel, but it's not too helpful. And there's a Daily Motion contest group here but it's a la french.

I guess, barring finding something from Gondry in print, I'll have to refer to the definition. Re-making something from scratch using whatever you can get your hands on. Although, in the movie, it becomes more of a film making statement, as it ends with a new movie, and not a recreation of an existing movie using the super low budget techniques.

Hold on, I found it.

You'll Like This Film Because You're in it. The Be Kind Rewind Protocol. That's what I was looking for:

Michel Gondry’s debut book is a functional memoir of his quest to put the tools of filmmaking in the hands of as many people as possible. At New York’s Deitch Projects, in February and March of 2008, Gondry emulated the heroic example of his characters, constructing a do-it-yourself film studio in which any visitor could assemble their own film from extant plot summaries and rent the results. His aim: “I intend to prove that people can enjoy their time without being part of the commercial system and serving it…Ultimately, I am hoping to create a network of creativity and communication that is guaranteed to be free and independent from any commercial institution.” This book chronicles Gondry’s journey towards what he calls “The Be Kind Rewind Protocol”, and serves as an inspirational guide to creativity and the art of having fun.

I'm off to Amazon...

Your format is invalid 9:28 AM

Got the Movie Box out and fired it up to timeshift some Big Red Dog for Hans. The stuff is now so old that it works fine on the Averatec. But it'll never work on anything beyond XP. Hell, I'm lucky it works on XP. I've got software that only works on 95/98/NT. Obsolete. I've got hardware that only works on USB 1. I really need to break out the old zip drive and see if I can save some of that old artwork I stored up. I haven't touched the old Mac PowerPC in years.

Crap, think of the piles of floppy disks that I amassed over the years. I don't even have a 3.5 disc drive on the Averatec, now that I think about it.

Unfinished and unvarnished 6:00 AM

I have spent the weekend sick in bed. And nothing got done.

So, here's a bit of animation I had started for the X-mas show way back in December. In hindsight, I really worked way too hard for that X-Mas show. Of course, now I'm knocking myself out for the upcoming A-Kon show. I never learn...

Please stand by 12:23 PM

Sicko 1:02 PM

My ears are ringing. Really bad. It's coming on. I hope I can make it to the end of the day...

inches on the reel to reel 8:05 AM

It struck me last night as I was drawing frame after frame and I'd drawn somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 drawings that I didn't even have 30 seconds of animation. Because I really thought I'd drawn enough for 30 seconds, but I'm not thinking in frames per second but the effort of all that drawing.

Jones was right. Every drawing is only on the screen for a fraction of a second. I'm just starting to get a feel for what that fraction of a second is. The thing I've been concentrating on is the movement and acting. The squash and stretch of it. I'm not tied to a soundtrack, so I'm not counting frames. I'm not thinking how many frames make a second.

I'm working at 8fps, and I probably should be drawing at 12fps.

Eight drawings makes a second, 16 is 2 seconds, 24 is 3 seconds, and so on. 40 frames is only 5 seconds. And 80 frames is only 10 seconds. Now 8 drawings for a second doesn't seem too bad to me, but for some reason, in my mind, 80 drawings for 10 seconds is lousy. So, for 30 seconds of animation I need to have 240 drawings.

So, the question is, how long does it take to draw 240 frames? I'm not sure exactly, but I think it took me about a half hour to draw those 90 frames last night. In my de-evolved squiggle style. Is it more work then puppet animation? Oh yeah. You could say that. But I still like the results I'm getting.

And this is why I'm not animating at 24fps.

So, let's split the difference. If I'm gonna do anything more then a few seconds at a time I need to use some limited animation techniques. Including breaking down figures into puppets and animating them on different layers.

squiggling as I go 9:00 AM

The more I animate the more I look at other animation with a different eye. Looking at Bob's animation I find myself deconstructing it. What's moving, how it's moving, and sometimes how I'd do it differently.

Right now I'm very dissatisfied with puppet animation, which seems to be the standard for almost all flash animation these days. And it just doesn't feel like, well, animation. Not that I'm all that much for the Richard Williams school of realistic and shooting on ones. I'm obviously in the rubber hose school, so I'm pretty much working at odds with the mechanics of puppet style. Is it more work? Maybe.

Like this 8:22 AM

Jeez, that's disappointing. Gotta build a nicer title card then this.