Ramping Up Pre-Pre-Production

Wow, it's been a while here, hasn't it? Sorry about that...

Life itself has been fairly busy for me, unfortunately crowding out most goings-on as far as animation is concerned. However, it has enabled me to much better prepare for actually animating and getting down to business. I had some nagging health issues suddenly become much worse just before the holidays. I managed to get some really good doctors, had surgery in the spring, and I'm doing so much better now. That took care of some problems that have been plaguing me back as far as high school (which turned out to be more serious than I thought), so that down time was more than worth it.

Also, we moved! Dan and I are now homeowners again. The house is the same distance away from my day job, settled towards the edge of a well established neighborhood, and backs up to a quarter mile of wooded wetland. We both started drooling when we saw the basement--it's completely open, and finished just to the point where we can do anything we want with it quite easily. It only had one outlet in the entire area that wasn't already on a dedicated home system of some kind or another, so that's the first thing we had to work on. I now have 4 pairs of outlets on a dedicated breaker for the wall that will be my dedicated studio area. The other 2/3 or so of the basement is going to be the "shop." Dan and I are both into woodworking, and we have a lot of large tools.

electrical run on the "studio" wall

And speaking of woodworking, yesterday's project was a stage. I gave Dan preferred dimensions for a small stage that I can put any type of top on, and let him design from there. He got all fancy with a pocket-hole jig, and it's probably the nicest looking stop-motion stage I've ever seen. From the top and sides, the only visible screws are the ones holding the edge of the top surface down to the frame, and it's insanely sturdy. Even without sandbags and a set on top, it takes a very purposeful effort to get it to move. We cross-braced the heck out of it, but left one side open for easy under-side access. For its size, it's about as close to square as we can possibly get it with cheap Home Depot boards. It's a simple stage, and we can quite easily add on to it if needed.

excuse the crappy camera phone pic

About a month or so ago, I finally figured out a little film idea that gets me excited. I've only gotten as far as some sketching and a lot of notes, but I feel good about it. I took a chance on an eBay listing for a copy of Dragonframe that someone simply hadn't gotten around to installing and using, and got a nice deal on it. It installed and works just fine on my laptop. This coming week I plan to do some testing and really get a feel for how to use it. There's still a lot more to be done for my studio area in the basement; somewhere to put the laptop other than the stage, what type of lighting I'm going to use, light and dust control, and painting the wall with a new coat of Drylok (and some black over that). Dan's camera will need an AC adapter that's not the easiest thing to get ahold of, so that's one thing currently in the "research" phase as well.

This should be a very exciting week overall. Building the stage this weekend was a great start, and I'm already just tickled over that. I'll be testing out Dragonframe and learning the ins and outs of it. Almost just as exciting, I'll be making the final payment on my Vespa.

Testing: Aardman's Animate It! software

The new Sony Vaio laptop is fantastic. Everything is just effortless on it. I can multitask, I can use the software I need to, everything under the sun can be done wirelessly... it's just great. I'm so glad we were able to get it!

The purchase of said laptop did set us back a little as far as spending money goes, so I won't be able to get any of the higher-end capture software for a while. That's ok. I read a few reviews and did a little price hunting on some of the lower-end titles. Last month we got The Pirates! on Blu-ray (which is fantastic, by the way), and it came with a flyer about some kid oriented stop-motion software from Aardman called Animate It!. I played a little with the trial version, and decided it had enough features to keep me entertained. The full downloadable version only cost about $31 through PayPal, and installed faster than anything else I've put on this machine so far.

The software is extremely simple. There aren't a ton of features to play with. However, it does work quite well. It has live onion-skinning, live chroma key, a handful of camera settings, and import and time-lapse features. It appears to be able to make use of any connected or built-in camera instantly, without having to do any fancy kind of setup. You can adjust the frame rate, drag and drop frames with ease, and even add an audio track. I haven't encountered any bugs in it yet, though I've only played with it for an afternoon. There are limited save formats, but what's there is pretty standard.

What I like best about the software so far is honestly just the onion-skin feature. Now, I haven't played around with other capture software for a long time, nor have I gotten to use the newest Lunchbox DV. Perhaps it's just me, but the flashing back and forth on the Lunchbox Sync and with other software I've tried always bothered me. Maybe my eyes are too sensitive. Maybe I only tried crappy software a long time ago. I don't know. But with Animate It!, it has true onion-skinning, and you can even adjust the opacity of either the previous or current frame. There's a few different playback modes available while taking frames that work with the onion-skinning. Another nifty feature I hope to have fun with is the live chroma key. Not only can you use an eyedropper tool to pick what color you want to key out of the live feed, you can adjust the opacity and tolerance on the fly.

While I didn't produce anything spectacular today, I did have a bit of fun. I learned a bit about the software, the Acrobot figure I was trying to animate, and the kitchen. The software is more than adequate for simple stuff. The Acrobot figure rather sucks, doesn't move well, and the joints like to slip. The kitchen floor also creaks enough to knock a camera off a stand and a magnetic figure off the fridge if you step in just the wrong place. But hey, them's the breaks. I got to do a tiny bit of  play animation this afternoon, and that's what matters at the moment.

The Past, and Reawakening

This is my first real venture into the world of blogging, so bear with me, folks.

I'm a bit of an oddball, to say the least. And my life in the past has been kind of crazy, in many ways, due to lots of circumstances out of my control (and later, some that probably were). But here are the important bits related to this blog...

I wanted to be an animator as soon as I knew the correct term for the job. When I was 12, my dad took me to see Nightmare Before Christmas. I left the theater wide-eyed, and saying to myself, "I'm going to do that kind of animation. And I'm going to do it with those people." Fast-forward a few years later, when I got my first computer that had a modem and AOL was what everybody considered "the internet." I got this insane idea that if I wrote down the names of people on the credits of Nightmare, I might be able to look them up and pick their brains. Much to my surprise, it actually worked to some extent. Some thought I was completely nuts (rightly so). Some did give me advice. I've been in touch with many of them, on and off, ever since.

Fast-forward again, and I'd just gotten my first apartment, and turned 21. Mall jobs, as a career, suck. I started thinking of ways I could get involved with studios. Growing up in Austin, Texas was great, but there's always been quite a shortage of stop-motion studios there, and I simply didn't have the money at the time to even buy a camera. I decided that I could be just as broke elsewhere as I was in Austin, and asked Justin Kohn if he would mind recommending a few studios to try and get an internship at. He hooked me up with the wonderful Chiodo Bros., and my mission began.

All I really had was my dog, a hopped up moped-class scooter, and about $400. Other local scooterists gave me some extra gear, maps, and rode out to the edge of town with me. Over the next 2 weeks, I rode mostly solo to the California border, stopping for a few days to rest and recoup in Phoenix. Mike Frankovich of NoHo Scooters picked me and my scooter up for the last leg of the trip. I showed up on the Chiodos' doorstep, and earned myself an internship.

The 3 years I spent out in Hollyweird were a strange time for me, but I did enjoy it, and wouldn't give it up for anything. I got to see Ray Harryhausen get his star on the Walk of Fame, chat with Phil Tippet, and work with countless other animation legends and pros I saw replays of Nightmare at the El Capitan Theater with some of the crew. I put Elf, Green Screen Show, Disaster!, and Robot Chicken on my resume. I even got a tattoo of Jack Skellington holding a banner that says "I [heart] stop-motion."

Unfortunately, the rest of life was hitting me pretty hard, and I realize now that I needed a bit more stability to do some more growing-up. At the end of 2005, I moved in with a previous roommate-turned boyfriend (now fiance) Dan in upstate NY. We moved to Colorado for a few years, and just recently returned to NY. And we've both recently come to the conclusion that I seriously need to get back into "the biz." And whether it takes me temporarily relocating for studio jobs, or us moving around a lot more, he's behind me 100%.

The first step in my renewed journey is a bit more preparation than last time. I've really been out of the animation loop, so to speak, for quite a while. And I'd been using one of Dan's old computers after my laptop gave up the ghost. While the Sony Vaio tower was still functioning just fine, it was purchased in 2001, and simply couldn't be upgraded any more. We just purchased a new Vaio S series that can currently run circles around almost any other laptop out there, so that should do me well for capture and editing for quite a while. Probably by the beginning of the year, Dan hopes to upgrade to a new SLR, so he'll give me his current one to play with. In the meantime, I'll be brainstorming, story boarding, playing around with different capture software demos, and doing tests. I've currently got my eye on Stop Motion Pro, but nothing is set in stone.

Today I quit one of my two part-time jobs to devote more time to working on animation projects. We're not exactly swimming in money (far from it), but we're not completely drowning in debt, either. We can go out to eat on occasion without breaking the bank, we just don't spend our weekends in NYC. We did a little creative accounting--yes, all legal, just rearranging things--and the new laptop is paid for. We'll be fine with me just having the one job, and I'll make very good use of the time I'm not at work. Between the two part-time positions, I just finished a 32 day long stint with zero days off. I'll never get a reel even started if I keep doing that (not to mention the lack of sleep).

I am extremely excited to be taking this journey once again. I think I'm a lot better prepared, mentally and otherwise, this time around. I got an excellent taste of things already. So hold onto your demo reels, folks. Mine's going to start pre-production soon, and it's going to be awesome.