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.