HIGHLIGHTS
This month, I really ran with the idea of doing small projects. This helps my mental health and also provides something to promote my work with, so it seems like a pretty good idea.
PRODUCTION
The control panel shot in “Lunatics!” is followed by a shot in which Georgiana presents her space-bunny toy to the technician. We didn’t really have a specific action planned, but I’ve realized that the logic thing is that the technician
straps the toy to her spacesuit. We need to animate that in the following shot, so I need to create a velcro strap for Georgiana’s spacesuit and rig it. Blender’s “bendy-bones” feature seems like a good fit for this.
So this month, I modeled the velcro strap and started trying to rig it, although I’m finding the latter a little hard to learn, and maybe hard to focus on.
I decided to collect all the production work on “Lunatics!” from July to October into a single timelapse video:
Timelapse: Lunatics Production (July to October 2024)
More-or-less on a whim, I added a soundtrack with free-licensed techno music and sound effects from freesound.org for Georges Méliès’ film “Voyage à Travers L’Impossible” / “The Impossible Voyage” (1904), which tells of travelers to the Sun — sort of a sequel to his better-known “A Trip to the Moon”.
I hadn’t seen it before, and when I tried to watch the silent film, I found it hard to get into because of the lack of sound. I first thought I’d just add some music, but I sort of got carried away, and now it has music and sound-effects almost approaching a foley track (I don’t call it “foley”, because I didn’t perform the effects in real-time, I just matched them to the action in Kdenlive).
Impossible Voyage Techno/FX Edition
Timelapse: Making of Impossible Voyage Techno/FX
After that, I followed through on my plan to create a very simple stop-motion animation to go along with my son Nicholas’ rap version of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. This was a project for a high-school English class, now several years past. Last year around Halloween, we bought a black crow decoration for the season, and thought about doing some kind of stop-motion with it, along with the winter squash they sell in the grocery stores this time of year. It was really too late in the year to do it then, but I realized at the beginning of October that we had enough time to do it this year. So I did!
Raven Rap
Timelapse: Making of Raven Rap
At the end of the month, I spent some time editing audio, video, and photos I took at a Halloween concert by the Greater Fort Worth Community Band, in which Nicholas also plays percussion. So this was kind of a home video. I didn’t have any formal permissions on this, and the concert includes proprietary in-copyright compositions and arrangements, so I can’t legally publish the result.
But I do have the making-of timelapse for it:
Timelapse: Making of Halloween Concert Video
WORKFLOW
Downloaded and watched some 2D animation tutorials for Synfig and OpenToonz. I am thinking of doing future experimental projects with these, and perhaps folding them into future “Lunatics!” work (i.e. in episode 2 or 3).
DOCUMENTATION
Decided to create timelapses of production work, since I did quite a bit this month. Also decided to include work from thie Summer (I did significant animation work in July and August, and a little bit in September). I did not try to do the full “Topical Summary” and “Time Breakdown” treatment, but only focused on production work.
I’m continuing to record video logs, but I’m dropping the pretense of them being on a weekly schedule. I just record them when I get the chance.
IT
The Internet Archive got hit with a huge data breach, which exposed my password. Unfortunately, that was a password I used in a lot of places, so I had to change them all. On the other hand, this was a “low security” password, so I didn’t use it on really critical accounts.
HOUSEHOLD MAINTENANCE
Continuing work on the bathroom. I’ve managed to get insulation and drywall onto the north wall, re-route the 220V electrical junctions, and close up the worst gap in the floor under the toilet (where the electrical and plumbing supplies enter the room). I’ve cut the sink drain and gathered materials to reglue it slightly lengthened to fit the sink properly (it was a little too short, which might have contributed to the sink drain leaking).
