Highlights

This month was pretty tough for me. After 5 years of dodging it, I finally caught CoViD on August 1st, and was extremely ill initially and then severely fatigued for just over two solid weeks. This was also profoundly affecting emotionally — I’m still not sure if that was just because of the fatigue, or some physiological effect from the CoViD infection. I had terrible swings from anxiety to depression. I was not able to get much done. It was particularly hard to make any headway on creative production work. Towards the middle of the month, I came out of it, and was able to start working on remaining animation work. I got stuck on problems with untangling animation actions in the NLA Editor, and realized I needed to do some experimental work with it on a simpler system in order to figure out how to solve it.

Writing

I finished up editing daily worklogs and timelapses, and then finished up summary articles for June and July. And then I finished up three articles that had been sitting in draft for awhile:

• Inside the Dark Forest is a follow up on my Entering the Dark Forest. Two rare posts from me about the state of US politics.
• AI, Automation, Ritual, and Process in Art is a long exploration of ethics and practicalities around the current generation of AI, particularly “Stable Diffusion” technology.
• Virtual Studio 2025: Metal & Money is an exploration of business plan options for Lunatics, Film Freedom, and Anansi Spaceworks. It’s particularly about the idea of setting up a project hosting service based on my virtual studio work for Lunatics.

I feel like this was a really good use of my recovery time, because it was fairly low-impact work.

Production

I worked on the animation for two shots in the Launch sequence, “LA-6-A” and “LA-6-B”, which are set inside the Soyuz spacecraft (I had copied these to the “Launch” sequence, from the “Soyuz Flight” sequence, due to adjusting where the break between them would be). I was pretty satisfied with the individual animations (represented by NLA action strips):

• Lipsync
• Expressive Animation / Head Turns
• “Ride” Animation

However, these were animated in place, including the base pose (which derived from the “blocking” phase, where I put the characters in their seats. In order to get these to work correctly with each other, I would need to convert these absolute animation poses to poses relative to the blocked pose. And while I do understand the basics, I was finding it hard to untangle the various settings for strips: the effect of combination operators (Replace, Add, Subtract, Multiply), the interaction of keyframes and animation/bone channels, and the effect of the extrapolation modes (Hold, Hold Forward, None).

This required me to solve what turned out to be an old question of mine. In fact, when I searched for any help on this online, I found a Blender Forum post from 2014 asking about it, but without really satisfactory answers. And that post was by me!

Documentation

I decided that this required me to do some experimentation on a simpler model, so i created one, and worked out the details. I recorded these sessions, with the intent to make it into a kind of tutorial.

This was successful in that I did figure out how to solve my problem, using the “Bake Animation” and “Subtract” NLA operator.

However, when it came time to edit this, I realized I had over 3 hours of footage, and there were many dead-ends, unnecessary steps, and other oddities which meant that it would not only be very difficult to edit, but also the result would be unsatisfactory. So the tutorial plan didn’t really work.

So, by the end of the month, I decided to simply re-record the screencast as a planned “demo” rather than an open-ended “experiment”.  I started work on that in September.

Research

Also, as a little side project, I found that a 2008 Thai animated film, “Nak”, which I have heard was made with Blender (I have not been able to confirm this), using NPR 3D style, had been uploaded to the Internet Archive (ironically, just 10 days after I gave up on finding it in 2023!). It had no sub or dub, but I had previously found a set of Thai subtitles for it, so with a little work with Google Translate and then Kdenlive, I was able to translate and sync the subtitles. The result was very imperfect (many translation glitches), but it was good enough for me to finally watch the film, so I was pretty excited about that!

The film was difficult to find, due to having only aired on Thai children’s television and then the animation company folding a short while after. So it was kind of orphaned.

And I was able to catch up on some more recent Japanese anime, including “Irina Vampire Cosmonaut” (2021), which is much better than it sounds! I’ve largely fallen out of currency with anime — most of the ones I really remember are from the 1980s to early 2000s.

August 2025 Timelapse

Video Logs

Video Log 2025-08-11: Covid, Timelapses and Summaries

Video Log 2025-08-31: Bad Month and NLA Problems

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