Filmmaking

Blogging the same thing on two separate blogs doesn’t make any sense, particularly if one of them goes unread. So, this is adios for me from Animation Blogspot.

Sad? Don’t be! You can still catch the latest production news & images from my current films in progress by sliding on over to GoofyGraffix.com. Also, I have another blog called DanBee’s Doodles where I post my random sketches and doodles and whatnot. You’ve seen some of the drawings here before on the Daily Sketch, so stop on by for some new goodies. And leave some comments. Let me know you’re alive.

Thanks! It’s been real… :)

–
Dan
GoofyGraffix.com

One of the things I need to be careful about when working my models is adding too much detail. I want the characters and sets to have a greater degree of detail than I used in Break Time, but there are limits to what POV-Ray can do, and while those limits don’t necessarily affect the robot models, they do affect the organic creature I plan on introducing in later scenes. Basically, I don’t want to pair up an exquisitely-detailed robot with a blockier, cartoonish alien sidekick — imagine something like Wall*E next to one of the bee models I have in my bee movies and you’ll get what I’m talking about…

Something I can do is round off those harsh edges on the model. A perfect 90-degree angle does not exist in the real world, so when the eye encounters one in the digital world, it tends to raise red flags. As you can see in the image above, I’ve got the claws nicely rounded now. In addition, our robot now has FINGERS! Sort of. A couple, anyway. We very well can’t scratch our cabooses without fingers, can we?

I finally got my markers in the mail… yayyy!!! Here are a couple of views of Three-Eyed Larry with some color:

periwinkle

raspberry

Neither color is quite the one I’m looking for — I want something between the two and lighter in tone. So, looks like another trip the art store…

It took all of five minutes to pencil, ink, and color each drawing. Scanning and a slight color correction didn’t take long at all. That means at least in principal the idea of making the drawings less computer-centric will speed things up considerably…

Sat down with a sketchpad and a Staedtler marker and drew some poses for our hapless hero:

Three-eyed Larry poses

So, what’s next? Well, when I did How Space Wars Begin, I took poses of Larry and put them on one layer of the animatic reel. Then I sketched some mouth shapes, put them on a separate layer of the reel, and synced them up to the dialog track. Finally I went through both synced layers, noted the mouth and pose combinations, and drew the pencil roughs. Hard to explain in a way that makes sense — after this first short is released, I’ll post the animatics reel for all to see.

Background: These are the next installments of a series of shorts that started with How Space Wars Begin, using the little three-eyed alien (otherwise known as Three-Eyed Larry) as the star (I hesitiate to use the word “hero”). There are currently two shorts in pre-production, with script ideas for at least three others floating around.

Behold — the hero of my new robot movie:

robot model

Gorgeous, ain’t he? Actually, this is a prototype - the real McCoy has more work left to do (redo his claws & eyes, change his colors, round off some of those sharp edges, among other things). Still, it’s pretty darn close. Very similar in appearance to our hero from Break Time. Although you won’t be able to see the finished model until the movie is released*, I figured I’d give you patient people a glimpse at where the design is going.

Some background: this film is the first in a series of robot movies I’ve been toying with in my noodle since early 2002. In fact, Break Time was initially created as a test movie to try out some of the various large-scale filmmaking techniques I would need to produce these other robot movies. Right now, there are plans for four films — there may be others…

*A subject for another post…

First of all, a big “thank you” to the nice people at deviantArt.com for picking Break Time as a Daily Deviation for July 3. Very cool! Definitely an interesting crowd that runs on dA, and I mean interesting in a good way. Thanks again for the love :) (I posted a big thanks on my dA page, but I forgot to post one here — not that anybody visits my website :( )

I just sent off an order to one of the online art stores for some new Prismacolor markers. Gonna try something new with future 2-D movies. Instead of trying to do everything on the computer - where I can only go, at most, an hour a night — I want to do the inking and coloring on marker paper (Bienfang Graphics 360), then scan the results and layer in Painter accordingly. I’ve actually been wanting to do this for a long time, but it was next to impossible using a digital camera (lens distortion, focus issues). Anyway, I’ve modified the POV code so that it outputs all the layers I’m using in a particular sequence/scene onto single sheets of paper; I’m going to print those out and and put the marker paper over it to trace. Probably won’t be used for the remainder of Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog, which is too bad. For all I know, though, this mad little scheme of mine will end up looking like complete crap and wasting hundreds of thousands of hours. I just know I can trace with a Sharpie & color with a marker a hell of a lot faster than I can with a Wacom tablet, and paper & markers are far more portable than the iMac (not to mention the more positive social aspect of tracing and coloring in the same room the rest of the family is occupying). So, it’s worth a try. If it works, I’ll detail the process here so you have a better idea what I’m doing…

Finally, sketched out some poses for one of the new Three-Eyed Larry shorts I’ve got in pre-production. I recorded audio last week but I haven’t yet gone through the various takes to decide what’s good and what’s not. Hopefully this weekend I can get enough usable dialog together so I can Frankenstein something worth animating…

Survived the 4th of July and associated vacation with all my digits intact and no sunburns worthy of a trip the hospital. I hope yours was equally pain-free :)

Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog is creeping along at a speed normally associated with moving tectonic plates, and as a result I’m starting to lose my marbles. This is not good — my puny brain is the only thing that separates me from monkeys, and losing it would mean a lifetime eating bananas and flinging dung around. Production went south roughly the same time I decided to do away with production deadlines, so I suppose it doesn’t take a genius to see what the fix is. Yeah, deadlines make me nutty, but so far the lack of any hasn’t kept my mental boat on an even keel, and if I’m going to be a stark-raving lunatic I might as well hold a finished film in my hands than not. Easier to explain to the shrinks — or zookeepers. Anyway, I have the end of July as the deadline for finishing inking, with two months to get on the coloring. If all goes well, we’ll have a release date of October 31st…

Speaking of things that make me crazy, what I’ve rediscovered through the self-inflicted stupidity of Scary Monster 2 is that my attention span is far too short to tolerate slugging through the same movie for longer than two months without wanting to shove a flaming poker through my skull. I’m the only person working on these films, and the amount of time I can devote to them on any given day is minute. As a result, these films take forever to produce, and after a few months spent working on the same project something that’s worth maybe two minutes or less of film time, my brain says, “Enough, already!”

Why bring this up? Well, sitting just over the horizon is the first episode of the robot series I’ve been wanting to do for over two years now. The first animatics reel I did for it put it just a shade under ten minutes long. If I use the same production math for Break Time — seven months of work for six minutes of movie — I’m probably staring at an entire year to shoot this thing.

Hmmm. This is a problem…

What does one do??? Well, instead of eating the elephant all at one sitting, I’ve got it split up into twenty separate mini-projects of various lengths (all short). If I can crank out one or two of these guys, take a break, then kick out a couple more, it might go a long way towards keeping me off Death Row. Each project would be considered a whole movie in and of itself, so I’ll go through the same steps for each one from start to finish — storyboard, dialog, models, etc — all the way through the final shading and rendering. The only thing that would be excluded would be the sound effects and music.

So, that’s the game plan. I tend to flake out when implementing these plans, but not this time — I absolutely cannot continue doing business the way I’ve been going about it, not if I want to get these movies finished and shown at film festivals any time this millenium. I have to change my ways, even if it kills me…

So much time has been spent on Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog as of late that I was starting to worry about the health of some of my other movie projects. Neglected movie ideas tend to atrophy rather quickly, and the problem is exacerbated when the movies in question are big multi-scene brutes with short attention spans and shorter tempers. Therefore, I’ve juggled my production schedule to free up more time to work on the little blighters, keep ‘em fed, exercised, toss ‘em the occasional bone. In other words, show ‘em a little love…

For starters, I’ve been reviewing the dialog tracks I recorded for the first episode of my robot series. Unfortunately, it looks like I’ve got quite a bit of re-recording to do. Some of the performances were pancake flat, while in others my voice started out fine but slowly changed over the course of the session, so instead of a spunky gravelly-voiced robot, I’m listening to a tired… me. With a head cold. Not very convincing. So, looks like I’ll need to set up the microphone again. Maybe this time I should actually listen to the tracks before I pronounce them finished…

I’ve also been futzing around with some script ideas and concept sketches for a couple of shorts featuring our friend Three-Eyed Larry. They’ll be relatively easy to put together (compared to ‘Scary Monster’, that is…). I hope to have some dialog recorded this weekend…

Lastly, I had a whole barnyard full of sketches for my dinosaur movie that I finally got loaded into the scanner. The movie has been languishing in various states of pre-production for two years now, but was suffering from a case of lets-add-a-bunch-of-stupid-crap-to-the-script-itis. Removed the obfuscated jibber-jabber, and all of a sudden a cute little movie pops out. Imagine that! Anyway, it has life again, and maybe if we’re really lucky it’ll be finished by year’s end…

I hope everyone is having a great week so far. Look for more doodles and the odd cartoon panel soon…

One more place to watch all nine Goofy Graffix movies. Check them out at http://www.aniboom.com/boomzones/goofygraffix. I sent them some slightly higher-resolution stuff, so they should look better than the ones I currently have hosted on Revver.com. In fact, I may switch my video hosting there — let me know which site you think looks better!!

Once again, Real Life took over the flight controls this past week with soccer tournaments and assorted silliness, but I still managed to punch through a couple more scenes for Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog. Now that the spring season is over and I don’t have to entertain any soccer-related daydreams and/or panic attacks for a whole month, I can get back to obsessing about inking and coloring the rest of the movie. I’m hoping the revised coloring methodology I’ve been working on will speed things up…

Coming up for air for a spell. Honeymooning with the iMac is more like a working vacation where you get to go to Aruba but end up locked in a conference room filled with sweaty meatheads for eighteen hours and never see one lousy beach. But it’s Aruba, so you shouldn’t complain…

The pre-compiled versions of

Another MegaPOV annoyance is the lack of Quicktime support. When I run MegaPOV on my old G3, I can opt to save my images as a Quicktime movie, which is important since, well, you know, I’m a moviemaker. The new version of MegaPOV won’t do that, and I see no reason to kick out another thirty bones to Apple for functionality their program should have in the first place (not to mention the chunk of change I’ve already dropped to get the iMac). To get around that, I’ve employed MPlayer, the movie player and encoder of choice amongst Linux-heads. My first experience with MPlayer two years ago, when the G3 was sporting Debian Linux, was an ugly mess, mainly because I’m a moron and had no idea what I was doing. This time around, I’m getting muuuuuuch better results (even though I’m still a moron). So, problem solved…

I just about have all the necessary tools in place to get rolling again on Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog. Still looking at June sometime, although I’m thinking it’ll be more towards the latter half of the month…

Last week I found myself beset with vision problems (double vision, inability to focus) and throbbing headaches. My boss at work thinks they’re migraines; I think it’s just overwork. Too many long workdays starting at a computer screen, followed by too many long worknights of the same…

So, this past weekend I shut down all the computers and cozied up with some sketchpads, writing notebooks, and pencils. Smartest thing I’ve done in weeks. Besides having my vision return to normal and making my headaches go away, I was able to work on sketches and keyframes for Evolution, as well figure out some production schedule changes for the films after Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog.

I’ve also begun looking at some changes to the way we do business in general — less emphasis on hard deadlines, more emphasis on production-based design. Steve Ogden’s Moon Town production blog and podcast has been full of useful information on running with a production-based design philosophy. I did something similar with Break Time, and it worked really well, but for some stupid reason I haven’t been following it lately. Anyway, I hope the changes will allow for more productive studio time, without making me want to shove my head in a bucket of water and take deep breaths. And I need to have more fun doing this. Making myself partially blind and totally psycho is not fun…

Since I’m trying to slow things down to a more manageable level, the original June release date for Scary Monster is up in the air. Like I’ve mentioned previously, it’ll get done when it gets done…

Here ya go — your first glimpse of the next Goofy Graffix short,

This clip is from the pencil sketches I finshed last weekend. Don’tcha just love my cute fluffy little clouds? The shot of the monster walking down the sidewalk towards the house is missing the clouds floating overhead — those will be added at the coloring stage since I will need to do it for every single frame and I haven’t decided what color the cloud outlines will be. You’ll also notice the monster is walking through the house walls. Obviously, he won’t do that in the final cut, unless he’s a ghost. And no, there’s no audio in this section, so that’s why you’re not hearing anything.

I have four scenes inked now. Between scenes 3 and 4, there were 84 separate poses/layer elements to ink. That’s only about ten less than the entire How Space Wars Begin short. The movie is about 70- to 80-percent edited — minus titles and credits, it’s already sitting at around 2:15, which is as long as Revenge of the Ladybugs. That means when it’s finished, it’ll be the second-longest Goofy Graffix short, after Break Time. In other words, a June release date is not out of line. I’m a lot less grumpy with myself now…

In the past three days, I’ve gotten one and two-thirds scenes inked for the ‘Scary Monster 2′ movie. At that rate, with nineteen and a third scenes remaining, I’m looking at the end of April to have inking completed. Then tack on another month for coloring, probably another two weeks to deal with audio, final edit, blah blah blah…

Hmmm… looks like a release sometime in June…

June?!?!?!

Do you see?? Do you finally get it?????? I wrote “mid-May” as a release date in my previous blog, and in an instant, before I have a chance to turn around and scratch my butt, the release date jumps up a whole month! Just like that. Magic. Gotta be magic. Black magic, maybe???? Maybe a gremlin running around with nothing better to do? What’s that, Mr Gremlin? You don’t have a church to burn down, or a busload of orphans to send over a 100-foot cliff?? No problem — there’s an animator trying to figure out a production schedule who’s just dying to have someone give him a wedgie. Have at it!

He needs to find a girlfriend or something. Seriously.

Well, whatever’s causing it, I’ve learned my lesson. No more ‘tentative’ release date announcements or half-witted gazing into crystal balls. Every time I do that I look like a bigger idiot than I truly am. The damn thing will be done when it’s done.

Sunday marked the conclusion of the pencil phase for ‘Scary Monster 2′. Except for some minor tweaks that we’ll fix later, all twenty one scenes have been completed, and are now patiently awaiting ink and color…

All I can say is “Whew!!”

Although I’ve got at least another month left, the hardest part is done. Done! All the edits and test reels I’ve looked at to date have me feeling good about life. Inking and coloring will be tedious, but knowing the final result will look snacky-good… yeah, I can live that. No problem…

I mentioned at least a month to ink and color, so that puts our tentative (damn, there’s that word again!) release date in mid-May. Unofficially. All sorts of wacky things can (and will) happen between now and the end of all this jibber-jabber. The one I’m hoping for is a mob of friendly magic elves, armed with wicked painting skills and twelve-packs of beer, to show up on my doorstep willing to volunteer their time and energy. A more likely scenario is an asteroid plunging through the roof over my studio, obliterating my computer and all the hard work contained within. This is why we do backups…

In non-filmmaking news, the Sprout’s soccer team won their season opener 4-3. Last season they went 0-7, so I’m already loving this season. Maybe now the parents will let me keep my coaching job til fall…

This sounds suspiciously similar to the post I did on 3/12 but… this is the final week of pencil drawings for ‘Scary Monster 2′.  I have this entire week’s drawing efforts scheduled out, and so far I’ve been able to get everything done I’ve planned on.  So far.  I have Sunday as the tentative last day for the pencil roughs, and then we move into an inking mode. 

Did you notice the way I wrote ‘tentative’ in big bold letters?  That’s for added emphasis.  Emphasis on tentative.  As in something catastrophic could happen this week that would prevent me from finishing.  Or more likely, something less catastrophic like, say, I get freaked-out/frustrated and don’t feel like doing any more drawings.  Or aliens invade… okay, that’s just silly.  Anyway, if all goes well, on Monday I can start the inking and making things look purdy.  And my eyes will stop twitching involuntarily…

First soccer game of the season is the 30th.  We have yet to have a practice where all the team members have shown up.  This does not bode well…

Besides working on pencil roughs for ‘Scary Monster 2′, I’ve been busy hacking away at some of the other movie projects languishing in pre-production purgatory (in case anyone’s counting, there are thirteen). I had to split the various tasks into bite-sized little nuggets of chewy goodness — the better on which to snack on during lulls in the pencil-slogging drudgery. One task was to go thru the robot movie’s raw audio and separate out all the individual dialog bits. When I go into an audio mode for ‘Scary Monster 2′, I can go through the robot dialog and decide which lines were keepers and which were total horse-dookie. Another thing I’ve been working on is storyboarding for ‘Evolution’ — yeah, yeah, I know, I said I wasn’t going to bother, but I really need to know how many scenes I’m dealing with, so I figure as long as the storyboards don’t turn into a huge, convoluted mess it should be okay. Famous last words, normally, but so far no problems…

Future little nugs include going through the bee movie script and working on some rewrites, working on the story treatments for some more robot and ‘Scary Monster’ movies — even that weird little movie idea from the other day will get some love (Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think they’re two separate ideas. Hmmm. Two more ideas. Isn’t that great? Two more things to put on the list. Someone needs to tell my brain to knock it off…).

Sometime I’d like to schedule some quiet time so I can, I don’t know, do some mindless sketching. Or read a book. I haven’t read a book since October. That’s pathetic. My set of Simpsons‘ DVDs is collecting dust, and I’ve totally forgotten how to work the DVR. Not that I ever knew to begin with. Whatever.

 I need to move to an alternate universe where there are forty hours in a day…

Last night as I was powering down my studio, I was wrestling with a bit of a puzzler.  I need to make some changes to the editing system I designed in POV-Ray — changes to improve workflow, allow me to attach audio events that won’t require any adjustment if the synced video frames need to be changed, and so on and so forth… The ideas collided with one another, like bumper cars driven by drunk college students, but I was confident that once I closed my weary brown eyes and let sweet, sweet slumber take over, the ideas would right themselves by morning, and I would awaken with THE ANSWER to my quandry…

When the Better Half hit me with her pillow and told me to drag my sorry carcass out of bed, the first thing that popped in my head was an idea for a movie short involving three-eyed aliens, a squid monster, a dead squirrel, and God.

Aliens.  Squid monsters.  Dead rodents.  The Almighty.

Uhhh…. yeah.

Anyone want to trade brains?  Anyone?  I’ll throw in a pair of broken headphones and a copy of the 2003 Guiness Book of World Records.  C’mon, that’s a deal, people!

Sheesh…

I really wanted to be able to hammer out the last of the pencil drawings for ‘Scary Monster 2′ this weekend.  However, as I’m starting to go through the various scenes I’ve already penciled out, sequencing the drawings and seeing them as a movie rough draft, I’m discovering there’s a lot of… hmmm, what’s the word… “sweetening” that needs to happen.  You know, extra drawings to make the scene pop.  Or at least make it look less stupid.  Not surprisingly, a lot of new drawings involve globs of slobber and sweat flying around, with the occasional eyeball popping out.  It’s animation.  What did you expect?

So, we’re looking at one, possibly two more weeks of pencil sketches…

My problem is, there’s a schedule, and schedules must be adhered to.  Schedules are the holy engine that drives our commerce, makes the trains run on time, etcetera etcetera… too bad my ability to accurately judge the amount of time I need to spend on any given activity is pathetically underdeveloped and almost completely useless.  Didn’t you ever wonder how come I never EVER put down a release date for a project?  It’s because I have no… freakin’… idea.  None.  Anyway, having long ago recognized my bizarre inability to guess these things, I always load whatever schedule I devise with tons of buffer time, so technically I’m still on schedule.  Sort of.  Kind of.  It’s done when it’s done.  Leave it at that…

Have a great St. Patty’s Day.  But don’t drink any of that green beer.  That’s just nasty…

This is the final week of pencil drawings for ‘Scary Monster 2′. I have this entire week’s drawing efforts scheduled out, and so far I’ve been able to get everything done I’ve planned on. A minor miracle, I must admit… anyway, I have Sunday as the final day, and then we move on to inking. Aren’t you thrilled? Aren’t you excited??? The toughest phase is nearly done, just two more to go… First official soccer practice is this Thursday. I hope the girls haven’t forgotten everything they learned last year over the winter break…

Real Life is such a jokester. I planned on spending my weekend zipping around Omaha like a gypsy, toting Little Miss Hoopster from game to game for her basketball tournament. And then, wouldn’t ya know it, the little twerp comes down with THE FLU. Sky-high temps, looking like a train hit her, and just like that we’re chained to the domicile, pumping all sorts of fever-reducing drugs into her, visiting the doctors at Urgent Care, happy stuff like that.

But wait — there’s more… The Disease Queen, being the kind and giving soul that she is, decided not to hoard the virus fun all to herself, so guess who has the bug now? Go on, guess…

Thanks, hon. Nice to see you’re looking out for your old man…

Seriously, though, the lack of a tournament freed up the weekend enough to let me tackle one of the most difficult scenes for the ‘Scary Monster’ short. I’m really starting to get comfortable using the Wacom to pencil the inbetween frames, which speeds things up considerably (no more fighting with tracing paper or digitizing drawings). I’m hoping someday the paper thing will be necessary only for general sketching, and all my keyframes can be done direct with Painter. Then I can concentrate on actually learning how to draw…

The rest of the week I have plans to finish up all the pencil drawings for the remaining scenes. Most are pretty simple, but there is one more big, bad, scary scene that I’m sure will make me totally crazy. I lose this weekend to a trip to Kansas City, so whatever I do, I have to do it before Friday. Could get interesting…

Happy Leap Year! Earlier this month, I sat down and wrote out a shooting schedule for the next “Scary Monster” installment. One of the goals was to finish drawing and shooting all pencil roughs by the 2nd of March. Doesn’t look like I’m going to hit that goal — there are waaaay more drawings than I had anticipated, and I’m losing my next two weekends to Real Life things. Fortunately, I put some extra buffer in the schedule for just this scenario, so overall I’m still looking good.

I’m hoping next week to put up a test animation of a couple of scenes from the roughs. If not next week, then the following week for sure. I’ve got thirteen out of twenty-one scenes shot, so if all goes well I should be inking by the end of next week. Woo hoo.

Not a rhetorical question.  This is actually how my weeks have gone the last two months…

Monday:   I have time to eat dinner, socialize with the family briefly, then take ze Munchkin to the soccer footskills clinic.  It’s very late when we come home, and I usually pass right out…

Tuesday:  Basketball practice — almost two hours of writing and storyboarding bliss, but no keyframing.  After practice, I have about an hour and a half, maybe two hours to do actual keyframing. 

Wednesday:  Nothing happening.  A good two-plus hours of keyframing & tweening, whilst the other people who camp out in my house watch “American Idol”.  Next to Tuesday and Saturday, the one day a week I feel like I’m accomplishing something…

Thursday:  Maybe an hour of keyframing.  “The First 48″ is on AMC, and the Better Half and I happen to like grisly crime shows with dead bodies and detectives grilling dimwitted suspects… 

Friday:  Are you kidding?  It’s Friday!!!  NOBODY works on Friday, you silly goose…

Saturday:  Panic sets in when I realize the last two days I’ve worked only an hour, at most (why didn’t I do anything on Friday???  Curse you, Friday!!!).  The sunlight that filters into my room is perfect for illuminating the drawings I’ve done for photographing (I’ve had a scanner on my Christmas and birthday lists for the last three years, but no one seems to get the hint).  The rest of the day I’m compositing images in Painter, doing some tweens with the Wacom, and enjoying Real Life.  Saturday evenings I plop in a movie or watch some tube, interact with the family unit cuz, you know, you gotta do that if you want a sane, happy family unit…

Sunday:  A day of suck.  During the AM it’s house-cleaning time (insert random swear words here), then the afternoons are swallowed up with hoops games for the Pint-sized One.  The games themselves are not the problem - it’s the dead time from when I finish cleaning til we have to get ready to go to the gym.  I’m not very good at forcing myself to be productive between two fixed points in time (I prefer an open-ended arrangement).  Usually get an hour in the evening to draw…

That’s the winter schedule.  The rest of the year, there’s soccer coaching and lawn mowing and a variety of other goofy things to do.  Then you have to take into account I like to come up with some less-than-intelligent schemes and sundry distractions that guarantee most of those keyframing hours are spent not keyframing.  Brilliant, no?

Soooo, the point of all this is…?  No point, really.  This was in case you’re wondering why in the @*$!% it seems like it’s taking forever for me to finish any of my movies.  I am a blockhead.  Get used to it…

Last night was the final basketball practice of the season for the Squirt.  There’s a tournament and a make-up game this weekend, and that… is… IT!  Done!  This means I lose my semi-private script-writing-leave-me-the-hell-alone space until the late fall.  Crap!  Fortunately, I made this last practice count and finally finished the rough draft to the “Stupid Bee Jokes” movie.  Woo HOO!!

Let me re-phrase that:  I finally finished most of the rough draft.  The very, very end still remains, but I know how it goes, so as far as I’m concerned I’m finished.  I think.  Maybe I should write something done…

Anyway, here’s the problem:  where and when am I going to do the rewrites?  In two weeks Tuesdays morph from happy-basketball to crazy-soccer days.  Since I’m one of the coaches, I don’t get the luxury of camping out under a tree with a notebook and ignoring everyone around me.  And, I’m up to my fuzzy dome with “Scary Monster 2″ keyframing & tweening for the foreseeable future (more on that at a later date).  What’s an old fart to do?

Well, for right now I’m not going to worry about it.  The rough draft is done, and I’m in a good mood.  I’m sure some time will magically free itself up.  At least, I’m pretty sure it will… sort of… I hope…

Anybody watch the Oscars last night?  Seriously, anyone?  No?  Me, neither.

I suppose, being a filmmaker and all, I should care about what films win what award, and most years the Better Half and I make a concerted effort to watch at least some the nominees so we can come to our own conclusions.  This year’s crop, however, was a rather uninspiring bunch, to say the least (2007 in general was a pretty worthless year for films, if I do say so).  I’m sure all the winners will end up in the Netflix queue, but I have a feeling it’ll be like 9th-grade English class where we were forced to read Dicken’s Great Expectations — it may be good for you, but swallowing that pill is going to be a bitch…

Anyway, the nice lady who lives with me made a go of the Oscars for about an hour but got bored silly.  Meanwhile, I happily composited pencil sketches, then discovered Men In Black was playing on Turner Classics.  Sweet.  Saturday night The Matrix was on AMC, so two of my favorite films from the 90s in one weekend…  I think I know what I want for my birthday…

This past Saturday was another extremely productive one, with many keyframes & tweens drawn.  At one point, the Mutt decided to camp out on my lap, preventing me from getting anything further done.  I’m certain my astounding work output left him green with envy, considering he hadn’t lifted a helpful paw all day.  Lazy vagabond (observe the stoner expression)…

Mmmm, warm lap…

To get him to leave me alone, I was forced to bribe him with a rawhide bone.  No doubt, that was his plan all along.  Devious lad (observe the satisfied smirk)…

Nom nom nom nom nom!!!

And that, friends and neighbors, is the most interesting thing that’s happened all weekend.  Sadly, my life lacks much of the drama and tension required for interesting blog-reading material.  I’m a crashing bore, and I’m perfectly okay with it…

Tonight and Thursday night I’m at the basketball court for the Munchkin’s practice.  Should be some more good scriptwriting time…

This past weekend was another keyframing, image-compositing funfest, and the love has carried forth into the work week with image-sequencing and tweening for a couple of scenes in ‘Scary Monster 2′.  Now that the “B” list has been throttled, I’m finding time to get movies made.  Go figure…

Last night I was able to get about half of act 4 scripted for the “Stupid Bee Jokes” movie.  Another gabby scene that will require a half-dozen rewrites before it flows.  Part of me is hoping like hell this movie will be done in time to submit for the 2009 Omaha Film Festival, but the realistic me is not so confident.  After the next two 2-D movies I’m planning on jumping into the robot movie, which has been floundering around much longer than the bee movie.  Maybe 2010?  I don’t know…

Seems like it’s been an uphill struggle to get anything useful done this week.  I blame it on the “B” list. 

For those of you not in the know, the “B” list is simply the lower priority items on my to-do list — the things I’m only supposed to worry about when there’s nothing going on with the “A” list.  This would include things like the drum machine script for POV, playing with ideas for comix strips, going over my checkbook for the last two years to try and find a missing twenty dollars, etc.  In other words, a lot of time-wasters my brain comes up with to avoid doing any real work.  Here’s an example:  I’ve spent part of the week scribbling and sketching some marketing-type images for projects that are months, even years down the road.  Now, why I’m worried about creating marketing stuff when I haven’t produced a new movie in two years is beyond me, but my brain seems completely fine with the idea, because that way it doesn’t have to start thinking about how to make those more difficult keyframe drawings for the ‘Scary Monster’ movie.  Nice.  I’m sooo glad my brain is looking out for my best interests…

So, I’ve scrounged up a harpoon and stuck it through the heart of the “B” list.  Comix idea?  Shelved.  Songwriting?  Nope (and let’s be honest: who the hell wants to hear a fat, bald forty-something guy play his silly little punk songs, mmm?).  Balancing the checkbook?  Well… I really need to do it, because knowing the checkbook is off completely freaks me out.  But that’s it!  No more piddly crap!  I don’t want to turn seventy-five and still be dinking around with this ‘Scary Monster’ movie (I’m sure the grandkids would be embarassed)…

On a positive note, I got the rest of the third act of the ‘Stupid Bee Jokes’ movie scripted out.  That’s leaves only one act to go.  I have a couple more basketball practices to sit through, so that should give me time to write, maybe finish this thing off…

Saturday was an extremely productive day, with most of the remaining dialog for the robot movie finally getting recorded. I may have one or two lines from one of the extra characters to record, but the vast majority (more importantly, all the dialog I actually need to get rolling with production) has been finished. I still need to weed thru the raw audio files and figure out which takes are keepers; that can be this week’s focus…

On top of dialog recording, all the many keyframe drawings for the Monster movies got photographed and uploaded. You know, someday I’m going to break down and actually buy a scanner… anyway, I need to run those drawings thru Painter, build composites, and start setting up some sequences in POV, which can be another focus item for this week. Lots of keyframes left to go, and there are a lot of Real Life things to contend with this week…

The drum-machine POV script has been finished and seems to work pretty well. I’ve been creating some ’stock’ drum patterns at a variety of tempos so I have something to jam along with. Now all I need is a stone-cold money riff and a half-baked melody, and I’ll be set. Odds are pretty good, though, that the most I’ll be able to dig up will be some snarky punk thing that will just annoy people. Nothing wrong with that…

Oh, yeah, and one more thing… HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!!!!!!!

Tuesday was not a blissful day around the flatlands.  Apart from the previously-mentioned porn site hotlinking episode, the Better Half’s car battery decided to go belly up, so we were forced to scramble around for rides and an overpriced replacement battery.  Grrrrr.  Nevertheless, I managed to eek out one page of dialog for the Bee Jokes movie.  One page isn’t going to go too far (the particular scene it’s for is a chatty one), but at least I wasn’t sitting on my thumbs…

On a sunnier note, the next four days look to be quiet, low-stress days with no wacky extracurricular activities planned, so that should give me some time to continue with keyframing, scriptwriting, or drum-machine programming.  I hope.  Crossing my fingers for luck…

The past week has been a keyframe-athon of epic proportions.  I’ve got keyframes coming out of my ears for the first ‘Scary Monster’ sequel, and a couple for ‘Evolution’.  The drawings are scattered all around the studio — on the drawing table, computer desk, floor, kitchen, whatever.  I’ve found that the cheapo Blick-housebrand tracing paper works just as well as Canson or Strathmore paper.  The plan is to continue drawing throughout the week, as long as the drawing buzz keeps going, then this weekend I’ll start shooting the drawings, dumping them into Painter, and building composites…

New Year’s resolution update #1:  I stumbled into a local music store to purchase strings for my PRS for the first time in probably four years this weekend.  Let me tell you, fresh strings on a guitar is like waking up in the morning and realizing IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF SUMMER VACATION YAAAYYYYYYY!!!!  Cleaned off the finger grunge, slapped on the new strings, stretched them out, and before you know it my fingers are dancing around the neck making weird spaceship noises (mind you, it was very clumsy dancing, but my fingers didn’t care one stinking bit).  Life is good.  Makes me want to get the drum machine script for POV up and running.  I’m getting ideas…. hmmmm….

I like Tuesdays. I have officially made Tuesday my favorite non-weekend day of the week. Why, you say? Well, Tuesdays are basketball practice days, and basketball practice days mean I get to work on scripts and storyboards for nearly two hours without interruptions or fear of accidentally falling asleep in the middle of something. I take the Bambino to the practice place, then park my butt in the foyer next to the gym. There, it’s just me, some sketchpads, pens and pencils, and nothing but the dull roar of snot-nosed kids running up and down the basketball court. I don’t chit-chat with the other parents, I don’t have dogs chewing on my slippers while my feet are still in the slippers — I’m just enjoying a little slice of creative heaven, right next to a freezing cold, smelly gym…

Anyway, Tuesday night I got a big chunk of dialog written for our Bee Jokes movie. An entire scene’s worth, no less! Call me zany, call me madcap, but I’m actually starting to get excited about this movie again. Very excited.  Lack of sleep, perhaps??? Hmmm, maybe…. I still have another scene left to draft, and then come the rewrites, but I’m feeling a lot more love about this script than its predecessor. And everyone knows I’m all about the love. The trick, of course, is to stop myself from rewriting the script to death. I may have to hire someone to beat me with a cane if I get carried away with my rewrites again. I’m sure I can find more than a couple of willing volunteers…

Of all these supposedly worthy nominees, I have seen exactly one of them (Ratatouille).  Maybe it’s just as well there’s a writers strike; that way, I don’t have to think up an excuse not to watch the Oscars this year…

BEST PICTURE
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

BEST ACTOR
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

BEST ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Julie Christie, Away From Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Laura Linney, The Savages
Ellen Page, Juno

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There
Ruby Dee, American Gangster
Saiorse Ronan, Atonement
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

BEST DIRECTOR
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Jason Reitman, Juno
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Brad Bird, Ratatouille
Diablo Cody, Juno
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Tamara Jenkins, The Savages
Nancy Oliver, Lars and the Real Girl

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Christopher Hampton, Atonement
Ronald Harwood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Sarah Polley, Away From Her

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Persepolis
Ratatouille
Surf’s Up 

The last animatics reel for our 2-D films has been completed.  Clocks in at right around two minutes, about thirty seconds shorter than the first two.  Of course, we’re talking animatics reels, so there’s a LOT of play in the numbers.  I’ll know the exact run-time after I shoot the pencil sketches (well, maybe not, because it won’t include titles, credits, or trailers)…

WooHOO!!

Well, sort of woohoo…

When I started this project back in… October?  November?  I don’t remember anymore… anyway, I had my sights set on about eight or nine 2-D and a pair of 3-D movies that I wanted to do.  A couple of the 2-Ds have been deferred til later, a couple more died of natural causes - storyboarding revealed terminal flaws in their design.  There are a couple of others that are sitting on the border between life and death, and I wasn’t able to devote enough time to sway them either way.  Then there are the 3-D movies:  my robot movie is still spinning its wheels waiting for some dialog, and the first incarnation of the Bee Jokes movie - after sweating over the script for a month - laid a big fat egg…

Yeah.  Woohoo…

Frustrating?  Kind of, but not really.  I don’t mind the demise of the weaker films - just natural selection doing its thing.  I’m more frustrated by the amount of time I’ve spent working on scripts that have gone nowhere, films that are right on the cusp of being really good were it not for my clumsy writing skills, knowing I’m spending a lot of time on something that will be over in two minutes.  In other words, normal animation stuff…

Whatever.  The real work begins tonight.  I have blank sketchpads, sharpened pencils, tracing paper, freshly-charged batteries in the camera, and a coffee pot armed and ready for some keyframe action.  This weekend is not looking particularly good for robot dialog recording, but there may be some quiet lulls I can use to work on the Bee script.  Time to go to work…

I have two of the three 2-D movies’ animatics reels completed. Both films clock in at around 2 minutes 30 seconds, which will make them longer than any other film I’ve released except for Break Time. Film number three is in the works; should have the reel completed tomorrow. Once I figured out how to run the master editor, putting these together was pretty easy.

One film I am NOT making an animatics reel for is ‘Evolution’. I’ve already had two false starts on this, and I’m afraid trying to do the animatics on it could be the kiss of death. I already know how the story is supposed to go, so let’s just get on with it, shall we?

Speaking of getting on with it, I need to make a stop at the art store to pick up some tracing paper. I figure by mid-week we’ll be drawing our first keyframes. Sweet! Now, up to this point I’ve been working on all the movies simultaneously so I could handle dialog recording and animatics reels at one time. After this last reel gets put together, though, I’m gonna switch gears and go into a one-movie-at-a-time production mode, right up until it’s time to be released. At least, that’s the plan. The odds of the plan staying on plan are not promising, but I’m going to try and be a good boy and actually follow through on this (Actually, the odds are strongly in favor of me working on one film til I hit a production brick wall, then moving on to the next movie, eventually getting back to the first movie when all the other ones have hit their walls)…

Got about twenty percent of the dialog for the new robot movie recorded. As I feared, doing the robot’s voice is murder on my throat, so I have to space apart the recording days. This might drag on through the rest of January. There’s really not that much dialog, though — maybe I have an outside chance of getting all the parts recorded before February. That would be nice…

Slow progress on the animatics reels for our 2-D movies.  Main reason behind the slow-going is the fact that the fancy-shmancy master editor POV script I put together to handle the edits and audio and such is… well… I have no idea how to run it.  This is what happens when you don’t do any movie work for almost two years.  Actually, it’s the audio section that I’m stumbling over.  This is the first time I’ve done a live project with it - or even a test project with it - so there are lots of coding bugs and interface “issues” I’m discovering…

Now that I’m getting into the animatics reels and layouts for the four 2-D movies, I’m beginning to lose enthusiasm for tackling the bee movie script.  This is normal.  I have a tendency to laser in on one particular project, to the exclusion of all others, which makes trying to do multiple projects simultaneously a bit of a challenge.  I need to dig up some motivation to get cracking on the script.  What I have so far is actually pretty good (well, I think so!); I need to finish it, make it better than just “good” (”great” or “outstanding” would be nice)…

No movement on the robot movie.  I’ve been wanting to kick people out of the house so I can record dialog in peace and quiet, but no one is willing to leave.  Might have to resort to bribery…

Finally, I’ve been putzing around the studio, scratching out some new doodles of bugs and monsters and things.  Still wrestling with some comics ideas, but with my brain sucked into the movie-production weirdness I haven’t gotten any traction…

Happy New Year!  Some project-related stuff to blurb about:

1.  Our four 2-D animations are officially in production mode.  I’ve sorted through all the dialog bits, selected the keepers, and have started working on some model sheets for our characters.  The model sheets aren’t going to be too terribly elaborate — I’m the only animator, so there’s no need to go totally nuts on it.  Just enough to work out the scaling, number of teeth and fingers, all that fun stuff.  Once that’s done, I can work on some layouts…

2.  In less encouraging news, our two 3-D animations are officially wandering around with their thumbs up their noses.  The bee movie has a partial script and no storyboards, while our robot movie is patiently waiting — and waiting — for me to record some friggin’ dialog.  What’s the deal?  Since when did I become so completely incompetent at this?  Oh, wait a sec… I was never competent to begin with.  This is just par for the course…

**sigh**

So, I am simultaneously pleased as punch and ready to throw myself under a moving bus.  The joys of animating…

One thing I can do while I wait for an opportune moment to record dialog is start working on the robot models.  It’s been almost two years since I last looked at the model or interface code, which is like twenty years to an animator (animator years are like dog years, only animators aren’t anywhere as adorable as your average mutt, nor can they be potty-trained).  Maybe gazing upon the cryptic mess of code jibber-jabber will inspire me to roll tape on some dialog.  Or maybe it’ll make me junk the 3-D thing altogether and take up claymation.  Either way works for me…