One Year Later.

 

 Okay! So what's been going on? I'm still working at it! What you see up above is a completed set #2. My friends made all the walls and floor and I built the surrounding structure, painted it and dressed it up. We started this set first because it only films with Pel and no one else. Since Pel was 3/4 done at this point, I could get the correct dimensions for it and tell my friends to start!

Set #1 is actually almost done. I just need to add a chair and a few more set dressing pieces. I just can't complete it without finishing Alexander, and for some reason, I'm just not in the mood to start him yet. He's been designed in Zbrush and Rhino. I've started soldering the armature together, but I just can't find the interest in building him. So I started on the Guardian instead. She's a lot more interesting since she lights up and is printed out of clear parts. I have her head 3/4 printed. I've been instagramming the whole process.

As usual, I'm not happy with my progress, but Maria reminded me that a professional stop motion film takes 30 or more people several years to complete with financial backing etc. I'm just doing this on my free time in my bedroom with the help of three other people. Once I make this chair for the first set, I can actually start filming the first shot of the movie!!

I still need to re-cast Pel's voice actor. The guy I got really can't act or doesn't seem comfortable trying. The guy who did Alexander's lines nailed it pretty much on the first try!

Once I have more filmed, or anything filmed, I'd like to look into getting someone to make music for it as well. I still really want to do this! Every now and then I fear I'll lose interest. I haven't yet, but the motivation has dwindled recently. 

By the way, Instagram is really the best way to see progress on this project. Just look for 'Sculptwerks'.

The fire in which we burn

 

I'm a good 1/2 through building the puppet of Pel. It's all designed in Rhino and sculpted in Zbrush. I used the measurements in Rhino to sodder together the brass armature. I've 3D printed most of Pel's pieces. I've printed and redesigned 7 different Pel Heads, each one getting progressively better and better. 

As of right now, his legs are too heavy so I'd like to go back, redesign them and reprint them so that they have the same dimensions without all the mass. I pretty much printed  them as solid pieces. The tail was printed in 4 pieces, totally hollow! They're all glued together, but they need to be sanded and a piece of armature wire needs to be mounted within.

I still have to zbrush all the mouths, torch, fire sequences, and hands for Pel. I also need to finalize his clothes and then hand fabricate them.... I thought each puppet would take month, but each might take 3 months!!! So I guess this being a one year project is out the window. 

I'm going to meet up with a friend this weekend and have him start making tiny books.

I've lost a week because I've been working nightshift for AOA out at Magic Kingdom. I've also been spending the days working on Props for Disney's Cruise Line. I'm grateful for the work and the money! But I feel bad about my project being put on hold. 

Pel and Alexander

 

So it's the end of February and what have I accomplished? Well, a lot actually. I started by writing down 10 ideas on a sheet of paper. They were almost all jokes (of course). One was "Two archeologist mice unearth an alien sphere that tries to sell them time shares". Some were just simple ideas like "A fire knight falls in love with an ice dragon". I showed the list to Maria and we whittled it down to three. I then elaborated on them a little bit. One of the ideas, the one I decided to go with was "A village trains an adventurer to overcome the local dungeon/labyrinth only to find the treasure is a mirror." I explained that the dungeoneering would be a montage of all the famous movie stuff as parody and that sold it to her. 

As I started to develop this idea I thought, wouldn't it be funny if a guy went through a bunch of riddle chambers and the Minotaur at the end just had his collection of mirrors that he was obsessed with? Normally the mirror would be 'The magic is in you' which we've seen in Kung Fu Panda and that Matrix Southpark parody of Wal-Mart. But I thought what if the Minotaur really really loved mirrors and there was no lesson at the end? That would be funny, right?

So I started to write the script. I pictured an old German style house cottage on a hill. It would be sunset and the husband would be coming home. I literally wrote "She was in the cabin making...." and I stopped. Why does she have to be making something? It's already sexist.

So I changed it to "She was reading by the window". But then it dawned on me, what if it's a he? What if it's a gay couple? The partner comes home because his job is gone. This gives the guy reading at the window, Pel, an excuse to pursue the labyrinth cave thing he found a little while ago. The partner, down to earth realist Alexander is sick of hearing about it and isn't in the mood now that they have no income.

The beginning is great! Very honest, the stakes are high. But then I realized, this can't just end with a joke about mirrors. This needs to be a bit more emotional. It ends with a life lesson (sorry) but I think it's cute and still manages to be overall a twist I don't think I've seen before. There's even 'The lie the character believes' so there's a character arc!

So with the script finished middle of last month, I hired actual voice actors for Alexander and Pel and Maria is the Minotaur guardian. This February I worked on getting the entire animatic done. Maria re-worked the Minotaur design (mine was my typical clunky crap). So my plan is March I'm going to ZBrush, 3D print and build the puppets! 

Wish me luck!

A new year! A new Plan!

 Hello!

   So I watched a 6 minute long stop motion video of two friends going to the park, sitting down next to each other on a bench and the whole gag is that they're texting each other on their phones. Everyone passing by is on their phones. Even a dog walks into frame and has a phone on a harness that he uses with his tail instead of playing fetch. The animation was okay. The social commentary was about as tedious and heavy handed as it sounds. 

    Why am I telling you this? At the very beginning of the film, it had a 3rd place winner stamp from some festival. I thought to myself "I can do better than that. I'm going to do better than that." I sat down and started thinking of storylines. 

    I've watched every episode I can get my hands on of "Lessons from the Screenplay", "Every Frame A Painting", "Just Write", and probably others I'm forgetting. I just finished John Truby's 'The Anatomy of Story'. I've watched every single best picture winner ever made (except Green Book, we still need to watch that). I can do this! I started this journey into stopmotion trying to make a masterpiece. That was a naïve mistake. It wasn't a waste at all, I learned a hell of alot with my attempt at Dasos. I spent all last year teaching myself and upping the game. I'm still far from where I want to be. I want to make it clear I consider my stuff 'Almost Good.' But I'm seeing stuff out there that frankly sucks and it's winning awards! 

    I hate to admit this, but I'm not a real artist. I've met real artists. Carina Fernandez is a real artist, Sam Mishlap is a real artist. I don't even like drawing. I'm not good at it because I don't do it enough and I don't do it enough because I'm not good at it. I enjoy making stuff. I enjoy lighting things. I love posting stuff and seeing the little 'views' number go up. Everyone compliments me on my okay stopmotion stuff. I love that. I love that I see crap all over YouTube and I know my stuff stands out in quality a little more than theirs. That's not what being an artist is about. That's just petty ego crap. 

So this year, I'm going to make a 6 minute long (or longer) short and I'm going to submit it to every single festival or competition I can find. I want to win 3rd place or better at ANYTHING! I don't care what it is. I'm sure I won't place at Cannes, but as long as I can post a video that has a little festival stamp on it, I'll be happy!        ... for like a day. 

Christmas 2020!

https://youtu.be/iXGBXjnJftA

 

Well! Here's the longest Stopmotion video I've ever done. It took two years to do Dasos (with a full time job) and only a month to do this. I made Anerin breath, and honestly, I think it looks great!!! I animated snow falling out the window, which was completely a last second decision. It looks okay. It's quaint and kind of charming. With more time, I definitely could have come up with a better system for it. The camera movement is good, but when it turns to keep Anerin in the center, it gets all jumpy. I hate the hand movements for her when she's checking out her claws, but I needed filler gags for the 2:30 minute long speech Santa gives. All her eye rolls are great! I'm happy-ish with the growling. I didn't realize the christmas tree was going to be dead center behind her the whole time. It's great for framing her in the lighting, but the tree is so pretty! I guess it has to be this way since the lights on the tree are way too bright for the scene. 

Next year I'd like all the shorts to be one continuous story. I want to start off with her assistant in the city before they've met. That would be fun. Not sure how many videos I'll be able to do. If I never get a job again, I can do 7 or 8 more two minute long videos. I'm working all of January and there's talk of me doing a minute long stop motion commercial for one of my friends maybe around late Feb or March. If I do get a job I might just go back to little experiments or maybe two 5 minute long animations for all of 2021. Who knows!!

Happy Thanksgiving 2020!

 

 Hello! I finished this quick one well in time for thanksgiving. It took three weeks; one week for making Gobbles, one week for the set, and one week for filming. Not too bad. I'm going to post a green screen lesson for you soon. That was by far the biggest challenge on this one. Keying out green when there is yellow, red, black, and blue in the screen was incredibly difficult!!!!!

Lets Talk YouTube

 

 I uploaded a new video to the channel. This one is a behind the scenes look at how the Fox Witch stuff is made. It's a little over 10 minutes long, almost doubling the length of time my channel has available. My goal is to try to get monetized on YouTube. I need 4,000 public watch hours and 1000 subscribers. I think the watch hours will come naturally over time... but 1000 subscribers?! That's a tall order. I have confidence though. Each time I see a 10 year old kid unboxing a flashlight with 110K views, I feel okay about it. 

To date, I have 37 subscribers and 12 watch hours. Not much you say. But think about it. I've only been live for a few months. My channel only has 7 videos with a total of 12 minutes of watch time! My longest non-making of video is 2:36. Most of them are only half a minute long! Think of how many times people have to watch such short little videos to get 12 hours!!! So I'm looking very optimistically about this!

The next thing I'm working on is an 18 second long thanksgiving day message. Once everything is done being made (puppet, set, lighting) I hope I can crank out one or two more for the month of November. The set is literally going to just be fake autumn leaves from Hobby lobby or whatever I can find, with a blue background. If it takes two weeks to make (it's November RIGHT NOW!!) then maybe I'll just do two videos. 

Anyway, it's fun doing all this and I guess I'm thankful for having all the time in the world to do this!

Stay safe! Stay Healthy!