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! 

Halloween 2020 Message!

 

The next video is up on YouTube! 

https://youtu.be/iK_EijQ60z8

As you can see, my animation is getting better, but is far from perfect. The movements are often coming too late, making the audio seem off... which it's not. I LOVE when she rolls her eyes when she says "Door to Door" but the first 10 seconds it looks like the audio isn't matching. Mouth choices aren't great yet combined with movements that are starting into the words that are the emphasis words and not before. The movement should crescendo when the audio for the word crescendos. 

The Vixen's Cauldron Now up to view!!!

 

https://youtu.be/iySM-UiHLhY

I finished my next piece just in time to premiere it on October 1st! I hope you enjoy it! I want her to be a recurring character. The first of a few. Her 3D printed parts worked great! Blinking is still a bit of a pain, but far superior to sticking clay onto an eye. Her eyes worked PERFECTLY!!! I just had to print them a little bit smaller than I originally planned to get the eyelids to fit as well. The hair was from a huge pony toy. Luckily they had one with silver hair. Even with the fan turned on, it was never a problem. I got better with animating her as I went on. This is the second take that I had done. Each take took 8 hours from start to finish. I couldn't bring myself to do a third take. I really should have though. This animation is the best I've done so far, but it's still only close to being good. 

I'm going to do a short Halloween message with her next and post that on the 26th, hopefully. It shouldn't be too hard. I'm going to use the same set and the same lighting. It should just be a matter of writing and recording dialogue, assigning the face set to it, then filming it in a take or two.

I'm not sure if anyone goes to this blog anymore. If you do, please comment! I'm considering taking it down due to lack of interest. 

Thanks! 

Stop Motion: Terra Magma

 https://youtu.be/bfDvCogVeKQ

Terra Magma is finally finished! Thank you Maria Stuckey for the wonderful title! I kept just calling it "Lava" but that just didn't sit right with me. Thanks to Ellee Gilley for the use of her green screen background. I'm so happy that my little ship kept working throughout the whole shoot.