Posts from — February 2008

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)…

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)…

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…

Stumbled across eight animated GIFs that somehow escaped notice and posted them on the clip-art page. Just in case you’re interested…

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!!!!!!!