Hm. Motion blur isn’t looking so great. Good to know.

This week 29 September to 5 October saw the compilation and release of the teaser, thanks to a long weekend. Then on Tuesday I underwent a medical procedure which left me limping and feeling sorry for myself for a couple of days afterwards. The less said about that the better.

I’ve started cramming the Dutch course at Duolingo in preparation for my visit to Amsterdam and Blender Conference 2014. My favourite Dutch words so far are ook which means “also” and vaak which means “often”. Vaak is pronounced homophonously with an Australian English variation on a much-loved swear word beginning with F.

I made a sweet and spicy vegie salad today for a bring-your-own-salad birthday party. It had corn kernels, red capsicum, green capsicum, crushed pineapple, jalapenos, chunks of cocktail truss tomatoes and roast capsicum salsa in it. It was nice and crunchy.

Enough of salad and Dutch and medical procedures, you cry, What about the damn short!?

I got no actual work on A moment in the sun done this week. I’ve been strengthening my larynx muscles and working on honing Pointy’s voice. Production-wise, I was honestly stuck about how best to proceed. I talked about gags last update but that approach didn’t seem to be really working – how do you write a walk?

Then on Friday night while I was burning through a lot of units of Dutch waiting for the Gooseberry weekly to start, I cracked it. The mental breakthrough was to do with synaesthesia, specifically the synaesthetic experience I get when I see a repetetive motion like a walk cycle. I start hearing a repetetive sound in my head that follows the contours of the motion. So a walk can turn into a kind of pre-musical impression, and likewise a particular musical rhythm and contour can inspire a corresponding walk. During the creation process I have to be ready to add music to animation and/or animation to music and then mix them around, just like I did with the boards except working at a granularity of frames instead of 9 and 8 frame beats or longer.

Some walk cycles might match the short musical phrases, but even more likely the musical phrases will inspire walks and vice versa. So that’s what comes next: walks and musical phrases. I can do at least one of those. 🙂

I remembered shortly afterwards that I sneakily wrote A moment in the sun to be a comic walk cycle boot camp for myself, so sneakily that I completely forgot I had done so. During this miniature re-revelation I wrote:

It’s not just animated comedy but animaTION comedy – the kind of stuff that John K does, Bob Clampett did, Genndy Tartakovsky is doing now with Popeye. Movement that’s absurd and funny. Not just writing funny dialogue. The tasks on AMITS are kind of designed to take me in the direction of producing entertaining little musical animation comedies.

That was kind of like a clearing of clouds from the old mountain. It’s a long way up until the fog clears again probably, but I can see the paths I need to take to get there. I’m oriented again. The short could also blow out to longer than three minutes given that the gagstorm will be increasingly looney walk cycles – whether that’ll mean re-rigging, I don’t know, but then that’s an editing question and not one that I can really make sensibly from the perspective of animation. I’m resigned to producing way more animation than I end up rendering, but the stuff that I end up leaving unrendered will still be taking me forward, so why not! Just have to roll my sleeves up and get stuck in and make mistakes and fix them.

There are no videos this week.

Movies I watched this week:

• Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Royal Tenenbaums in an impromptu Sunday evening matinee. Both great films in their own way, though Ralph Fiennes as the amorous concierge in Budapest is especially wonderful.
• Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – was good catching up with it again after many years of not seeing it. Found it interesting how Dr Gonzo was perfectly capable of being a monster whether or not he’d been sampling the contents of Dr Duke’s suitcase. Also, leaving the entertaining drugginess and misadventure of the film aside for a second, I found myself really liking the two monologues about the rise and fall of flower power. Poignant.

That’s it for this week. Over the coming week I’ll be learning more Dutch and hopefully getting into some walk cycles, trying to find the right kinetic feel for the animation, and so on.