A storm seems to have knocked the Internet here back online – barely – so I’m going to do a post anyway.
Five days out of the seven of 14 – 20 July I was ill or otherwise impaired. I’d mostly shaken my flu on Friday night, then just after I woke up on Saturday morning I started having a migraine aura. Cue madly dashing around the house finishing chores with impaired vision before the migraine proper hit. Still feeling queasy now. Blurk.
On Monday I watched Hitchcock’s Psycho and worked on my drawing. On Tuesday I was starting to get sick and didn’t feel up to very much at all – though I did start watching Psycho 2. As one does.
From Wednesday to Saturday I was various degrees of ill (either flu or migraine) and set myself the task of watching all four seasons of Rocko’s Modern Life from start to finish. I succeeded in being front of all of them as they played, though I lost consciousness more than once. I’m not a fan of series 4 – once Joe Murray got more hands off with the show it feels like it lost a bit of its sharp edge and the mental ages of the .
On Friday night I wrote a bitterly tongue-in-cheek theme tune for a low-budget animated series I want to make called Grumpy Squirrel. The last thing I posted about yon squirrel was back in April when I sculpted his head out of clay after the 3D model failed to dutifully scowl from all angles. More about Mr Squirrel later.
I also worked on a piece of beepy ambient music to help with animation timing. If it turns out to be useful, I’ll post it.
I also did some more playing around with Freestyle, the source of this week’s pictures. I wanted to try some nice tapered lines around some cartoon “hair tuft” geometry – alas, the lines were popping depending on perspective. BlenderNPR’s super awesome Freestyle course advises that models are better built from the ground up to work with Freestyle – maybe the geo just wasn’t right for it. Despite setbacks I’m liking Freestyle a lot as a tool and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing BEER get off the ground. More experimentation needed!
Today (Sunday) I did some written development work on Grumpy Squirrel. After an unsatisfactory brainstorming session earlier in the week I’m trying to figure out where the series is coming from, looking for the hook, even just an episode synopsis that can serve as a good tonal foundation for everything that follows. It’ll come. Just have to keep working at it.
Today’s big impromptu creative spew though was a 23-minute hypnotic house tune. Or maybe it’s psychedelic house. I’m not sure what genre it fits into. It is pleasantly ear-amusing though.
No movement on “A Moment in the Sun” this week. Gronky’s design is still proving elusive. Once I finally nail it and take it to modelling, I’ll have many many pages of character design exploration to post here as the road I took… many many pages…
