So, I was good on my word and got the whole video shot this morning. I settled in with my chocolate, Melba toast, cream cheese veggies and Pepsi to edit. That is when I discovered that my iPad doesn't like to take 10,000 pictures at once. They are all there but they are not in order, and as I cannot see the numbers I have no idea which ones go where. Except the first 20 seconds, as they involve a tv flashing and that is obvious even when looking at thumbnails. I was ready to throw my iPad out the window, so I decided it was a better idea to walk away for a bit and take a short nap. Which ended up being 4 hours long. My theory is that my last few weeks have been so frustrating that my brain couldn't take any more frustration and shut down for a reboot.

The last hour I have been playing around on the interwebs, checking my work email, checking my work servers, double checking that all users are functioning, checking the logs, and downloading podcasts. I am good at productive procrastination. I have been perfecting it for years. I am still procrastinating polishing my stories for next week. That has been happening at 2am, when I can't sleep but too tired to actually write down what is in my brain. Some day soon I need to actually write down what I remember and see if it makes more sense than what I already have.

Anyway, now I need to motivate myself to get back to the video. It isn't that I don't want to do it now. It is more I don't want to deal with frustration any more. I am making myself because I need to practice pushing myself to do things when I don't feel like it - especially when it comes to my creative shit. I will never get anything accomplished if I don't make myself finish. One of the purposes of this blog is to help me motivate myself to complete projects. Seeing it written, and knowing people are reading and expecting a follow up or a finished product, has been helping me to continue when I am ready to say "fuck it" and move on to the next shiney project. I am actually proud of myself for not completely dumping this project for the guitar-to-uke project this weekend. It would have been so easy. Then I might have had 2 more unfinished projects to add to the heap.

OK, now that I have talked myself through the slump, I should start working on it again before I lose my motivation and start searching the interwebs for animal photobombs. I can't resist those silly animal photobombs.

*This is from the Animal Photobombs tumblr.

Well, yes, I have been working on my video. The one I am making completely (well, mostly) on my iPad. I have gotten some people to collaborate and help record voiceovers. I tried to do both voices myself and it sounded like the same person for both characters. I really need to learn how to do voices. Anyway, so now I have all the audio I need. Well, mostly. I may have to rewrite the script a bit, as I am having a hard time finding a particular soundbite that is integral to the plot. But anyway, I probably would be shooting today, but I got distracted. I have been dividing my time between this and a new project. Yesterday someone at work brought in a bunch of stuff she had cleaned out of her son's room. This was included in the bunch:

It is a little bitty baby guitar. At first I was going to just restring it as a guitar, as 2 of the strings were broken and I had my doubts about the remaining ones. Then I went to the uke store for strings for my soprano uke and the guy suggested I string it as a concert uke. It is exactly the same size and shape. The biggest differences being the part at the end that holds the strings and more tuning pegs. So, while I have been working on my video stuff, I turned that ugly orange thing into this:

It is kind of hard to see. The light also makes it look lighter than it is. But I painted it green with silver trim, and painted the bridge black with silver trim. I also had to glue a piece of wood under the metal string holder. I found out the hard way that the metal eats through nylon strings quickly. Like, within minutes of stringing it and while trying to tune it. If I didn't have my glasses on at the time I would have put my eye out. I have strung it like a concert uke, and with a low G instead of a high G. It is interesting to listen to. Definitely changes how my chords sound. The strings are still acclimating. It will take a bit before they stop stretching and settle in.

But yeah, I would paint a bit, then work on video while the paint was drying, then paint some more. I probably would be farther along on the video if I could just leave this thing alone. But I can't. It's my new toy.

Tonight I am tired of doing stuff, but tomorrow I will get to shooting and editing. My plan is to have it completely done by sundown tomorrow. That is the plan. We shall see what actually happens. :)

Damn it, my posts keep getting swollowed up. I will try one more time, but I am not going to check for duplicate postings till tomorrow. So forgive the overabundance of identical posts, if there are any, etc.

So I figured it out. How to get audio into Pinnacle. I feel tricksy slick now. I had a long drawn out explanation that I have already typed in several times. As it is getting late and my patience is wearing thin, you get the truncated version. If the others actually do show up you can read it there. It was all witty and everything.

Bottom line is I uninstalled iTunes and reinstalled it, and now I can get music to my iPad. I can't get it off, but I can get it on. That sounds slighty dirty. Anyway, if I enail it to myself, download it to my laptop, convert it to mp3 I can attach ny iPad to my laptop and drag it into the iTunes interface and it will load. Then it is a matter of opening Pinnacle and rebuilding my library. So that hurdle is overcome. Tomorrow after work I will record some audio, do some foley, and time it out. In a couple of days I should have a video done. Yeay!

I will leave you tonight with a pic of my set, which I may or may not have already posted but I am too tired to check and besides I am using the Weevly iPhone app to post, which may be why my posts are being eaten.

So, I fully intended to have a completed video. You know what they say about the road to hell? I can totally see that. I did have some issues though that were beyond my control.

Well, not beyond my control, more like beyond my coping capabilities, so I decided to walk away until I was less frustrated and come back and problem solve.Only I never came back. I am going to tell you about my week, because I think it may be cathartic, and maybe someone reading this can offer me some advice. Or a one way ticket to the looney bin, either one. :)

So I'll start with the issues I was having with the video. I was hoping that I could do everything on the iPad. One of the issues I have had with this thing since I got it is my inability to transfer music or sounds to my iPad from my PC. I can transfer music I have purchased in iTunes with iTunes, but nothing else. iCloud is the same way. I can move stuff to my PC that way, but it doesn't work for moving stuff to the iPad. In order to time the animation correctly I need to record the audio so I have at least a basic idea how long to make it. I need to be able to use the audio I timed. I found one free awesome audio recording app for the iPad. The big issue is I can't import it into Pinnacle. There is an option but it doesn't work. I am guessing there may be a paid version of this app, though I haven't been able to find it. And I wouldn't spend money on something that may not suit my needs. I can record audio in Pinnacle, but only to do voice over for current video. I also can't record audio then export it into a different project. I tried that. So that is issue number 1 that I am trying to get over. And that is about where it ends.

Then I had issues at work. Those were not fun to deal with. I won't give specifics here, but I was pretty much at the end of my rope. Then something happened that took me to the end of that rope and made me feel like I was being hung with it.

Wednesday was payday. I decided that since it had been such a shitty week I was going to treat myself to lunch at Wendy's and a movie. I felt I deserved the emotional break. So I head over to Wendy's, which is just down the street from my work, and I order my food. At this point I was really hungry, as working on issues had made me miss breakfast and lunch. My card was declined. My card was declined three times. Insert your own religious joke here. This has happened before. From time to time my bank just glitches and usually getting online and clicking a box makes it all better. I was hungry and extremely annoyed, but not panicked. So I went to the library to use the wifi and do the thing with the thing on my iPad. That is when I lost it. My bank account was empty. Completely empty. My paycheck was just direct deposited. Not to mention what was left that I was saving from my last paycheck. All the charges were at physical brick-and-morter places in Louisburg, NC WAY THE HELL on the other side of the country. To my credit, I did not yell or scream at the customer service people on the phone who kept transferring me cause it "isn't my department". I was shaking, as my blood sugar was extremely low and I was pissed off, but I didn't yell. I didn't even yell and swear when the bank's fraud person told me I would not get my money back. I did cry in her ear though. Loudly. But I got the card number cancelled, and I had a new one sent to me. Then I went home and yelled and cried for a long, long time. I would like to commend the guy who answered the phone at the Eugene Police non-emergency line. He was very sweet. Though his first words were "Are you sure it's not an emergency?" By the time I got someone from Fraud on the line I was a bit calmer. I learned from that officer that it is actually illegal for my bank to not give me my money back. Once I prove fraud, they have to give me my money back. And Oregon state law says a police report is enough to prove fraud. Then I went and opened up a bank account at a different bank, where I was told that the law also states that while I am waiting for my bank to clear their paperwork for the fraud they have to provide me with a 45 day provisional credit in the amount of the fraudulent charges. Which was damn near everything I had. I had $3 in cash in my pocket, so I guess they didn't clean me out completely. Ha ha. I have made sure they got all the paperwork, and yet I still have not seen anything of the provisional credit they are supposed to give me. This is a bank that was recently taken to court for skimming off student's financial aid. They would place a charge, real or not, then not notify the student for months, letting their late charges and penalties pile up until the next financial aid check came. Then they would just take that money out of it. Court has ruled they were wrong and have to pay it back. However they don't have to pay while they go through the appeals process, so it may be years before any of us get our money back. Money that was from student loans that I am still paying on. My point in that long digressive ramble was that I expect to have to fight to get both provisional credit and my actual money back. I plan to touch base with them again Monday, but I don't expect them to be helpful. All that took me the rest of Wednesday, Thursday and part of Friday.

Now it's Saturday. Most of my energy had gone into dealing with all that. Today I spent most of the day either sleeping or curled up with my iPad watching a show on Hulu called Who's Been Sleeping In My House? It's not what you think. This guy in Australia goes around to different houses in the country at the request of the owners and researches the history of the house. Kind of like Who Do You Think You Are and History Detectives all wrapped up in one awesome show. And I watched Doctor Who, of course. The Doctor makes everything feel better. :) Tomorrow I have to go back to work and try to get the fricken phone system to accept my programming for another line as it will be needed Monday, but after that I intend to try to problem solve the video issues.

So, it would reduce my stress greatly if any of you have a suggestion on how to solve my audio problem. And don't say "Buy a Mac". I didn't have money for that BEFORE the big clean out.

And as I feel the need to amuse myself with a non sequitur now, here is a spider that got into my water pitcher today. This water pitcher has a filter in the top and a hinged lid that has a fairly stiff hinge. I have no clue how the bugger got in there.

So today was supposed to be all about polishing stories for my foray into storytelling. And, like a good little procrastinator, I watched Doctor Who and played on my iPad instead. Which in this case is good, because I discovered something awesome. Remember a while back when I compared free stop mo iPad apps? Well, there is another one.

This one I mentioned before. It used to be called Avid, but now it is called Pinnacle Studio. It is usually $5, but until the 18th of September it is FREE!!!! So guess what I did, and guess what I have been playing with? Yup....the new app. Technically Pinnacle is just a video editing app, but it also does stop mo if you set it right. Almost in the same way windows Movie Maker does stop mo if you set it right (or used to). Seems to be more full featured than most of what I have seen for free. I can even set the pictures to hold for a number of frames, rather than fractions of a second like WM does. It also allows for audio to be added and edited in 3 tracks, you can make several clips then edit them together and add 3 more sound tracks. I just played with photos and audio I have currently on my iPad, which are not really stop mo related. it seems to have more freedom than WM had, and more editing capabilities. I like this. I do have to take pictures outside the app, though, as it isn't strictly a stop mo app.

SO....

Tonight, after I have had dinner and a short nap, my plan is to write, shoot, record and edit a short stop mo with my iPad. Just my iPad. I have a recording app. Not sure if it converts to Mp3 though. Or I can record audio actually inside the app. So by tomorrow afternoon my goal is to have a 30-60 second short done all in my apps. This shall be fun.

Hehe, I am like a raven. See something shiney, and I am diverted from my original task. Well, at least there will still be time to get those stories done. I have the basic structure done, I just want to polish them up. They are all a bit rambley. But this will be fun.

And, well....STOP MO.

So, remember a while back when I was posting about Chris Hardwick and the RL-RPG thing? No? Not surprised. It has been ages since I have posted about it. I haven't stopped working on it, but I really haven't been talking about it much either. One of the goals I set for myself was to write and learn how to perform as a storyteller. I have spent a lot of time listening to other storytellers and analyzing their styles. I have worked on writing out several stories. Now I have decided to move on to the next step. I have contacted Kevin Allison from the Risk! Podcast to negotiate one-on-one sessions. The price isn't too bad. I have decided I can afford 2 sessions a month. That will give me time to polish between sessions. Now that I have started the processes, I am a tad freaked out. This shit just wandered into real territory. I will be investing money into getting better at it. Someone else will be listening to my story and telling me what they think. I can no longer hide safely behind my computer, wondering if I could have been or what I could have done. I will have to shove myself out of my comfort zone, out of the little self-coddling cacoon of safety I created for myself while I was feeling it out. I will have to put aside my feelings of self doubt. I will have to stop fearing the possibility I will fail hard, and know that when I fail hard I will have someone to help keep me from failing so hard the next time. it is scary and exciting all at the same time.

I miss the stage. I used to love performing. I still feel at home just standing on a stage. When standing on a stage, my instinct is not to go "oh my god, people are looking at me" but to go "I need to do something". For too long I have let fear take over that rush I get when I am actually on stage. That self doubt that crept in there when I was dealing with abusive situations and difficult people has made it hard to get back to a place where a stage is a stage, and what matters is the performance, not the person. Performing is fun. It is a huge adrenaline rush. Yes, for me performing is a selfish thing. I like to give people a good show, but the rush you get when you have been practicing hard, and the performance is going well, and there is good energy coming from the audience, and you feel it and it feeds your energy, and you finish with a huge applause and this symbiotic energy that doesn't go away for hours, sometimes days. It is the best kind of high. It was the kind of high I thrived on in high school.

So it has been a while. Again. It is surprising how fast time gets away from me when I am working at an actual job. I haven't done much more than last post. I have pulled out my stop mo stuff and gone through it. I need to figure out what I need for sets and props and start building. I need to do a run to Eugene Toy and Hobby and stock back up on balsa wood. I also need to decide how I am going to do foliage for the forrest. Am I going to try to do it with real plants, fake plats that look real, or plnt-ish representations. I think the reason I havebeen putting it off is I have an idea that may change how I am currently doing my stop mo. I think I may have posted about it before. I want to research and play around with the idea of stabilizing marionettes to use as my stop mo puppets. They would be much larger, so I would have to look for and/or make larger sets, furniture and props. it would be easier to find what I need, though.

Last night a friend and I went thrifting and I found a set of knitting hoops for $5. Not a bad buy, considering they are usually $30-$40 for a set like that. It was missing one hoop, but it did have the hooks and finishing needle. so now while I sit and watch my shows I have something new to play with. I plan on trying to make myself a sweater or something. At this point I am just palying around with them and learning how they work. they seem simple and straightforward enough. It looks like they make a very loose knit, though. I may have to see if I can get it to tighten up somehow.

I am currently sitting at a cafe waiting for a friend to come join me for sodas, beer and brownies and ice cream. I probably should post this before she gets here. I will leave you with a pic of the 1959 Jewish cook book I found at the thrift store. Rosh Hashana is coming up, and it has some excellent recipes. I am happy withthat find.