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Testing testing 123

3/10/2018

So I found a refurbished iPad on the Apple site for really cheap.

My old one...the one that I won as first prize in the Douglas Adams contest back in 2012.....she has had a long a fruitful run. I blogged it all if you wanna look back at it. I believe it is Jan through June of 2012. She was a Ipad gen 3. I won it like 4 or 5 months before the gen 4 came out, but right after it was released. Yeah that year they released them really close together. It is a signal of my accomplishment. It is a reminder of what I can do. It is a memory of Stephen Fry (aaaaaaah) calling my work a love letter that was cute but not too precious. It is a memory of Bob Stein looking me up and giving me a call and saying he thought my comedic choices were good, and that he thought I had talent and potential. He told me to contact him when I was ready to go pro. It is also a reminder of how petty people can be, as it is the only part of the whole prize package I actually recieved.

She has served me well. However, years and years of use and a buse has made her....weary. I have struggled for years to keep her going. I personally replaced the battery andthe bluetooth, and I replaced the screen and digitizer at least 4 times. I have an issue with my joints, and that means from time to time my hands just release and stop holding whatever it is I am holding. Sometimes that means the ipad she ended up on the floor. 😞 When I had a good case for her it was fine. When I didn’t....well that is the reason the screen and digitizer was replaced so many times. This last time when I went to replace the screen I found some internal damage that was fatal. Well, almost. She had been dropped so many times the metal tags that hold the LCD screen in place were completely sheered off. Even though the screen works fine, this means it is floating around inside the iPad and it cannot sync with the digitizer. I can’t just get new tabs....I have to get a whole new LCD screen. Which no one has. iFixit has them off and on, but now is not one of those on times. They also charge $45-$50 for one, without the shipping.

So I had to make a decision. Do I persist in keeping her going with bubblegum and duct tape, or do I move on? Moving on felt...wrong. Like cheating on a spouse. She has been a loyal friend, and a memory I will cherish for the rest of my life. It feels wrong to just give up on her. But she is now old enough I can’t update her further than ios 9. And it will be harder and harder to keep her in action. But.....they engraved “Don’t Panic” on the back of her. But if I have to keep putting $40-$50 into her every couple of months, and she will still only be limping along, is it worth it?

Well, perusing the Apple site and finding the cheap refurbished iPad made my final decision. I bought it. And now I am testing Weebly’s newer app by posting from it.

It is sad. I feel like I betrayed a friend. I feel like we have been through so much together and I am just tossing her aside like yesterday’s jam. There is so much I have been able to accomplish just because she was there in my life. So much more I plan to accomplish, and she won’t be there by my side (or on the floor).

I am not going to just throw her out though. I will eventually get the new LCD screen and make her work again. Or I will gut her and put her shell in a shadowbox for my wall. For now I feel like I am mourning a friend. Is that wierd?

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Thoughts on animation in general and dialog matching specifically

2/26/2012

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In spite of what many people seem to think, animation is not an easy thing to do. Stop motion doubly so. You have so many things to take into consideration. You have to calculate exactly what needs to go where to get the effect you want. And if you don't have the money for the professional grade high-end software that will do it for you, it is that much harder.

I have encountered many articles on the internet that, by reason or content, seem to be saying that stop motion is a medium for children. Some even go as far as to state that if an adult works in this medium it is the equivalent of drawing with crayons. This offends me greatly. I know it shouldn't, but it does. These people are obviously ignorant of what it takes to make the Coraline's and Corpse Brides. If it really were that simple, wouldn't more animation companies get on board with it? Wouldn't we be seeing more stop motion and less CGI?

Granted, stop motion has been pushed lately by educators as a great way to teach kids patience and help them understand the mechanics of motion. That does not mean that it takes a child to work in that medium. I agree, to a certain extent, that it is a great medium for teaching children. Especially those that aren't confident in their artistic skills. And, as they are children, we don't expect Aardman-esque work from them so the free and cheap alternatives for this medium are great for their purposes and makes it affordable for most educational systems.

But what is essentially being ignored by these writers is the hard work and attention to detail that is required for this medium. To make a short, choppy video that has little to no story line maybe not. But a glance at You Tube will tell a person that any type of video is that way.

If you want to make a good smooth animation, not only do you have to take into account scenery with every shot (as I have learned the hard way), you have to make sure lighting is consistent, focus is consistent, color balance is consistent. You have to watch for things like sets peeling up slowly while you shoot, floors that have bubbles you don't notice until after you have shot the scene and assembled your images, that took 4 FUCKING HOURS TO SHOOT to get 10 seconds of footage.

There really is no way to speed up the process. You go too quickly and you get fingers in shots and you miss something that needs to fixed.

And in addition to that you have to pay attention to the story line of the video, and make sure everything you are shooting actually matches what is being conveyed. It is hard. And if you want to make something that does not look like a child did it, it takes practice and talent. Just the same as any other animation or visual media. Doing it alone while just having the few written books on the subject to guide you feels nigh on impossible. But I am doing it. Slowly but surely. And eventually I will have enough working knowledge, professional equipment and possibly assistance of other people to get a video that is wow-worthy.

With how hard I have worked on this particular skill set, if it was "simple and for children", I would have already made several full length successful features. For someone who writes for professional publications and professes to know a lot about it, these writers are plainly ignorant.

This is turning into a longer post than I had intended. Oh well. I really needed to get that out. This is really the most appropriate platform I have for this kind of rant. I feel a whole lot better. Thanks. :)

OK....so what I originally came here to to was to talk myself through dialog matching. This is when you get your figures motions and movements to match the dialog you have recorded. This is very difficult when you are using free software. As at the moment I don't have puppets that allow me to manipulate the face, matching plosives and vowels won't be a problem. But as I don't have rendering software that allows me to calculate movement down to the milisecond, planning for dialog matching is hard. I tried to use After Effects. Not only was it hard to get it to work exactly, but the scenes that were rendered were pixelated and very poor quality. (See the One Tiny comparison). You'd think it would be easy. The math being, that if you render at 24 FPS, and you hold each picture for 2 frames, then you should need 12 pictures for each second of scene you shoot. Logical, right? Then if you calculate how many seconds you need for a particular movement, you should be able to figure out how many pictures you need for that movement and how many pictures to take of each stage of the movement, etc. Wrong. At least in my case. One of these days I may understand it enough to get it right when doing it manually. However, as most professional software out there do it all for you there really is no manual on how to do it correctly. Frustration, argh.

One thing that I was successful with the Douglas Adams video was getting the scenes to basically fit the dialog. This was achieved by making all those calculations, determining the overall feeling I wanted to accomplish in the scene, shooting what I wanted as it came up, then cutting the audio up into spidgetts to make longer pauses so it fit. I knew at least the minimal number of pictures I needed, and went from there. Sometimes it worked great. Others, it just kind of worked. But overall it made a successful video. As I was using Windows Movie Maker, which has fewer controls, I had to tweek the math little bit, but it was the same concept.

So the question is, can I use what I learned in that video to make a successful dialog video? As I don't have facial expressions to match the words, can I do it the same basic way? One thing I worked hard on was getting certain parts of the Douglas Adams voice over to fit certain actions. For example the scene with the tree smashing. Or the scene with the bench and the books piling up. The gold-ish guy bringing the books in matched the line "Lots and lots of them" pretty precisely. That is what I was going for. I was kind of pleased that that one worked.

Anyway, I digress. I have probably lost whatever readers I may have had at the beginning of this post. But I have achieved what I have set out to do. I vented my frustrations and talked through a concept. I believe now that yes, I can use the spidgett technique to make a dialog video work. I don't see why not.

Now I need to get to writing some killer clever dialog to match some stop mo. Heading out to get food, then writing up a storm.

If you still haven't seen my Douglas Adams tribute video (and WHY the hell not??) you can click on the big words over there to take you to it. I have recently re-read the rules, and I can't post it here until the contest is over anyway. So if you have seen my other posts or just this one and want to know what the hell I am talking about, go see it. And vote with many bookmarks for it. :)

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Testing testing 123

Thoughts on animation in general and dialog matching specifically

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