I have been working on this video all week. I still don't have all the pictures moved into the timeline. This is tedious. Well, usually stop motion is. I have to import each picture, one at a time, and sometimes instead of dragging it, the app decides to send me to another folder. As there are no visible numbers on the pictures, and it doesn't save the markers, I have to figure out what picture I was on when it decided to crap out on me. This is the frustrating bit. I have not yet figured out what it is that makes it do this. I must admit I walked away a couple of times. I am now about 2/3 through adding pictures, then I get to actually work on finesses it all into a coherent video. I worked for 4 hours last night, and didn't get very far, so this part may take way longer than I anticipated. I shall continue soldiering on, and maybe by the end of the weekend I will have a video for you.

I have also been working on polishing my stories for storytelling. I have my first class on Monday, and I am very, very nervous. Just to get used to people hearing my stories, when one of my friends said he needed stories for his new blog I submitted one. If you want to read it, it is at Broken Treasures . It really didn't get much editing, and his spell check actually changed some of the words so they don't make sense. but otherwise that is mostly what I am going with. Feel free to read it and comment back here. I would love to know if it is too rambly, disjointed, whiney, etc.

Ok, back to the grindstone. I may go get tea and work somewhere else.

EDIT: I am finding that the app is now seriously lagging. Thinking maybe 1165 photos are too much for this app to process. SIGH SO I am starting over, and going to see if I can do this in spidgettes, like I did with the Douglas Adams video and still have something continuous and flowy. I am concerned with it becoming jerky and hard to watch. With the Douglas Adams audio I did the segments where the scene changes were so you'd expect a little bit of flow interruption. Cross fingers. And damn duplicating work.

I am not happy right now. I don't know if you noticed it or not. I spent the majority of the day working on the TMBG stop mo mentioned in the last post. I have been using Windows Movie Maker. I was in the middle of editing when it stopped working and insisted I get an update before I could continue. Before I could save and continue. Yup...I wasn't allowed to save what I had already done. So I complied. Because with Microsoft there is nothing else you can do. Now I can't use it for stop mo. I have been breaking it down into bits to allow me better control over certain spots. If I do that then try to edit the sections together it jumps. Majorly. Black out for a second, no sound then continues. No options to fix it. that is how I did the Douglas Adams video. So apparently they changed something and now it is useless to me. This made me frustrated, but whatever. I still have my copy of After Effects C4. One reason I don't use it is because I am having a hard time getting consistent and unpixelated results from it. But I still wanted to get the video done, so I tried it. 4 hours and 600 pictures into a 925 pictures set, and I find out I didn't give myself enough time in the timeline. And I can't get it to change. It won't let me add any more. So basically, my whole day has been flushed down the toilet. If my roommate's dog wasn't already upset by the fireworks, I would be screaming at this point. The string of expletives going through my brain at the moment would make a hard core biker dude blush. THIS is why I need an income....so I can afford the real equipment. I need to get a better computer, a camera that can be triggered from the computer, and a full paid version of  stop motion software. Well, all those things and a place to live....but shit I am tired of this kind of thing happening. I waste so much time unsuccessfully trying to get things to work. It would also help if I had the money to get someone to teach me how to use these things properly.

OK, time to go crul up in bed with a Pepsi and cry now.

Another day of writing. I am housesitting this weekend starting last night, so I thought this would be a great weekend to sequester myself with my computer and write. I have a lot of writing to do. However, now I am here I am having a hard time motivating myself to get started. It's not like I don't want to write. I love writing. As hard as it is, and even with how much I struggle with getting it just right, I love it. This whole frustrating, maddening, wonderful process I call stop motion is love worthy. I admit, no job I have ever had has made me as happy. Or as frustrated. And yet, in spite of the frustration, I still want to do it. I have not the feeling of "Fuck it!" and the urge to walk away, kicking everyone in face as I do so. The frustration does not make me mad. As much as I want to have an income, after experiencing this, I don't want to go back to crappy day-to-day stuff. I am still looking and will take what I can get, but I am realizing more and more that I need to get my butt in gear and figure out a way to make THIS my job. I need to find someone who can help me figure out what is crap and what is good, so I can improve faster.

I feel stupid just figuring out what I want to be when I grow up at age 37. I wish I had figured my life out sooner. Looking back on my life, I don't think I could have. I went from one abusive situation to another. I wasted my 20's on an abusive man who wasn't worth my time, and wasted most of my 30's getting away from the shit he lay on me. Only now am I realizing what I can do, and what makes me happy. Only now can I look at what I do and see the good as well as the bad. I guess I am getting to a point in my life where I really am getting too old for other people's shit, and their negativity no longer completely shuts me down. Granted, I have a long way to go before the fear monster sitting on my shoulder dies. He may never die completely. But it feels good to look back on something I made, even if there are flaws that need to be corrected, and be excited and happy with what I see. It feels good to make myself laugh. It makes me feel like running around yelling "Look what I did!" like a five year old.

Actually, I take that back. I am not just discovering now what I want to be when I grow up. I am only now rediscovering what I wanted to be from a young age. When I was in elementary school I used to write little stories all the time. I used to amuse my teachers with them. One of them even encouraged me to submit one of my stories to the district wide writer's conference. Somewhere there is a published volume of elementary school kid's stories from 1984, and one of mine is in there. I believe it was a story about a witch. I LOVED melodramas, and as an extension British pantos. One summer I wrote a melodrama, and I roped my siblings and my cousins into performing it for all the adults. I think I was 10 at the time. When I was a teenager I wrote books to take with me babysitting. I had what I called my babysitting bag. I found that although kids had books and toys and videos at their houses, usually they had played them all to death and didn't really want to do any of that stuff. So in my bag I put a bag of chocolate chips with which to make cookies, a jump rope, paper and colored pencils, dress up clothes  and cheap McDonald's toys. And, of course books. My mom wouldn't let me take our books out of the house, so I wrote my own and my best friend illustrated them. We made several for my bag and several for hers. So what happened? Several things. There are circumstances I don't want to bore you with, but mainly the end result was me giving up on myself. I honestly thought that the best I could do was be someone's wife and raise kids. (The ironic thing is I still don't have any kids) That I was too stupid and incompetent to be creative. That my ideas were cliche and stupid. And it has just taken me this long to wade through all the bullshit and realize what I have known all along.....that I can do this, and whether or not I am good enough at it NOW for people to pay me for it, it makes me happy. "It" being stop motion animation, storytelling, writing, comedy....anything and everything that I have been working on the last year to keep myself sane.

Because in the end, all THAT,  is what makes me happy and sane.

Well, look at that. I think I just knocked my motivation loose. See ya either when the weekend is over or when I hit another rough patch. Enjoy your weekend. :)

Ok, this post is because I am stuck and I need to kick myself out of my stuck spot.

For some reason, whenever I write, the place I always get stuck is the names. I may put too much emphasis on the importance of names in fiction. However I feel that the right name tells the audience the right things about your character. I also have an affinity for names that are clever double meanings, tells you something specific but covertly about the character's personality, or has obscure ties to something in the storyline. It doesn't help that I am a fan of such authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and Neil Gaiman. Tolkien was a linguist, and used words and names accordingly. In American Gods, the king of character development  Neil Gaiman uses names to help tell the story. He uses them to obscure the identities of  the gods, and uses the ambiguous name Shadow for the main character to emphasize his ambiguous roots and the fact he is basically lost at sea after the death of his wife and release from prison. As he learns more about himself and his origins, we learn more about his name. In The Graveyard Book he uses names like Miss Lupescu  for the Hound of God or werewolf. The ghouls, who have obviously lost who they were before they became ghouls, receive names that are obviously ridiculously not theirs.

So, those are all serious fiction. They are well written novels by talented writers. Why should I have such a hang up on names? It would be really easy to write the whole thing then add in names afterwards. For me, though, the names will help me A. keep track of the characters and B. keep each character's, um, character in mind so I don't have them doing things out of character. That annoys me the most about poorly written fiction. Once you establish your character, you had better give me a good reason why that character does something that is outside the already established parameters. Just having them do something because it pushes the story forward or because you have written yourself into a corner and need a magic story bandaid takes me right out of the willing suspension of disbelief. You may be writing about invisible aliens attacking talking animals in anti gravity boots, but what will make me call bullshit is an action or bit of dialog that doesn't fit. It is jarring. I equate it to that moment in the Wily E. Coyote cartoons after he has walked off the edge of the cliff. At the beginning he stays up in the air, because he hasn't realized that the ground is no longer underneath him. The moment he starts falling is the moment he realizes he should be falling.

Now  if you give a good reason for this out of character action and/or dialog, that is something else. In the Hobbit, Bilbo does a ton of things that are way outside his established character. However we also see how he is struggling with it, and he doesn't do anything completely out of character from the beginning. He doesn't charge into the encampment of trolls brandishing his sword and shouting. He considers his precarious position with the dwarves, and how the uncharacteristic action of stealing the trolls pouch would aid in establishing his position with the dwarves.  Both actions are out of character, but one illustrates his evolution into doing the out-of-character action.

But I digress. My point is that establishing the correct names from the beginning helps me to keep my characters in character. It  helps to remind me of what I had in mind for them in the first place and not make that jarring mistake. Should I even care about this if I am just writing a silly little stop motion video? Am I being over conscientious?

What's in a name? Everything.

I think I have successfully kicked myself out of the stuck spot. Now that I have articulated my reasoning I can now just do instead of agonize. Thanks for the help.

Wow, it is amazing how quickly time can get away from you. I think I say that way too often. The last few days I have been dealing with a personal crisis, so crafting and stop mo have not been my priority. I think it has mainly past, so now I can concentrate again on the stuff I love. :)

Well, the contest is basically over for the Douglas Adams Video Contest. According to the rules a long list of finalists was supposed to be announced today. There is no mention on the site. When I tweeted them and asked when and where I can find the list, I was basically brushed off. The first answer was "Winners will be announced May 25th". When I replied with citation in the rules that there would be a finalist list announced April 30th, I got the equivalent of "Don't call us, we'll call you". I must admit I am disappointed. I worked really hard on that video. I did my best to follow the rules. The least they can do is follow their own rules. The video response was not that big. I am guessing mainly due to poor publicity. I think they also overestimated the number of people who can do that much work in that short amount of time. When Eddie Izzard did his contest, most of the entrants had already done a video and just submitted that. I think I was one of the few who actually started from scratch. But it really does feel like they started this contest and don't really intend to finish it. I don't think there has been anyone keeping an eye on it. There was an anti Obama video up there for weeks, which clearly was not part of the contest. But enough of my whinging. I will let you know if they get back to me or not.

In other news, my room is filled with pot smoke. Yup. And it isn't mine. I don't do that. But there is a small cafe whose back patio butts up against ours, and my bedroom is the closest to it. Even with plastic covering the windows and 2 storm windows, my room smells like Burning Man mixed with old skanky hotel room. I am not happy. Not much I can do about it, though. They are allowed to smoke outdoors. And let's face it, if the police responded to every "they're smoking pot" call they got, they would never do anything else. This is Eugene.....Hippyville. 4:20 friendly. So until I figure out a solution I am not going to spend much time in my room. Which is where I have all my stop mo stuff set up and my crafting area. It made me positively sick this weekend. I will go back to stop mo...I can't stay away for long. For now, I have started a new project. well, one that brings it full circle. One of my first craft posts was about making myself a tank top. Never completed it, then figured out the yarn I was using is silk, so decided probably not a good medium for sport wear.

Yesterday I started this:

It is going to be a tank top. I have researched a bit more about tank top construction, and have come up with a better plan. Now that I am done with job search stuff for today I am going to attempt to complete it by tomorrow. We shall see how far I get. Basic construction is crochet tube for chest portion, crochet strip for straps to be attached to, crochet straps, sew together, then crochet the rest in a tube from the bottom edge of the chest piece down. Sounds simple. We shall see if it works.