So time has marched forward, and so has my progress....a little anyway. I now have my storyline for the steampunk video all lined out. I have my characters developed. I have designed the world in which they will live. I am kind of excited about it. This is going to be fun, once I get past the hard parts.

I decided I want the exterior of the houses to all be stone, with stone garden walls, etc. I envision this place to be like one the planned garden cities in England of the late 19th and early 20th century. If I am going to do this I need to find a good way to replicate a lot of walls. I do not sculpt well. I am not going to rely on someone with sculpting skills to have time available for this. So I took a trip to the Eugene Toy & Hobby to see waht they had. I found these retaining wall sections for model train sets. They will work wonderfully. I just can't afford to buy all I need. They were $11 for a set of 3.  I have liquid latex. I have lots and lots of cheap plaster. I thought hey, why not make my own molds of these wall sections and then I can make all I need cheaply.

Latex mold making is not as easy as they make it look. they didn't turn out very well. I got sick from all the latex fumes. And the ones that did work didn't actually produce a working model. Even though the molds really did not shrink (I can fit the original in without stretching it), the casting is a good inch smaller than the original. I need to figure out why. I also had a hard time getting that first layer to dry properly. The side touching the original wall piece never dried properly no matter how long I left it before I did the second layer. The thing is, when you do a second layer, you can't wait too long or the layers don't adhere to each other properly. Then there were the issues with making the mother molds. Latex is thin and does not hold it's shape. This is ideal for peeling it off the original...not so for holding the casting material in the right shape. So you make a mother mold out of plaster. After the last layer has dried you cover it in plaster. Let it sit until set and voila you have a good solid base for the latex mold that will still allow for you to peel the latex off the casting without breaking it. my issue...the plaster kept crumbling. I followed the directions on how to mix it. I let it sit for hours. the ambient room temp was 70. The stupid things just kept crumbling. I finally got a few that will work, though I really need to figure out how to solve the mysterious shrinking casting issue.

Here be the picture evidence. The yellow one on the left is the first one that worked. the one at the top is the second one, though you can tell it stuck to the original and destroyed some of the detail. The one in the middle is the original, and to the right is the casting. Sad, sad, sad.

I guess I am failing in whole new ways. That is ok. I am learning, and each one gets better. I just don't have a lot of time. I wanted to get the video done in time to submit it to the Pacific Northwest Animation festival as well, but that is not going to happen. The deadline for that is Dec 31. It is already the 11th. I will be lucky if I can get the sets built by then.
    I also had a brilliant idea to use those poseable wooden artists manquins as the armatures for the puppets. I figured out how to get the hands to work, I just got to figure out how to build up the head and face. The advantage is there are more natural articulation points, and they are already built up to natural human proportions. I will still work on learning how to make my own, but to try to facilitate this video that is what I am trying.

Because I don't have a lot of good clamping tools for delicate cutting, I used a Dremmel with the sanding wheel to grind the hands down to where they are more normal shape. The dots are the places I will be gluing twisted florist wire. I will then wrap them all in paper sports tape and paint them. Then I need to decide how I am going to anchor them. Do I want to continue the magnet method, or do I want to drill holes and destroy my set table to try screw anchors? I am leaning toward the magnets. Less permanent damage. And I don't have to go buy sturdier foam for the base. I don't think I could get that locally. Disadvantage of living in a small town.

    And that is as far as I have gotten. The molds alone took 3 days. This is a long slow process. I am impatient. I want to be animating. However, this time I want better puppets and sets. I want this one to be really cool.

    I am also looking into renting office space. As long as I keep it under $300 and utilities included I may be able to do it. I would be sacrificing saving any money for deposits for my own place to live, but it would be easier for everyone else to help out if I had a place other than just a bedroom for us to work. It feels weird, and frankly no one really wants to do that, as much as they want to work on this. Sigh. It always comes down to money, doesn't it. Well, if I can get to a place where my animations look more professional maybe I can get a few commissions, maybe start at least having it pay for itself. that would make it tons easier.

Anyway, if you are reading this and have an inkling of why my molds are giving me grief, feel free to either comment or email me. I was planning on having people over to help make castings, but I have to have enough molds for more than just one person to use.

I really need to get creative with my titles. :P It has only been a week and half, but I thought I would post anyway. Just kidding. I am trying to be better at keeping up with this thing. It feels like it has been months, though the calendar says it hasn't been. I really had fun playing with the Dremmel. I haven't taken it out for anything else yet. I am itching to, but I am worried about using it when I don't need to and killing a project that would have otherwise been fine.



I have been writing, but haven't really finished anything. This week we have had issues at work with the servers, issues at home with an injured ankle, and emotional issues dealing with this time of year. Also, someone in France has decided to usem y debit card number to try to purchase Formula One tickets (of all the fucking things), so they had to close down my debit card. My plan for this weekend was to price out alginate and get it ordered. Nope. I cannot do anything online now. Grrr argh. At least my new bank had the courtesy to call me first. They gave me a chance to get cash before they closed for the weekend. And they also replaced the money and flagged my card number. That is much better than what my previous bank did. My previous bank let the bastards clear out my account completely, from clear across the country, minutes after I used it here, so clearly it WASN'T ME. I had to jump through a ton of hoops to get it cncelled, a ton of hoops to get my money back, I had to threaten to sue in order to get my legally mandated 45 day credit until it was cleared up. I had to send a police report 4 times before they acknowledged they recieved it. At least this time the transaction was flagged, they saw it was from another country, and called me right away.



But I digress....I am good at that. :) Now that my ankle is doing a bit better and I am a bit more mobile, i will et going on it all again. I shot some footage a few weeks ago with my iPad. I am not happy with it, but I am trying to work with it. Main issue....the damn autofocus. Even after I have put it in focus lock it still kept refocusing. This is why I need a good camera damn it. I am getting tired of this crap. Makes it hard to get anything done. I have been playing around with the pictures in Pinnacle on my iPad. Not much help, but I think if I futz with it a bit more I may make something workable out of it. I tried transferring the pictures to my computer and working with them there. Every one of them were blurry. How the hell did it lose quality? All I did was copy them over. There are 400 some odd pictures. I guess I could try to email each one to myself. Or I could just say screw it and see what I can do in the ipad. Unless one of you wants to spring for a brand new camera? Yeah, didn't think so. I am also feeling jealous. Last fall a girl did an awesome Doctor Who stop mo, in the style of the old Rankin Bass Rudolph stop mos. it was very well done. And I am green with envy, cause I want to do THAT. And if I had money for the equipment I need, I could. I don't begrudge her the props. Cause she totally deserves them. I just want to be there too, and I am not yet.



Ok...enough of the whining. Time to get back to work.

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.

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.

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.

I have decided I do not like the Weebly app. I will continue to post from the regular computer. I think if all I had was my iPad I felt I HAD to post, then I would use it. It isn't very useable. I can't control the size of the pictures. I can't add tags. Maybe if they develop it further I will use it.

Not much else to post about. I have done some writing, but I haven't finished anything. I don't have internet access at home, which should be great for writing but terrible for helping find a job. Nothing makes you feel cut off from everything like losing your internet connection. I realize that people have been living without the internet for thousands of years before it's inception. As I have no money to go out and do stuff, the internet is kind of my connection to the outside world. Right now I am sitting at the library. There is a guy at the same table as me taking apart an acer netbook. The connection is so slow I can't download anything that I usually do. I can't watch my shows on Hulu like I generally do. Last night I coped by spending several hours playing a gladiator game on my iPad. It was pretty cathartic. Nothing like slashing, slicing and beating my way through several huge burly guys to get rid of some angst. Usually I use Unreal Tournament as my go-to catharsis. Last night, it was just fun to beat guys up.

Don't get me wrong. I am not a violent person in real life. I could hit someone hard enough to hurt them to save my life. I think that is one of the fallacies that people who are against video games try to perpetuate. Playing games on my computer, or iPad, does not make me want to beat up or shoot people in real life. If anything, it helps me to get rid of some of the frustration so that in real life I can deal with people. I have an outlet for it. An outlet that is safe and hurts no one. I think it is similar to the therapy trick of having someone hit an inanimate object with a baseball bat. I can get all the irrational feelings out of the way so I can deal with life in a more reasonable manner. which is good. Cause with the way things are going right now, I need to be as reasonable as I can get.