So the decision has been made....sort of. I was out at a game store yesterday and I was able to find really teeny tiny polyhedral dice. I had been looking on line, but wanted to support my local game shops before I ordered them online. I was actually impressed with the store.  I asked for the dice. They said they had some that were for display purposes only that belonged to the owner, but they would ask the owner if he would sell them to me. If not, they offered to order them for me. I would have taken either choice, but the owner said I could have them. So now I have 5mm polyhedrals to use with my stop mo. Which means the idea I will be using is the game idea. 

They are actually metal. The ones I found online were resin painted to look metal. So these are even better. I love them. And I am very grateful to the nice guy at Funagain Games for helping me to get them. 

So today I have been working on getting a storyline and script together. I got halfway through it when I realized I was writing too many characters into it, so now I have to start over. I am going to have to completely change the story. That's ok. A bit frustrating but ok. So while I am letting my brain detangle from that I am building a new table. I tried to set it all up to help me with a story line, hoping they would tell me what story they wanted to tell. My biggest table doesn't fit the dice, character sheets, and the GM barrier. I hope the table will not be too big and overshadows the scene. when I have it assembled I will check it out. 

Ok, so back to writing. 

Well, it has been a very productive weekend. I haven't finished recording and posting stories yet, but it still has been very productive.  

     I spent several hours yesterday rewriting the story arc for the webseries. This is re-write number 3. Re-write because the direction it was going has changed so dramatically I had to go back and change the first few episodes and reconfigure the story arc. For some reason this time my characters are telling me where they want go with it, and it is not what I had in mind at all. However, it is truer to the characters themselves, so I guess I don't mind the rewrite. It is also necessitating the addition of more great characters, so I starting losing track of it all. And little jokes, story threads and character interactions are popping in, giving little touches to what was a good silly little story thing. It has become more than I meant it to be. I do not think it is bad. But it really isn't what I had in mind when I started this. it is tons better. I just hope I can make it fully to fruition. 

     One thing I noticed was I kept having to flip around through my notebooks to make sure I was referencing each character correctly, and not leaving dangling story threads through out. I found cheap foam board at the Dollar Tree, which I had planned to use for light bouncing. I decided that having everything easily accessible was a better idea. 

So now, my walls look like this:

     I just taped the foam board to the walls using packing tape. I will still be able to use the other side for lighting. I also am saving a few to put animation notes on. As crazy as it looks, it is actually helpful. I have never been in a writer's room, but after I did all this I realized this room now looks like pictures I have seen on the intertubes. So maybe I am on to something. Probably a lot less efficient, as it follows my logic not general conventions, but still. Sitting back and looking at it all I feel like I actually accomplished something. And I feel that much closer to this thing becoming a reality. 

     Also this weekend my friend drove me to the hardware store so I could purchase some supplies. I bought plywood, 1x1, 1-1/2x1/2, etc. I glued and nailed the boards together for a frame, then I glued and nailed the plywood to the top. Once it is dry I will have a base I can clamp to the table and attach a background. 

Here are some pics:

     So that's now done. I also purchased some small pieces of sheet metal. I am still figuring out what exactly I want to do with them. One of the ways I anchor my puppets is by using magnets. Unlike some, I put my magnets in the feet and use a metal base. Even if I feel the need to go the other way with my new puppets, a sheet metal base for the floor will give extra stability. I just haven't exactly decided how to execute it yet. 

     So that was my weekend. I still have a ton to do, but I feel like I am moving forward instead of stagnating. 

OK, I need help with something.

One of my current projects is organizing a local storytelling show here in Eugene. The existing ones are not the kind of storytelling I am looking for, and I need a place to practice telling stories on stage. I would go up to Portland, but it is a good 2 and 1/2 hour drive, if I had a car, which I don't, and a good 3 hour train ride or bus ride. Besides being cost prohibitive ($30 per ride up and back via train, $50 for ride up and back via Greyhound), most of the shows are on weekdays. 3 hours up and back, plus the time there for the show means I would have to take time off of work and not get home until about time to get up and get ready for work the next day. As I am the only person in the IT department right now, I would need my brain to be coherent for work.

So my question to you is...what do you think a good title would be for this show? Most shows have a good title to go with it. At this point, I am counting it as a one off unless I can find enough interest, but I would like to turn it into a monthly or bi-monthly thing.

I am so bad at thinking up good titles. I tend to get esoteric and convoluted with the meanings and it turns into something people read and go WTF?

This is going to be a truthful anecdotal storytelling show, kind of like the Moth or Risk! or The Back Fence.

Some of my current ideas:

No sh!t, there I Was
Rockingchair Tales
Audio Hallucinations
Audial Petroglyphs
The Front Porch Swing
Clay Jars
Quilt stories (or The Crazy Quilt)

What do you think? Do you have any better ideas?

HELP!! Please??

So, I spent the last few hours writing up a story, reading it over and over, editing it, reading it over and over again, then finally recording it and editing it with an intro and outro. I put it up on Soundclick, but it won't let me embed just individual songs, so I probably won't go with them for the long haul.

But for tonight, here is my version of the story Death Comes in Fly Form. Feel free to comment and critique.

Well, I had my first one-on-one session with Kevin Allison tonight. I was so nervous. He was very sweet, very kind, and gave me some valid feedback that I needed. I got some confirmation that I do know how to tell a story, even if I need to work on elements of it. That was gratifying. At this point we are looking more at the story than the performance. I feel that the more comfortable I get telling stories the better my performance will be. But this goal just skipped from anonymous attempt to real - to achievable. I just need to get my confidence and learn what to leave in and what to leave out. After tonight, I am going to research what storytelling opportunities there are in Portland and see if I can bribe someone to drive me up there from time to time.

I am very impressed with how present he was. It would be very easy for someone as busy as he is to just fluff it off. You know, not really listen, not really have any constructive feedback, just what he generally tells everyone. He really did try to assess my story and help me. I feel my money was well spent.

I am still working on the video in the Pinnacle app. It is taking way longer than I had hoped. I have about half the spidgetts done now. I was sick last night and today, so the rest aren't done, but I have been working on it. I probably won't work on it again for the next few days. I wanted to have it done by now. But whatever, I guess.

I have one person committed to doing voiceover for the web series. That is good. I am still looking, so if you are interested send me a message via the contact form.

OK, I need to lay down again.

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, 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.

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. :)

This morning I have been reading articles on animation online. There are a lot of them. I tend to do this from time to time when I am stuck creatively. Not only do I think about stop motion constantly, I like to read about it.

One thing that I noticed that comes up from time to time is stop motion vs. what they call "real" animation.

This comparison puzzles me. Stop motion IS real animation. It is the same concept as drawn animation or CGI animation, only it is done with photographs instead of 1's and 0's or pen and paper. It's just a different medium for making objects appear to move on their own. I have already talked about my frustration with people who think stop motion is a medium for children. I wonder if that is what stems this attitude of exclusion. In my opinion it is way cooler than drawn animation. For one thing, I feel it is way more difficult. The same amount of work is put into each frame. When you are doing drawn animation, if you draw it in the picture it happens, no matter what. You can make anything happen. You don't have to follow the laws of physics.

When you make a stop motion animation, not only do you have to figure out how to defy physics with every shot, but you also have to make it look like you aren't. You not only have to build or find every piece of set, every prop, every piece of clothing, but you also have to figure out how to make them look like they are moving naturally. If your protagonist is kicking a ball, there is so much more that goes into it than just drawing the ball moving and the foot kicking. You have to make that ball suspend in the air long enough to take the shot, then you have to do it over and over again until you have your entire sequence. And the whole time you have to keep track of where the protagonist's foot is, how the grass is or isn't moving, what is in the background, where the lighting is, where all fingers and pieces of loose clothing of the animator is, all to make sure you get the perfect continuous flow.  Stop motion isn't just the art of drawing. It is carpentry, sewing, model making, physics, photography, storytelling, lighting, problem solving, science-ing.....it is an amalgam of crafting, science, technical, artsy mayhem.

I have always been a storyteller. As young as six years old I used to tell long winded ridiculous stories about things that weren't true to anyone who would listen. The more absurd the better. As an adult, I can think of nothing more fun than telling those absurd stories in a medium that challenges my mind and my skills. Not only do I get to solve the problems of how to make the little things work, I get to solve the problems of making it all work together to tell a complete story.

Stop motion is a very underrated craft. I wonder if the drawn animators have rejected it as legit because they are jealous. While they are stuck behind a desk, I get to work with my hands. While they are agonizing over color choices, I get to solve a physics problem. While they are using the same scenes and only moving one part of a picture, I get to live in my set. And the end result is the same.....a hopefully amusing and pretty animation for everyone to enjoy.

It warms my heart to see the influx of stop animation that has happened in the last few years. Coraline, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Mary & Max, Corpse Bride, The Nightmare Before Christmas....all exceptional movies done in this wonderful medium. This year, 2012, we have Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (I use the UK title cause I like it better), Paranorman, and Frankenweenie are the few I am aware of currently. There is a film festival in Montreal dedicated solely to stop motion. I am surprised at how many established film festivals are adding in categories for animation and stop motion. We are becoming more and more mainstream (be that good or bad).

Don't worry, drawn animators who have a chip on your shoulder about stop motion. There is room for all of us. :)

As I have been working on gaining XP points for my RL-RPG, one of the things I have been researching is storytelling styles. This has really fascinated me. There seem to be as many styles as there are people who tell stories. There are basic similarities, but each one has their own spin and thier own way of doing things.

Tonight I listened to the story The Mayor of Mitchell garden told by Danny Lobell for the Risk! podcast. This was a story about his time working at a retirement home as the person who kept tabs on the kosher kitchen. I liked his style of storytelling, though I don't know that I would adopt it for myself. This story was more of a fond recollection story than one that had a point or a moral to it. He told it well, and you could tell in his voice that he really did care for those people. That is what made the story enjoyable for me. I liked that instead of describing the people, as in how they dressed, what color hair they had, etc, he told about who they were as people- the mean old man, the WW11 veteran. He helped us see them through the stories they told him and the things they did. He told enough detail without overburdening you with too much flowery speech. I like flowery speech, don't get me wrong. But like everything, flowery speech has a time and a place. I also liked how it felt firmed up without feeling rehearsed. It didn't feel like he was telling the story for the millionth time, though that might have been the case.

It also didn't feel like he was reading. One thing that brings me out of a story anyone is telling is when it is stilted and sounds like it is being read. Even if someone is reading a story to me, I want it to sound like they are talking to me, not reading to me. In storytelling that feels very unprepared and unprofessional. If you are going to do this you need to learn how to go without the notes. Yes, that does sound harsh. But storytelling is a performance art. If that person was a professional musician we would expect them to take hours and hours to practice the piece, to be able to play it without stumbling, or at least be familiar and comfortable enough with the piece to be able to hide stumbles. We forgive them the music on the stand, but still expect a practiced performance. I recently listened to a story telling podcast where all of the storytellers (supposed professionals) sounded stilted and like they were reading to a child. I might give them a few more episodes, but seriously, don't present them as practiced if they are not. I can forgive a newbie or someone still getting their feet under them to struggle with that still, but someone who should know better? I will expect no less of myself, which is why I will be recording myself telling stories and listening to them. I have not yet found anywhere in Eugene that does this kind of storytelling. They do children's storytelling at the library on some Saturday mornings, but that is all I have been able to find. Maybe after I get myself going a bit more I will see about possibly organizing a group here.

OK, that is enough about that for now. I spent my hour listening and analyzing. It looks like the voting is still going on at the Douglas Adams Video Contest, so if you feel up to going over there and giving me a vote or two I would appreciate it. The judges will compile a long list of final candidates on April 30th. I am guessing that maybe that is the voting deadline? The rules are really too ambiguous. So if you go there and can vote, please do. If you go there and you can't vote, well, I appreciate the support.