Caitlin and I leave on our trip to Vancouver tomorrow… I’m not sure yet if I’m going to bother bringing my [netbook] computer… I’m kind of thinking that I’d rather not, and just bring my camrea and my Kindle instead (and I’ll check my email on Caitlin’s iPhone if I do that). It’s not just that I am going luddite, it’s that I trashed the Windows installation by uninstalling a bunch of essential stuff, and it needs to be completely set up again from scratch. That said, Caitlin recently installed Ubuntu’s netbook remix OS and seems to be liking it — since it’s a very quick install I may go ahead and do that.
I’m working on a new project, a Gregory Corso poem (“Bomb“) set to music and then animated by me, and came to realize that one of the problems with using what is just barely into beta, as Pencil is, is that many rather important features are missing… There are no automated tweening features, and all-in-all I’m OK with that, but with that in mind I would like to have some sort of a symbols library or even just the ability to have a nice cut and paste with the ability to resize and rotate — and I can’t do the latter, and the rest of it is awkward at best. I discovered that the easiest solution is to draw my master image onto a piece of transparent plastic, holding it up to the monitor with my view window sized as needed, and it makes a really easy template/symbol library to work with as I trace it by eye!
This trick worked well, and I have had a chance to do some initial ideas and sketches for the animation. It’s about 95% incomplete (some doesn’t have motion, all doesn’t have detail, and most isn’t even drawn), and while I’ve had fun with it so far, it’s rather time consuming so I may well shelve the project for some time — at a minimum I won’t be able to dedicate much more time to it until the end of Nefarious’s March Break school holiday, since she gets back from California the day after we get back from the West Coast as well.
Anyway, the audio is a little weird, but I think with some tuning it’ll work out just fine… I had to slow it down to half speed and then increase the pitch to compensate, so it has a sort of a flange effect as well as a intoxicated mood, but if I didn’t do this, the whole thing just goes by too quickly. Unfortunately this also reduces it to 7.5fps, so I might decide to insert some more interstitial frames. Speaking of beta issues, the audio support for the Windows Pencil is rudimentary, so the sync work had to be done by hand by taking notes on the taming of keyframes with the aid of another free software tool, Audacity, a great sound editor.
As always, I had fun, especially with the mutation segment.
Well… our plane leaves in the morning and I have not yet begun to pack — let alone install Ubuntu — so I suppose I had better stop messing around with my blog and get at it. See everyone when I get back! Don’t think about robbing the studio because we have a guest-slash-housesitter.
5 Comments
Shit.
I was trying to focus on being productive with what I already know how to use.
This Pencil business has me learning instead of producing.
Nicely done. Again!
First off, Eeebuntu (netbook remix) is outstanding. I’ve been using it for almost a year and am completely in love. It’s on the netbook I use for school and I don’t have a single complaint.
I really like these animations you’ve been doing. The art is awesome. I remember we talked a few years back about working together on a music video for one of my songs. How would you like to do it with this animation? I think they’d fit together nicely :) Send me an email when you get home from your trip and we can talk about it in more detail.
Have fun!
That’s pretty neat dude.
Theeternal, I’d be totally into it. If you’ve got some shorter material, that’s where we should start the conversation, since it’s fairly time-consuming to create.
Woohoo! Vancouver! Heheh.
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