Well, I've started the second movie of Fight. There's a long road ahead of me that's daunting and filled with potholes of procrastination. But I press onward because I'm a big geek.
A couple of weeks back, I received the very generous package of Stikfas from rastAsia. He sent me 6 Pirates and 1 surf girl, so I have an extra "Maggie" main character.
As of today, I finished putting together all the skeletons. The final skeleton, I did in the back deck. Well, I started to do it in the back deck. I have a well worn system: I do the torso, then I do the head. However, no sooner did I pop out the head than it went sprawling onto my deck, which is a raised enclosed wooden platform with evenly spaced lumber pieces to allow small objects to fall through and remain forever unaccessible.I was distraught...but not undone.
Now, my skills in the real world are quite lacking, to say the least. I am of no use to anyone requiring heavy lifting, house repair, or laundry. However, objects stuck in drains, mouseholes, or subway tracks are the standard fare of adventure games everywhere. I knew that all I needed was a long object and some gum or similar sticky substance.
Long object was easy, I had a wire clothes hanger. Probably the last one we have, since every other one was plastic. Gum, however, was nowhere to be seen. I asked Dove (my wife) for some gum, and she didn't have any. My tenant was also devoid of gum. All the gum commercial ads that I watched as a child had no effect on me as an adult, because our household is completely lacking in gum products.
So I got some tape. Why didn't I figure on tape to begin with? Because text and/or graphic adventures never give you useful things to solve problems with. I mean, that would be too easy. And if you did happen to have tape, it wouldn't be used for actual taping. It would be more useful as a way to make false mustaches, because everyone would be utterly convinced I had a mustache if I taped hairs onto my lip. But I digress.
The tape was sort of successful. I would get it close, and then it would fall back to the ground. I never had this problem in text games. Gum goes on stick, stick goes through grate, I grab desired object, I score points. In real life, tape goes on coat hanger, coat hanger goes through thin space, coat hanger gets caught on the table, my kid's leg, my shirt. My hand shakes like a fiend, and the coat hanger is having a hard time trying to stay still to poke an object no larger than a pencil eraser. And then, tape gets dirty, and loses it stickiness.
After about ten tries, I finally get it again and success is almost mine. My inventory has expanded to 3 types of tape, a spoon, and a bubble tea drinking straw. Can you imagine if this were a real adventure? I would have had to complete some inane quest just to get the spoon, let alone the other objects. Anyways, the spoon is to slide underneath the skull head as I lift it with the tape, so that it doesn't fall back down when I get it close to the boards. The straw is to finish the final retrieval process because I can't seem to get it to squeeze through the boards. And I figure out why I had so many problems, because the evenly spaced spaces are not evenly spaced. It's wider at one end than another. So the skull head is stuck inside the straw after I had sucked it and most of the dirt underneath the deck, and the straw is stuck between the boards and I can't pull it out. I slide it over, with the spoon in case it drops, and I finally get the head out.
I am happy, my wife is happy, the kids are happy, and you are happy, because this rather long story which has nothing to do with animating has come to and end.
Now, I want to do a scene as a homage to Ray Harryhausen. I used to watch his films with my dad, and I thought they were amazing...and quite scary too. In one film, Jason and the Argonauts, the crew goes up against seven skeletons. I wanted to do a skeleton fight with Maggie, and rastAsia sent me those skeletons.
Unfortunately, I have six skeletons. I would have had seven, I bought one for myself, but I had a birthday party, and we invited a bunch of friends and their kids over. Now, I should have known that kids left to their own devices take closed doors as an invitation to be opened, and I did not put my stikfas on high shelves, they were sitting on the animation desk. After I found out he was in there, I didn't shoo him away, I let him play. But in the end, one of the skeletons was missing a forearm. I searched everywhere in the room for it, but it was gone. I'll probably still include the skeleton...he'll be the lame one.
Anyway, at the beginning of the Argonaut film, the skeletons come out of the ground. So I needed to make a lego platform for the skeletons to come out of. This took a lot more lego than I expected, and after about an hour and some of creating it, I didn't have any time to animate. I don't even know if it will work, but I will find out tomorrow.And thus ends my first day. I will post pictures soon. I am making this blog public, although I don't know why. That just means I'll get harassed after months of the film not being done, but I wanted rastAsia to know that I am working on it, and I didn't take his gifts and just run. :) So hopefully you'll join me on this insane hobby of mine. And it is insane. If you remember from my last film, it took me 14 hours to get two seconds. TWO FREAKIN' SECONDS. This time, however, I'm writing stuff down. I have graph paper. I can use it. I've saved it for many years thinking I would need graph paper. And now...I have a purpose for it. I just need to find it. It's probably in the attic.
I would post pics of me animating, but it's hot in my house, and I'm topless. And that is something no one wants to see.
