Contagious Magazine

Whoa, everyone and their brother is posting about stikfas so I figured I'd join the crowd. Well, ok there are seven new posts about stikfas, and four of them are retailers but hey.

So, how are things on the animation front? Well, I haven't done any animating again. We no longer have a billet though, so that means my animation room is free! However, my niece is visiting for the week, which means my animation room is now not free. But that's ok, that also means that I can go to a movie with my wife, hopefully.

I've been rather delinquent this last week as it comes to responsibility. Since our billet, Jason, was with us, and he was 16, and I find that a lot of my interests coincide with the tastes of people half my age, all I did was play.

The first night, we were putting together my LEGO Skeleton Tower which I had won from Brickworld. You see, I had a barbecue on Sunday night, and invited people from my music group, including spouses and kids. Well, all the kids enjoyed playing with my lego, so my the skeletal tower was manhandled all over the living room. Now, as a kid, I KNEW that Lego shouldn't be played with on the couch because the couch is an eating machine of massive proportion. I've lost so many things to the appetite of the couch that I'm afraid to sit on it in fear of being featured on "Handsome People Gone Missing". But there were the children on the couches, playing with my Lego, and there were the Lego, getting lost. Anyway, I put the tower together to verify which pieces were missing. I found most of it, but I lost the crystal ball and the princess. I think Zoe took the princess. She hates me, I know it.

The next night, we practiced our magic tricks. Ekko and Zoe both like
magic tricks so I've been learning card tricks. I think that they're interest is waning, because I'm now at the point where I force them to watch me, but I'm still having fun. The night after that was my weekly DDR night and Neil joined me. Afterwards, we all sat around and talked about old video games, and as Jason was pulling a blank on the majority of video games we were reminiscing so fondly, I realized how clueless the new generation was in regards to video games. A sad state of affairs. So I'm posting an image of Zork I, not because we talked about it, but I feel nostalgic.

Wednesday night, we played BattleLore. I bought this game for an obscene amount of money. I haven't bought many boardgames since Zoe was born, but one day, this obsession came upon me and I just had to get it. So I did. I found it, and I bought it, and we played it. And Jason and I played this game a lot. One game would go for either 45 minutes to an hour, including setup, so that wasn't so bad. I initially bought this game so that I could play it with my wife, because she liked Battle Cry and I would rather play in a setting with fantasy characters than play in a US civil war setting. However, I seem to roll a bit more on the fortuitous side, which increases the anger probability in my wife. She constantly states I have a golden horseshoe up my butt, although her terminology is a bit less G rated. Playing with Jason was great. I could be happy when I rolled a lucky roll. :)

Thursday, I went out for icecream with my girls, and I brought Jason and his leader, Jessica. Afterwards, we played Saboteur, and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. Especially myself, because I won all three games and got all the gold. :D Later that night, my brother and sister-in-law came over. Friday night was a slow; two nieces came down and we all just sat and chatted. In fact, Jason and I were talking to my nieces until 2am in the morning. I think Jason wanted to play Saboteur again. Saturday, we did get a chance to play, and then we went out for wings. Finally, Sunday, I got a chance to sleep.

So, needless to say, I haven't done anything productive as of late. And I also went to the library and borrowed a few more books. But just so you know that I am going to keep on topic of Stikfas animation and just not trying for the record of most tags in a blog post, I received an email today from Contagious Magazine. They want to put my Fight movie in their magazine as they're doing a feature on Stikfas! How exciting is that!

24 FPS State of Mind

In my last blog, I would write the entry and then backdate it, so that the blog date would coincide with the actual day I did the work.

But does that really matter? I mean, I did do the animation on Wednesday night, June 13th. Currently, it's Thursday night, and I'm writing about it now because that's when I have time. It's 11pm, I didn't have time to animate, so I'll blog about last night's progress. However I still backdated it. Old habits die hard. I'll figure something out.

So, none of you have asked, "What does your animation setup look like, Errol?" So I'll show you right now.

We changed the room around since last time. The computer is on the right, and a second monitor extends so that I could see what I'm animating. I stupidly tried to animate without that second monitor, and the result was a blurry, washed out mess. I have two mice attached to the keyboard, and I'm thinking of getting a second keyboard too, that would make life a bit easier.

I was able to get some frames of animation done, about 50 frames. Not bad, considering my average. It involved one skeleton bursting out of the ground. At least, that's how I envisioned it. The arm comes bursting out followed by the ancient and decrepit body of a creaky old skeleton. Of course, that isn't translated to the final product. It looks like a stikfas skeleton coming through lego. And this is after having done it twice.

Yes, I did it twice. The first time, the timing was quite off. I forgot how slow I have to go for 24 frames per second. The arm came out too quickly, a brief 3 frame pause, and then the body. It looked unnatural. I mean, the undead are unnatural, but they still follow a few basic laws of physics.

The second time I did it, I tried to have the arm burst out, snap back a bit, and then stand up somewhat slowly. However, the same amount of frames were used for bursting out as there was for standing up slowly, so it doesn't have much of a bursting quality to it. I may cut some frames there to make it a bit quicker.

And that's it. I think I spent only an hour on it, and I was able to refilm it twice. Not much happens in one animation sitting, as you can tell.

I'm envisioning the next run of sequences. After the first skeleton rises, it will cut to the villain who is causing all the resurrections. Then, I will probably do a number of quick shots of skeletal arms bursting out of the ground in different angles. Then a shot of maggie looking concerned, which is difficult without facial expressions, so it will be of Maggie just looking. And then it will have the seven skeletons rising to attention.

Since I'm not storyboarding this, I do everything in my head, it's good to write these things down.

In the beginning...

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.