Animating

Things are happening!

Zine things:
My crossword zine is coming together. I have to think up like 10 more clues (which means I already thought up about 300), make someone solve the puzzle for proofreading purposes, work on some layouts, make copies, and it will be done! I even wrote my letter from the editor part today. Maybe I will finish it by the weekend IF the contributors will all send me their bios.

Movie things:
Robin is working on my movie! We met up last weekend and she showed us what she'd done so far, and it was great! She did stuff!

I am also doing stuff! I went to the park and took photos of the town. Here's what it looks like sort of:


Realistic, huh? I made Jessica come with me to protect me from being run over by joggers and cyclists and baseball players while I crouched on the ground in the middle of a dirt patch. She did a good job. I did not get run over by anything.

I am also working on animating the audience for the vaudeville show that happens within the movie. Here is a preview of what a few of them look like:

The audience was drawn by HARVEY JAMES™ who is super cool and good at drawing! He's also taking commissions right now starting at just $6, which is really cheap! Go here! Give him some money! It will be well-spent, I assure you.

Animating the audience, however, is up to me. We tried filming them puppet-style, by attaching strings to paper cutouts, but the lighting was terrible and the cutouts wouldn't stay right-side-round, so it was a total mess. In fact, it's still a total mess in one of my drawers, where all of the cutouts are knotted up in a big pile. So I decided to try doing the animation digitally, which I'm kind of excited about, because I've never done such a thing, but also kind of nervous that it will be really tedious and hard. However, I am up for that kind of challenge. At least it's not confusing, tedious, and hard.

And then in a week or so you (if you somehow managed not to be a contributor) can give ME money when you purchase my zine! And in another 5 years (completely random estimate) you can give me money again when you purchase tickets to see my movie at a movie theater! Hooray!

I am actually not a great singer, despite the implications of this post.

We finally hired someone to work on editing my movie! Channing just did not have time to work on it, as I may have mentioned in every post for the past year. I had been suggesting hiring someone for a few months, but he kept promising that he would just buckle down and work on it. Clearly it wasn't happening. So now our friend Robin Griswold, who is a recent film school graduate, is tackling the project. I hope she doesn't go insane from listening to me singing too much. Not that you will, when you eventually watch the movie, because I obviously have a lovely singing voice. But editing is terrible and annoying, no matter how classically trained and perfect the voices on the soundtrack are. It is this attitude, combined with my inability to teach myself complicated greenscreen compositing, that has prevented me from editing the movie myself.

In the meantime, I am working on a crossword/story/coloring/mad lib zine. I've received quite a few lovely submissions from various writers and drawers. Now I'm working on formatting everything and adding more illustrations. I might also try to think of a title that's more concise than crossword/story/coloring/mad lib zine. Thinking of titles is always difficult for me.

I'm also doing boring projects around the house, like sewing bags to contain my hand-washable laundry and our stash of plastic shopping bags. Once the shopping bags are corralled, we can fit a mini-compost bin under the sink so we can actually compost a bit more regularly.

I also finally got a zipper foot for my sewing machine, so I'm going to be attempting to make some dresses soon! Hooray for things that don't have buttons or drawstrings!