I must be wicked

I can't every feel rested. I'm barely able to hold my eyes open as I wait for this dvd of the Guy Maddin-esque video that Eric and I made over the past week to burn so I can spend my lunch hour tomorrow with Eric kinescoping, in between my classes with my two grad students. I felt pretty alert while driving home the other day from Prince Albert, I credit the three espressos I had that day, and almost no food. I'm noticing that food makes me very tired.
So last week we went to Prince Albert. Paul came with us, so the car was full. In Saskatoon we had a Fudruckers burger and I got the new Douglas Copeland book, the Gum Thief, from the McNally and Robinson book store on 8th. We visited with Judy McNaughton and Michel Boutan in PA, seeing their studios and so on. There was a parade that was rained on by the bucket but we were able to hide out in the art centre. Day two was really William's day. We spent some time in downtown PA, in a used book store I found "The President Vanishes" by Rex Stout, one of the few of his books we don't have yet. We got some Lego on sale at the Zellers, went to the water slide for a few hours, then A&W for supper and back on the road to Waskasiu. William and Margaret went into the rooftop hot tub while I tried to shoot some film. The sunset on the pier was incredible. The next morning we discovered that the bakery nearby was pretty good and quite cheap, so we survived on pastry half the time. William got to start his Lego and we started each morning with Adam West Batman episodes on the laptop. The battery belt stopped working and wouldn't charge, so I couldn't shoot time exposures. I shot a lot of other footage instead, mostly beach stuff, and I sat down in the lobby for two hours and wrote out the soundtrack to one of the four Grain films, I'm pretty happy about that. I dropped my still camera and now the lens doesn't retract and it doesn't take pictures. I replaced it yesterday. I just discovered that the videos the new one shoots are not recognized by After Effects, grrrr. The next day was our last. We went on a hike and I shot more film, 16mm, super-8, and video (with a video camera rather than my still camera). Unlike the way up, I did all the driving back. Felt very in the moment most of the way. Not bad trip, everyone had fun. Best of all, no one insisted that I should wear shorts the entire trip!

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I worked on my taxes with my dad this morning (mostly I need him, but I do help him with the computer side of stuff as well). This afternoon I had my feet measured for some insoles to ease the pain. This evening I hung with William, went for a bike ride, visited the bulldog next door, did some reading, lego, etc. I designed a background for the next Warhol video, a 60s flower power sort of thing with a flower brush I designed. Here are a couple of frames.

256 test for Sock character animation in 3D

Finally started finishing some things today, delivered Tanya's disc she needs to her, and delivered all the work for New Dance Horizons to them. I can now purge my drives of all the material there and start on something fresh. At home I began trying to work with the 3D features in After Effects. Instead of the layers being flat on top of each other, they have a Z axis as well to allow the layers to be further from or closer to the camera. I've not figured out the viewpoint yet. I'd like to build the town out of tin buildings and let the characters move throughout them, but it seems you need to keep track of where the buildings are because if you don't, your moving characters will simply pass through them.
The BFA show opened at the MacKenzie Art Gallery tonight. I went alone, got Allan Dodson for my Warhol series. The art was very good, probably the best graduating show I've seen in many years.
Margaret and I watched two more episodes of Torchwood season 2 (thanks for downloading them Paul), both of tonights were tragic and more than a little melodramatic.

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I got the colour animation out of the computer at the university (chose full compression, if you do not choose any of the codecs or specifically select the no compression, then the default is to not let you export). I recorded a bit of William's voice (I should also give him writing credit as this is all him) and put it together with an after effects background. Enjoy.

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I worked on my website for another few hours today, finally getting all of the descriptions for my films written with a page and maybe photos or a clip for each. The pages are there, although over half the clips are still missing (there will be a total of 80 or so films listed). Next I'll have to design the page to tie the films together. I told Margaret's dad what I've been working on and he asked what order the articles (and thus also the films) will be listed? I now have a quandary, do I list the films chronologically? By genre (drama, animation, experimental)? Alphabetically? I suppose I could offer all options with links to each, how long could that take?
That was my main obsession, then I got thinking about the Walrus and the Carpenter film that I just made a dvd of, the one I shot 10 years ago and that Michele Sereda wants to perform in front of tomorrow night. Well the dvd looks like crap, I think the transfer to video that I did was a bit soft and I'm deeply unhappy with it. It may be passable as most people won't be looking at the projection that much or that closely, but I feel I'd be letting them down. So this evening after watching the new superfriends dvd with William (Galactic Guardian: The Super Powers Team, 2dvd set, Adam West as Batman), I took the only image I have handy of the Walrus and the Carpenter (if I still have the original artwork, it must be at my office) and brought it into photoshop, cut the pieces apart and painted the gaps where the cuts appeared, and reanimated the scene in after effects. It will now be bright and sharp and 6 minutes long, rather than the original one.
Speaking of Batman, I started rereading the Frank Miller Dark Night comics from the 80s. They hold up so well, I'm amazed all over again. I have the originals up in the attic somewhere, but only the first series. He did a second series in 2001. The whole set is published in whappingly thick hardcover book that I just borrowed from the almighty library.

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I finally have my new video uploaded; "Madonna for Congress", the fifth chapter of my fictional "She Said" series. I don't know what was the problem with my videos over the past couple of days, I made them in the same way as before but the upload kept failing. This afternoon, as I sit here at home because William is sick from the antibiotic that his dentist gave him, I tried the Flash Video Encoder I got with my Adobe master collection and made a video one tenth the size of the AVI. In the end, it looks like a Youtube video, which is what I made it for. I'll need to make a proper video output of these, although I can't imagine looking at them on anything but a computer.
I got back to the edit room this morning, we moved the room so I needed to put all the external drives back on, and I was able to work on two avids back to back. I digitized the super-8 footage I got back a couple weeks ago, it has more promise that I initially thought, and I also started working on the dance footage I shot at the Secret Garden Tour last summer. I just want to make some quick cuts in that stuff, throw it back onto disc, and hand it over to New Dance Horizons. Primarily I got back onto the End of Life workshop editing, starting to work on the notes I got from our last meeting. We meet about it again next week.

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I finally have my new video uploaded. I don't know what was the problem with my videos over the past couple of day, I made them in the same way as before but the upload kept failing. This afternoon, as I sit here at home because William is sick from the antibiotic that his dentist gave him, I tried the Flash Video Encoder I got with my Adobe master collection and made a video one tenth the size of the AVI. In the end, it looks like a Youtube video, which is what I made it for. I'll need to make a proper video output of these, although I can't imagine looking at them on anything but a computer.
I got back to the edit room this morning, we moved the room so I needed to put all the external drives back on, and I was able to work on two avids back to back. I digitized the super-8 footage I got back a couple weeks ago, it has more promise that I initially thought, and I also started working on the dance footage I shot at the Secret Garden Tour last summer. I just want to make some quick cuts in that stuff, throw it back onto disc, and hand it over to New Dance Horizons. Primarily I got back onto the End of Life workshop editing, starting to work on the notes I got from our last meeting. We meet about it again next week.

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I worked on a little video with William's drawings today. It's also basically his script, I just prompted a few things and recorded him. The backgrounds on the planet are from my "Modern" series. I've worked mostly in Adobe After Effects with a bit of photoshopping to separate the inconsistent blue screen from images of William (I've got a blanket close pinned up between a door and the window behind me that we used for a blue screen on the weekend.) William thinks there should be a chase scene next, so I've called it as "Mission to Fluutonia, part 1", and we'll do another chapter later. I am the uncredited voice of mission control as well as the theremin player (yes, I am sampling yet again from the same first recording I did months ago as the machine is at work and I never get around to completing its construction). I think the big breakthrough in creating this video is having this little M-Audio Microtrack recorder at home, I have been doing a number of little recordings and it's so convenient to record and to put the files into the computer. This is a little hand held unit that records good quality audio (new purchase for the NMSL). I've created a 1/4 resolution version of it below, the details are so poor you can hardly see things, but hopefully it will give an impression.
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I'm trying to figure out YouTube today. I joined and I've uploaded a very short video (5 seconds) that I created in After Effects and Photoshop, using new brush designs to essentially stamp images onto a blank canvas to create work that has similar formal characteristics to that of Norman McLaren or Len Lye. I've called it something forgettable, but I think if you click here, it may take you there. Or perhaps here. It also features a random clip of my first recording with my Theremin (discussed previously). It's interesting to notice how blurry everything on YouTube gets with the compressions they use. Here is a still from my video, notice the (relative) sharpness of the screw on the left hand side of the frame under normal video resolution: