Feelin' hot Hot HOT!

The great equalizer: heat. Turns everyone into a puddle of lazy. If you say you're different than your pants my friend are on fire. I just had another adventure. Shopping with my dad is always an adventure. But we managed to grab what we needed in order to build a camera rig. The Jig part (what the track will actually stand on) will be done some other time, we're just worried about the actual track at the moment.

So we get on home and it is blazing hot. We look at each other and say - yeah... another day. As excited as I am to soon have a fully functional dolly. IT IS JUST TOO HOT! I wanna enter John's (castlegardener) little animation test at stopmotionmagic.com, but even at 11PM the heat is just destroying me. I'm gonna try and do it tonight - might take like 4 hours.

I've been itching to animate Vanni, her head turned out really disgusting so I made a Mr. Potato-esque head for her. It looks more 3d and less flat, but it also looks somewhat different than the original sketch. I like it though. However I've only made 1 mouth for it, a pair of glasses made out of a nyquil box - no eyes. So not much happening with facial expressions, but its all good! I'm gonna hit the bed at noon for a long nap, hopefully pass up the heat through sleep and wake up later in the evening :)

Another note, I tried the spycam my brother never used and it just doesn't do the trick. It's meant for a simple "who's at the door" setup, doesn't zoom in nearly enough and has a shiny round lens at the front - kinda like a webcam. So I think I have to go back to the DV Cam sitting next to the DSLR. At least this has color and I can see it on the computer screen.

In the mean time, gonna hit up some guitar!
Playing: Jason Mraz - Mr. Curiosity <- tricky to imitate the live version with solo guitar! Update: Just did a small test animation using the set up, with the DV cam... not what I wanted but it still works fine. What wasn't fine was the animation haha. A lot of tweaks need to be made to the puppet to get a better range of motion out of it. Puttin' down notes for the next character, maybe I'll revisit Moe with a new armature approach. Anyway I got a mere 55 snaps and I'd already bumped my set - which is just two pieces of wood on a table -.-

Felt good to move a puppet again, but sadly I don't think I'll be able to enter into the puppet drinking challenge. We'll see what tomorrow brings. I'll put that little test together tomorrow too and if its even worth looking at I'll post it.