“Never despair, but if you do, WORK ON IN DESPAIR.”
—EDMUND BURKE
This past weekend I hit another low mark in my short film career hobby aspirations and indeed felt the need to quit. I haven’t and I won’t.
As soon as my parents return home from their wonderful visit I’ll be getting back on the horse and working to finish up this film. To top it off I started work on the treatment for my next project.
Onward.
Here’s the first 7 seconds of animation on the project. Warts and all, I’m very happy with where it’s going.
Actually, I was animating about 3 weeks ago, but life got busy and this is the first chance I’ve had to update my blog about it. Looking back I realize that I’ve been working on this project for over a year. If you include time spent thinking about the stories I want to tell with these characters, then it’s closer to five years.
It’s been slow going but I’m continuing to make progress. That I have yet to give up means something: probably that I’m stubborn, but also that this is important enough to me to keep going on it.
After nearly giving up entirely on the project last week, I managed to pull myself together and dive into painting the robot. It’s almost finished.
I just need to come up with what I’m going to use for his eye and I’ll be on to animating finished shots, hopefully as early as next week.
This weekend I took two hours and made an animation table. It measures 48 inches long by 42 inches wide about 42 inches high. I’m not sure if that’s too high or not, but it should make it easy to get underneath for tie downs and I won’t have to bend over to pose the armature.
It’s also likely bigger than I need for this project, but: A) I didn’t want to cut down the piece of plywood I had, and B) If it goes well I’m hoping to do more of these and I may need a larger table the next time.
It’s very sturdy, giving very little when i knock it or lean on it. I still need to add some additional supports on the bottom as there’s a very slight vibration in it still and give some more surface area to glue it to the floor.
Last night I finished roughing out the chest and pelvis. I may want to de-bulk the chest a bit. I have to sit on it.
Unfortunately, this morning I broke off one of the tie down screws in an effort to extract it. I’m guessing that some Sculpey got baked into the threads and gummed it up. And I foolishly tried to force it rather than break the clay off.
Ugh. Now instead of spending the evening fixing a simple sculpt on the foot, I’ll be in the shop re-fabricating a new foot….
Lesson learned (or more like reinforced): Don’t force things.
