In The Way...

For the last couple of weekends I've been trying to work on my film AND get some spring cleaning done. Neither of those things have been going very well. So, since I had all this other life crap that needed doing, I decided to knock it out this weekend to the best of my ability so I can dive back in headlong on Monday after work.

I realized I had entirely too much crap. Things I don't use, or things I was going to use for some art project or sculpture down the road, the ideas in mind for some of those things are just too blurry right now. I'll create those things when I get to those things. So, in the meantime, I'm trying something new. I'm selling my distractions online. Not only will they now be out of my way, but some of the "junk" I had laying around I had been meaning to sell for quite awhile.

I've already made a couple hundred dollars, and so I'm going to do what any good one-man-movie-studio would do with that spare money, use it for the film. I'm banking it because I've reached this standstill where I'm going to need some voice talent pretty soon, and I'm going to need some decent reference monitors, and I'm going to need some cash for a DIY room treatment for sound editing. Those things aren't cheap, but now at least they're significantly cheaper due to the money I've made so far.

And in the future, I think I'd rather go on the adventure of acquiring new materials for sculptures anyway, that's part of where the fun in making them is, right?

I'm going to try and update more often, I've been still trying to shake off the cold of the winter still, even though we have nice temperatures now, I spent a week in Colorado on business where it snowed the whole time. On the plus side, I have a new companion, so I began working out my rendering pipeline as well as a few other workflows while I was there in the hotel. Every little bit of time you have can be used to knock out something, at least.

One of the big things I've been doing lately is studying topology, and looking at a method for creating face "masks" for characters that can be both very articulate and very easy to set up. This ensures that any 5poles in my geometry are in the places they need to be, so that the face smooths out and deforms nicely when animated, every time. Then, once I have the "Ideal Face" geometry set up, I can take it, adapt it, per character with fairly minimal work, and then use a script to set up the exact same facial rig which will be based off the locations of the 5poles and other facial landmarks. This means that even minute characters can have the same emotive rig that the "main star" characters can have, with a few clicks of the mouse.

I'm also looking at building a body rigging script that does much the same thing using landmark objects. It's a big pain right now, but once I have it figured out, I should be able to use and adapt it for multiple films. Exciting stuff!

Special Place

I grew up in a tiny town in the heart of the Appalachian mountains. From a very early age my brother and I were explorers. We had a TV, but we didn't have cable, or a VCR for a long time, or game consoles for even longer, so we spent a lot of time outside. Every mundane place became a place to play, a place where imagination could take over. My favorite place, in the whole world, were the cornfields up the street from our house.

As I got a little older, I became more of an introvert, and for me, the woods and fields were a place to go and be alone. They were a retreat. They were special, because they were mine. I used to sneak out at night super late, get my "sword," which was an oak plank that had been roughly carved by pocket  knife, and go up into the cornfields under a full moon at midnight to fight armies of zombies. I remember those battles well.

When I became an adult, I started putting those experiences to work for me in my writing. Most of the creative work I compiled as a kid dealt directly with my adventures, and only later did I realize that I could use it for something more than just my own amusement. The cornfields became a good place for a long walk, still a haven to be alone and contemplate.

But it couldn't last forever, I guess. Now I live about four hours away from my hometown, but my parents still live there, in the same house. I got an email recently that they had heard that someone was talking about buying up that land, those cornfields, and building a subdivision on them. Even though I don't own that land, and even though it is just a couple of acres of weeds and dirt, still it feels like I've lost something I can never replace.

There is only talk now, so it may not even happen, but I was surprised at my own reaction to the news. It made sense to me too that because that place had given me so much, and was so very special to me, that I would need to do it justice. Akazawa is certainly inspired by the haggard dark imagery typical of that place in the winter. I'll make sure I do it justice.

Quick update, more to come soon!

Just a quick update. About to pass out for the evening. Been exercising a lot lately, feels great to have good weather back, but now it is going to get cold again. Meh. Went on another footage gathering trip, will post about that soon. My skype headset died. Meh. Recording some temp audio for my dialogue for timing out the storyboards. This should help me get some stuff done faster and better timed where there are dialogue heavy scenes.

zZz...

Monitor Capacitor Repair

I currently have two Samsung 22" 226BW monitors which are around five years old. I've really wanted to get a monitor that is better capable of displaying the entire sRGB colorspace accurately, so I've been eyeing the large format Dell monitors, but they are very expensive, and if I were to get one, I would want to be sure I could use it for at least a couple of films. I almost took the dive and bought one, but I had to remind myself that I won't actually need the color accuracy until I start texturing and color grading work.

Then, one 226bw decided it would die. The LED on the front would come on, but the monitor wouldn't power up, so I took it apart.

Almost immediately, my suspicions were confirmed. The electrolytic capacitors on the power supply board had gone bad and were bulging out on the top. This is a pretty common thing with these kinds of capacitors, depending on the quality. The cylindrical things are the capacitors:

WARNING: if you have never worked with electronics before, I would highly advise taking a class or reading up on high voltages, capacitors, transformers, and mains power to avoid killing yourself. You never want to have the item you are working on hooked up while working on it obviously, BUT EVEN SO, capacitors and other components will hold power for hours, and can give you a nasty shock OR KILL YOU even with the board disconnected. (There, you've been warned.)

To replace these, you just need to find new capacitors with the same ratings, and close to the same size (so they'll fit back in the casing of the monitor!). In this case, the taller ones are 820uf @ 25v, and the smaller one to the right is 330uf @25v. The great big one in the background was not bulging at all, so I checked it with a multimeter, and it checked out fine. Below, the replacement capacitors from Mouser (I ordered a bunch in case I need to do my other monitor too):

The tools you will need for such a project are a de-soldering bulb, a low wattage (15w in this case) soldering iron, some rosin core solder, and your other materials. You'll also want a ventilated area to work in.

After you desolder the old capacitors, you can clean the holes for the new ones by sucking up the excess solder with the bulb. Then, make sure you have matched up your polarity (these capacitors have a positive and a negative side, like a battery, and the board and capacitors are marked to show you which lead goes where). Solder in the new, and we're ready to trim the excess.

New caps in place and ready to go!

And viola, the monitor powers up just fine.

 
I'll run it for several hours, watch some movies or something, and do some storyboard work to break it in and make sure everything is alright. So far so good! Now I can avoid having to replace this monitor, and I know these capacitors should be good for at least another 5 years.

Then, eventually, maybe when the price comes down a little, I can look at a nicer IPS monitor with sRGB coverage to worry about my textures and color grading.

Ain't Even Dead

Animatic coming along, now a little over 1/3 done. Hope to put it at 2/3 in the next month. Might be a little optimistic, but we'll see!

Started fooling around with some of the photos I'll be working from as textures, getting my alpha maps to work right for stuff like weeds and trees. Some experimentation needed yet, but discovered that mental ray has a cool "cutout" map that uses the alpha texture, but still allows for volume light/fog/zdepth pass to render without a rectangular outline. Well, it should anyway.

Good Tsu, you look kinda cool. Derp.

Still Not Dead

Despite my usual lethargy due to the weather this time of year, I've been keeping busy. Still waiting to see if the Japan trip will be doable, but since the Dreamliners are now grounded, airfare has gone through the effing roof. Looking more like 2014. Ah well, that gives me a chance to save up for some other stuff I'm eventually going to need.

I got a Canon Vixia M500 (did I mention that?) on sale over the holidays, it shoots pretty nice video for what it is, so I'm already getting a head start, shooting some random clips of my outings, sound recording, me working on stuff, you name it. Still want to just archive that stuff for now, because it would take a lot of energy and time to edit it and throw it on youtube at the same time I'm making the film. I'll save it for the special features. Nobody knows who I am anyway, so to make youtube videos now would be a waste of energy, I think.

Still chugging right along on the film. I've reduced the quality of the animatic to just get the damn thing done, and it's coming along nicely. I should be able to get started on 3D in a couple of months. This has taken me a bit longer than I thought, but then again, I did go the complicated route with the animatic. On the positive side, the animatic does look very good, and to feel what the film will be like is amazing. It's amazing to watch.

Welp, back to it!

Japan

Well! It has been a little while. Just a quick update, still cranking away on the movie. Over Christmas and new years I was able to get some really good audio work done, got a whole lot of samples (filled up a 16gb card a couple of times with foley and other junk) and now I'll have to set aside some time to grade it all out and rename the files. I have a sizable sound library of random stuff I've collected when I've taken my recorder with me.

I also have been discussing with some friends the possibility of visiting Japan, which we have tentatively scheduled to do in August 2013. This will be the polar opposite time of year that my film takes place in, but I think the experience will be invaluable. I will be taking my sound recorder, still camera, new camcorder... and shitloads of batteries and flash cards. Probably need to get a new external HD as well to dump all the stuff on. I plan on not only gathering reference, but shooting some parts of my "making of" documentary.

I guess I should point out as well, one of the biggest reasons that Japan interests me as it does. In the west, we view animation as something for children. Sure there are good western cartoons out there, but I feel (and have always felt) that animation has such a wasted potential in the west. I can still remember the first time I saw Nausicaa. I was blown away. Akira. Blown away. And thus began my love of Japanese animation in all it's various forms and genres. I then took a look at how these productions are made, and under what conditions and budgets, and was saddened that ultimately, for a non-Japanese to work in anime was really a very long shot. I was never under the impression that I would do so. At the same time, however, I started to understand that with computers and software, the sky really is the limit as far as animation is concerned. I was also very happy to see the anime boom sweep through the world in the early 90's, and it certainly hasn't slowed down. I'm looking forward to see what the kids of today do once they reach the age where the creative among them pitch their own cartoon shows.

I think ultimately that's why I chose to make Akazawa what it is. I guess I could have set it in America, with character names like Kimmy and Ted. I could have made up some legend about Indian burial grounds, instead of ancient Japanese youkai. I could have appealed to a wider audience, your average American, happy with the "adult" humor present in the Simpsons or Futurama, but instead I chose to do the thing I really WANTED to do, and that was to make my stuff an "anime." So, in order to do that, BRBJapanLOL.