The End of Time
It's good to keep busy. So busy in fact that look at the state of this blog. It's barely had anything happen to it in months. Shocking.
As of whenever my registration with 123-reg cancels, basilbaradaran.com will no longer send you to this site, but to my newly created basilbaradaran.net, which is essentially the same website, but it looks less terrible. It's been on my mind for ages now, to rebrand and change how everything looks. The blog design I don't think brings a lot of hope to potential clients, but a cleaner, easier-to-use site with simple navigation could do the trick. Chances are what you see when you click that link now will be somewhat different in the future. Probably be doing loads of tweaks until I give up and admit it was fine the first time around.
Eventually I'll remove the pages here, bit by bit, until it's just the original blog again. There is a blog on the new site, but I don't like the feel of it, so chances are every post will just be published on this site and the new one, until I can find a way to integrate the two (never. I'm really bad at web design).
Lately I've been animating again, and it's one of my toughest jobs in a while. The idea is simple, and to some extent the execution is too, but considering how little time I have to do all of this - weekends and whatever spare time I have that doesn't involve playing Arkham Knight - it's a tiny bit stressful. But here's the guy I'm animating juggling:
Remember this short story thing I wrote? No? Yeah, me neither. Well anyway I'm adapting that into a long, long story. A novel in fact. It was meant to be a script but then I figured it's easier to adapt a novel to screen than a film to book, well, not shitty books anyway. And to prove that this isn't a thing I'm starting only to ditch it, I'm around halfway through the first draft, with documents of plot details, character bios, timelines and a chapter-by-chapter breakdown.
PRO TIP: do a chapter by chapter breakdown for your whole story before you start. Without feeling trapped - you can change the plot as you move forward if you want - you will always have something to refer to on days when you're just not feeling the inspiration to write. I'd have given up on this thing months ago if I didn't have that.
It's almost Christmas, but I don't have anything Christmassy to show, like I do every year. So here's the e-card I made for a friend a couple of years back.
Merry Christmas, y'all
Limit Breaks
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You know what's a horrible pain? Coming up with all kinds of ideas for animated shorts, only to be stopped in the middle of the thinking process by the little nagging voice at the back of your brain that tells you there's no way one person on a single computer with limited knowledge of animation or 3D software could do.
It's very annoying.
I just came back from a walk to get some good stories and concepts for the animated short I'm going to be graduating with next year (so, you know, it's got to be amazing. About ten times better than Toil and Trouble) and came up with some decent ones. However, each time there's something which I know I won't be able to do properly. I know it's a defeatist attitude but I do know my limits. I see what I was like this point last year and how much I've learnt (which, I have to say is a lot), but still, what I'm going for now would require, at least for the rendering times, multiple computers and people working on it. I've set the standard high for myself for next year, but I don't want to overdo it and end up with something subpar. Everything I do has to come out exactly as I want it, and looking at Toil and Trouble, there were a lot of things I had to compromise on, and it shows. I don't want any of that this year.
Well anyway, I'll talk about some of these ideas with some friends in the next few weeks and they'll help me organise myself a bit more, hopefully.
I'll be glad to get this comic finished too. I'm about a third of a way through the second (of three) chapter, so I'd say I'm about halfway, more or less, through the whole thing. Once it's done, it'll be a nice boost of self confidence, and will free up some time to work more on the animation. I've already freed up time, having finished (finally) reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which, if you guys haven't read it, an absolutely amazing book, and not at all in any way shape or form like the film they made in 2002, or the swash-buckling adventure tale it was always made out to be in everything. In fact, there are very few buckles swashed, and only one (brief, flashback) duel. I've never read a revenge quite like it.
Here, I shall leave with this letter from Austin Madison, an animator at Pixar who wrote this as part of the Animator Letters Project . I'm only posting one up, but click on the link, it's filled with some inspiring letters, if, like me right now, you're running a bit low on inspiration.
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Forwards Looking
Been doing a lot of actual animation lately. Hooray. Now with the rigging out of the way (well, sort of), it's just now down to putting things in scenes and making them move how I want. It's painstaking, in that each movement has to be timed, positioned, tested and then tried again if it doesn't look right, and that all takes a long time because of how complex some of the scenes are - and with so many polygons and objects in the single scene, my computer has a bit of a hard time showing it all in real time playback.
It's a long, annoying process, but it's totally worth it. I think.
Here's something I've been doing for Toil and Trouble - it's taken a few hours for this one single thing, but it looks about as good as I had hoped. It's the fifteenth storyboard in my scene animated out.
I've done a couple of others too, but haven't uploaded them to anything yet.
Moving along to the second deadline - which is in about ten days - I've almost finished this. Done more since I uploaded, namely involving the puppet swinging about wildly and then collapsing, but still have to finish all actions for the second character, as well as include some strings for the puppet. Here's what it's looking like right now:
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I've also been trying to start a new short story, but there's just not enough time right now. Maybe when I'm more confident in my ability to finish this on time.
I want to post up one more video to end on a quite optimistic note - which I saw on the Time website. It won't let me embed, annoyingly, but here it is. It's, among the death and destruction, a quite heartwarming story about a father's trek to find his missing daughter in Sendai.
