My favorite!

I would love to make kid's films that are this funny! This is a series of podcasts done in Flash called "Making Fiends". They are all about a sickly sweet little girl named Charlotte who starts at a new school that is being controlled by an evil little girl named Vendetta. She makes "fiends" to control her teacher and other students. But the new girl in school, Charlotte just loves Vendetta and her fiends. And this of course drives Vendetta crazy, so she makes more fiends to dispose of Charlotte. There are about 20 episodes. I would suggest starting with the first one. Go to: http://makingfiends.com/

Here's is one of the last episodes. It's the only one I was able to find that I could embed. The woman who created these recently sold the series to Nickelodeon. The new episodes are supposed to air on Nickelodeon this year, but not sure when.
[Upload your own video]

Meet my dog

Well I finally got his eyes and ears moving independently. That was driving me crazy yesterday!

Zebra chase and another surge

Well we had another huge surge this weekend. Luckily, I unplugged the computers right before the big one hit. It fried the cable box. I have never seen so much smoke come out of plastic. Two TV's down, none left to go.

We hired an electrician to make an emergency house call Saturday. He put some kind of surge protector on the outside of the house so if anything weird starts to happen, the breaker will blow and cut power to the house. He said that somehow a 220 volt current came through the outlet to fry the interior surge protector, TV, cable box, DVD, and VHS. He is still not sure what is causing all this. I think we will have to hire him to do a full day investigation.

In the meantime, we bought some heavy duty battery back-up surge protectors for the computers. They weren't cheap, but hopefully they will do a better job than the surge protectors we had.

Well here's what I managed to get done this weekend. I still need to animate the dog to turn his head toward the caveman.

Learning to manipulate keyframes within keyframes

I have mostly worked on tutorials this week. The minutia involved in animating expressions and mouth positions can be tedious. But they are also extremely finicky. You have to double click holding down shift, touch your nose and count backwards for it to work sometimes. Last night I tried to do a simple test animation of the zebra having a few facial expressions. I couldn't get it to work. So I finally went to bed. I don't know what I did different tonight, but it worked. Here's my zebra walking and moving some facial features.

Mark, the singing caveman

I spent the rest of the day watching more Flash tutorials. Here's my first attempt syncing cartoon mouthes to audio files. Mark makes a great caveman!

Caveman sits on a log and waits

Here's an animation for my elephant scene. Going to take a break then do a "how to animate" faces tutorial. I had to stumble through making this animation. I wanted his mouth to be closed but his eyebrows to move. I think the tutorial will help.

Zebras and thunderstorms

Well, I got a nice break this afternoon. A couple hours of freak thunderstorms allowed me to step away from the computer and do some much needed house work. Mark and I unplugged all electronics just in case. The last thing we needed was another surge.

But I went back to work this evening and managed to animate the ending to my film. I still need to animate the zebra's mouth biting the caveman's hand better. But I am happy that I was able to animate this so quickly. I am definitely becoming more comfortable with flash.

Oh, cool little trick...I bought a bendable wood figure to help me draw and position my caveman. Here's a frame grab and the clip:

Chroma key vs using alpha channels

For all my test animations and test stop motions...I have been using the chroma keyer in Final Cut Pro. I use my video camera to shoot my toys in front of a green screen, then I use software I dial out the green. But, I think I can get a better key if I shoot with my still camera, then delete the green background using photoshop. It's easy to get rid of the green using the magic wand. Then you have an image with a transparent background. The trick is keeping that background transparent once you save it. The only way I knew how to do this was to make animated GIFs. These take a lot of processing power, and I gave up on that a long time ago. But I remembered something about alpha channels that might work. I am going to write it down here so I can come back if I forget. I feel like I re-invent the wheel every couple of years when it comes to some of the obscure tricks in photoshop.

The way you maintain a transparent background in Photoshop using alpha channels:
1. double click on your layer in the layer palette to unlock it
2. click the "channels" tab next to the layer tab
3. click on the "new channel" button at the bottom (this adds the alpha channel)
4. turn the eyeball on all the channel layers
5. do a "save as" and make sure the "alpha channels" button is checked
6. import into Final Cut Pro

It seems like there should be a more intuitive way to do this. I would love to hear if anyone has a simpler method.

Here's a frame grab of my alpha channel test. There is still a lot of green around the pigs, but I did not light this correctly. Once I shoot everything in the studio, there shouldn't be any green outline.

I also taught myself how to export flash movies with transparent backgrounds. To do this using Flash:
1. Have an animation ready and select "export" then "export movie"
2. Choose the save as a QuickTime format
3. Click Save
4. make sure the "Ignore stage color (generate alpha channel)" is checked
5. Click export
6. Import file into Final Cut Pro

Here's a test of this technique:

Rough Cut Feedback

Yeah! One of my instructors really likes my rough cut. (I haven't heard back from the other three). The one I heard from said I was on the right path and only needed to finesse the script and do the real animations. That's the best news I have heard in a long time. He even mentioned he would like to use my film on TerraPod and that I could be paid.

If two of the three other faculty like my film well enough to join my committee, I am on my way to finishing up my masters. Fingers crossed!

kitchen scene

I bought another character pack from cartoonsolutions. It's for my final scene where I talk about how someone forgot to include the sugar when the zebra was made. I did actually do the drawings for the salt, sugar, and bowl. The bowl and sugar need work. But I am happy with the salt. Eventually I will animate the mom putting salt into the bowl instead of sugar.

Vacation Surge

Well, here I am...in my own bed, with my cat curled in my arm. It's nice to be home. Had a great vacation seeing my folks and friends. I showed my rough cut to everybody. It definitely needs a lot of script work. Everyone liked the ideas and animation. But I need to work on the structure so the 7 domesticity traits are clearer. Hopefully that will give the end more oomph. I sent 4 copies to professors in Montana. We'll see if I hear anything back. I may have to fly up there to remind people I am still alive.

During our 12-day, Oklahoma extravaganza, we went to Tahlequah to float the river, went to Grand Lake to go houseboating, fishing, and seadooing, went to Tulsa to take the godkids swimming, bowling, and to the drive-in, and then we went to Lake Tenkiller, El Reno, and the OKC Zoo/Omniplex. We were never bored. It was nice to get to spend a few days with everyone this time. I especially had fun shooting pictures with both my photographer parents. I even had time to teach my step-mom the joys of uploading and emailing photos.




On the plane ride home, I read an inspiring book called "Rebel Without a Crew" about a student filmmaker that made a feature film by himself over a summer and only spent $7000. Then he turned around a sold it for gobs of money and became a big player Hollywood. Not exactly what I want to do, but I am making a low/no budget kid's film, and I know that if I can only coax this film out of my head the way I am envisioning it, it could take the festivals and kids by storm.

With the inspiration from the book, I had hoped to come home and delve immediately back into the film. But it turns out Mark and I didn't have a very fun home-coming. Half the power was out when we got home. We had to trash all the food in the fridge. It reminded me of the many times the power went out when I lived in an old garage apartment. I can't count the times the food went bad and had to throw everything out.

Anyway, back to today...it also turns out several of our new "smart" strip surge protectors blew. And now our TV is fried. I am bummed. We bought it for my last birthday. Now we are back to squinting at my old TV. But at least we had the sense to unplug my G5. I don't think I could handle loosing my thesis film files again.

Hopefully I can get back on track once I get an electrician in tomorrow. Until then, I am afraid to plug the G5 in.

Finished the rough cut!

I just finished making a bunch of DVDs to send to my professors in Montana. Feels good to have that off my back. Now I can head home for my vacation without that worry. We'll see if we can cope with an Oklahoma summer.

Here's a screen grab of the DVD menu. I did two compressions exactly the same way. For some reason the nested version that had the timecode generator filter... did wacky/terrible things to the resolution. Anyone know why? I didn't have time to figure out why, so I came up with a work around. I am giving my professors two versions. One at good quality for their viewing enjoyment, and one with burned in timecode that looks like I filmed everything with a single-chip camera. My professors only need the timecode to tell me at what time in the show they have suggestions, revisions, and unsolicited praise (I hope).

Bonafied rough cut intro

Here's the official rough cut intro. Very exciting! As of the end of day tomorrow, I will be sending the whole 8 and half minute rough cut to my advisors in Montana.

Please keep in mind all the music, narration, animation, green screening, and rotoscoping are place holders. I will be re-doing everything with a fine tooth comb once I have the some feedback from those that be in Montana.

Yeah! PS. Sorry for the ugly text over the top, but I wanted to put a © statement.