Across the Universe...

... is beautiful. I get so consumed in trying to make something look real or plausible it's so amazing to see something that just blatantly exploits the beauty of a scene.

Wahoo! I'm officially an artist in distribution...

I headed down there last week, transferred Judder to BetaSP, and filled out the forms. Hopefully it'll get a screening this way! I have a screening in October which I'm excited about - it'll be in the city at Cinematheque - not sure about the details of it all yet, but it'll be my first non-student show which I'm very psyched about.

Progress has come to a near standstill on the new project lately as I've been sick for the last week, but hopefully everything will get going again now. Sadly it's also job-hunting time - I've been unemployed since January when I had to quit due to getting full-time hours (impossible during thesis) and had the luxury of taking the summer off as well... now it's the fun of dressing up and trying to find a job I can tolerate - eeks. I think I've gotten to spoilt just hanging out at home working on animations and playing with the pup, the 'real world' is going to be a shock. Tomorrow I go and track down some more interviewee clothes.

Manfrotto and Monsters

I'd been searching for the Manfrotto (410 jr geared) tripod head for awhile now, but Amazon was the leading seller and they only shipped it to the U.S. But, last week I found one used for sale on Kijiji (a great site!) only it was Montreal's page - so it took some googling and tracked down the seller (a Montreal used camera equipment store owner) and was able to have them ship it here - arrived this weekend and is perfect! Great condition and saved quite a bit on it, I can't wait to try it out!

I'd been hoping to finish the audio challenge at SMA, but aside from being past the due date, I'm caught up in making props for my next film and can't find the time to complete it - but as Ceri's amazing puppets were involved I thought I'd post part of it here. The idea was to have a stop-motion kid loitering in front of a 7-11 type building, the background being rear-projection. As he's standing around listening to Bret's music the background starts to flicker and changes to a scene of Ceri's monsters, all unbeknowst to him. By the time he turns around to have a look it's flickered back to a nice brick wall. Hopefully eventually I'll be able to complete a rear-projection piece - for now, here's the background animation - thanks again Ceri for the actors!

Clear Resin Casting

I need some clear resin objects for my new animation, so I did my first experiments with resin today - wow does it stink! I'm going to be working in tiny portions for each cast and the bottle measures in ounces, so I borrowed a scale and did some translations - 1 ounce of resin equals 41ml (based on an eyedropper) so, for the casts I'll be doing, 2 1/2 ml will use 1 drop of catalyst.

Since I had to mix a full ounce today for converting the weight to ml I did a test pour in a discarded mold I'd made - the final object will be made out of a better mold of the same object, but with a little twist - hopefully pull off an idea I had in sculpture class a few years ago. I've completed a 2 part latex mold today (using mold-builder, much better than the rubber latex I've been working with until now!) and need to build an exterior 4 piece plaster mold before I can start casting.

New Books!

Yay! Stop-motion birthday's are the best - I now have Susannah Shaw's 'Stop Motion: Craft Skills for Model Animation', Barry Purves' 'Passion, Process and Performance', and 'Filming the Fantastic: A Guide to Visual Effects Cinematography' to keep me entertained! Great timing, I've got a few new big projects I really need to get going.

(Also now have 'Alien Apocalypse' too, but looks like I'll have to ebay 'Beyond Re-Animator')

Judder on YouTube

I finally put Judder up on youtube... sort of. I'm still hoping to get into a few festivals, which rules out putting it up easily, but if you want to see it just add me as a friend or contact and I'll add to the private viewing list - my ID on there is emmyymme82 (I'm soo original with those huh...) A bit of a hassle but the bouncy balls are much better in this one, I promise! There's even added motion blur at Prosser's suggestion.

Clash of the Titans Remake

Stop motion has evolved in the last 30 years, and is being compared critically to state of the art CG - this is a campaign to acknowledge new stop motion and make it a part of the movies today.
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=vPe-M6E8nbk