I finished coloring, cutting out, and compiling my first group of clips into photoshop files tonight. Tomorrow I will start my first bulk group of animated clips. This ending sequence is the most complicated by far I have ever attempted, and is the most complicated of the film. A close second would be the next sequence I am doing, which is a fight in a grocery store. The one I am doing now is a war scene. They are so complicated because there is a great deal of fast moving clips in quick succession in them. What makes the war scene so complicated is that the backgrounds are film clips rather than still backgrounds. This creates an additional layer of confusion when animating as I also have to edit those clips to fit into each of the animated clips individually. After the war and fight sequences are done most of the rest should fall together (relatively) quickly. A couple of the others that may take longer are because I still need to do some inking/ pen work on them. This work is not as hard, but is time consuming. I am still aiming for December as a completion date on all animation and editing. Scoring the film, and sound effects may still take more time. The wonderful Andrea Anderson agreed to do the scoring, and I am very grateful for that. I worked with her in the past both on the Porkchops film and on a few of my smaller projects that fell apart for one reason or another. I really appreciate her support for my work and look forward to working with her on this project. I’m working out what my project work schedule will be once I start back to teaching in a couple of weeks. I should be able to average 1.5 hours per night, which is a little less than now but works out well. As it stands I now work about 2 hours a night broken into 1 hour segments, with a break in between. Animation work is hard on the brain, and the breaks are necessary for my sanity. I’ll do the same once work starts again, with 45 minute work sessions with a 20 minute break between. My goal is to be in bed no later than 1AM on work nights, but I’ll be aiming for 12 midnight. 1AM would allow me at least 6 hours of sleep a night, which is better than I am use to getting in a normal work schedule. Again, there is always time because of something is important to you then you make time. I may try to work a few hours over the weekends as well, but I’m not attempting that right out of the gate. Overall, things are going well with the project. Slower than I would like, but if that is my biggest problem then I guess I am doing pretty well.
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I remember the first time I interacted with a digital camera. I was in the eighth grade and a friend of mine had taken it with him on our eighth-grade trip to Washington DC. It was one of the old models from the late 90s. It only held about a dozen or so pictures and they were very low-quality. On the same trip I had taken several disposable cameras, as those with the standard cameras that my family would use on trips. The digital camera made no sense to me. Then again I had not interacted with computers much outside of school. It wouldn’t be until the following year that my house would get its first computer, a Compaq Presario, which looking back on it was not the best computer. Up until a few years later when I would take a photography class in high school this would be the only interaction I would have with the digital camera. The high school had one digital camera for the department and it too was an incredibly old digital camera. I remember you could only take about six or eight photos on it at a time in the resolution was awful. It also was about the size of a brick. For these reasons I came to the conclusion that digital cameras would always be this way. I did nothing but film photography until I got to college. The first time I got a 35mm camera was for that high school photography class. It was a point-and-shoot. That was the first camera I had ever owned that was more than a couple of dollars. The first thing that I did was buy a few rolls of black and white film that could be processed in color processing and went out and took some pictures. Years later, my teacher in that class would comment that it was very unusual for a student to look for black-and-white film to use a new camera like that. Even when I first used a digital SLR in college I was very uncomfortable using it. You have to remember it was 2005 and any camera that could take high resolution photos at that time was priced in the thousands of dollars. One of the assignments required us to sign out a camera of that value to take home to take “professional” quality photos with. I went and checked out the camera which I was warned when I checked it out cost about $12,000, and was made to feel like uncultured white trash for not knowing anything about it including it’s value. As a result I was so scared to use it that I never removed from the case and instead took pictures of the moon and of trees blowing in the wind at night using double exposure and long exposures. I did this with one of my viewfinder cameras instead of using the SLR. When it came time to turn in that assignment, I lied and said I used the SLR as required. I was told my pictures look very good when mounted and I made an “A” on the assignment. When I bought my first digital camera it was again a cheaper point and shoot camera. I remember really enjoying the fact that I could take lots and lots of pictures and not having to pay for developing. I really just like taking pictures of seemingly ordinary things. I don’t really know why. I wish I had some sort of creative or artsy reason to make myself seem more thoughtful for it but I don’t. Shortly after I bought this camera I realized I could apply this sort of technology to my animation. I had been using a WebCam on my homemade rostrum to shoot animation with since I started doing animation in 2003. The thing that I didn’t like about taking lots of pictures is that people expect you to take lots of pictures. This is one of the things that moved me out of photography. Firstly, I was never very good at it. Just because you like something doesn’t mean you’re good at it. Secondly, it became an expectation that anytime I would be at an event or out with friends or family that I would have a camera to take pictures with, and I would be told 20 times to go take pictures of stuff. This is one of the reasons that I hesitated so long in owning a cell phone, is that hinders your ability to genuinely experience things. As Time got on I still used a dSLR to do some projects with, particularly in photographing backgrounds for animation and for documenting artwork. I always found the SLR to be a little too bulky to take places. Now I use my cell phone for much of that like the rest of the population but given I’ve only owned it since February of this year I’m still getting used to it.
I had a college professor once say that animation is the most counterproductive thing you can do with your life. If you think about it, this is certainly true. An animator will spend countless hours drawing, pencil testing, penning, inking, and animating a scene that may only be a few seconds long. I am certainly feeling this with the battle sequence that I spent seven months drawing and am just now getting to scan it into the computer to animate. I have spent the past couple of weeks working out a procedure in the evenings that works for me to compile my animation into completed clips. I think I have finally gotten comfortable with the process and found my stride. My original goal of having the entire film compiled by the end of the summer was unrealistic. Given this battle segment is the most complicated part of the entire film in terms of animation and volume of cut sequences, I have decided to do this first to make it my goal to complete this by the end of the summer. I feel like if I can meet that goal that it would not be unreasonable to say I should have the entire film compiled by Christmas. There are a few steps in my process that I am skipping and the compiling stage for the fight sequence for the purpose of saving time. I want to make sure and take my time and do the film correctly, but it is also very important for me to finish it in a realistic timeframe. I feel like I am already exceeding that, but all the pressure to complete this film quickly are all manufactured by my subconscious. There are no people pushing me, and I have no financial backers to please. I guess it is just another example of all of those imaginary people that we spend our lives trying to please. The segments should start to go together more quickly from this point out, and even more so once I have figured out how I am going to replace my scanner. I will update in a week or so to see if progress has improved.
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Jacob FertigArtist, Educator, Activist, Micronationalist, et al. Archives
November 2019
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