back from the dead....

not really. yes it has been ages since i have posted. no, i have not been a complete and total slacker in that time period, although the "day job" (which is currently a late shift) is certainly giving me less time to focus on animation.

I did several short scenes for an independent, classically animated short film, none of which I can post for confidentiality reasons. I am attempting to do a full 4 minute short as a music video in conjunction with a local band, although after months of getting nowhere with cobbled together software, camera set-ups, etc, I am going to have to start from almost square one now that I have a way to actually test and export my frames. I can't get any less efficient, anyway.

In the meantime, i checked myself into a couple of classes for busy (or in my case, distracted) adults at the Glassell School, which is affiliated with the Houston Museum of fine Arts. Seth Mittag was instructor for both my Flash and stop motion classes, and deserves props for putting with me and my weird ability to cause computer crashes, system errors, and file corruptions without even touching the computer.

Seth Mittag also deserves props for MAD stop-motion animation, and I encourage anyone in the Houston area to see his current installation/ short-film presentation at the Lawndale Art Center.

I'm not really happy with my output for the Flash class, and I will continue struggling with (mortally combating) the program until i have something that's actually portfolio worthy. On the other hand, stop-motion is a blast, and even though we had only a single 3-hour class period to animate in once the hours of character crafting and rigging were complete, i'm pretty happy with how my first attempt turned out. Nearly 9 seconds of animation after just 2.5 hours or work!!!!!  Eventually, I would like to complete this, when next i get a big enough chunk of time off from the day job.