Yes But What Is It

2012-01-18T18:31:00.000-08:00

Moon Diary Released Online!

2011-08-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

So uhh... sorry about the year long lack of updates. Haha, I was busy? I guess?

Anyway, here's an update for the 4 or 5 of you that look at this thing occasionally, one which you probably heard about elsewhere already but...

Moon Diary is online!

Here is a list of places where it can be viewed so far...

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/576141
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm7O797P0uo
http://vimeo.com/27259802

As more places become available, I will post them here. Give them all a view and a "like" or whatever other garbage each website is using! Thanks!

Moon Diary Complete!

2010-05-26T17:59:00.001-07:00

Moon Diary is finished! DVD's in production, film festivals are being researched, steps are being made for public viewing. It's been a long journey! I wish I had something to post here rather than just text, I probably will soon, but I don't have anything I can really publicly release yet. WELL, actually, I guess I can post the image for the DVD case...

So much for a 7 minute film that would take 3 months! Final stats: 29:50 minutes, 22 months, 25,500 frames, 4 studio locations, 7 houses lived in, 3 girlfriends, 3 money paying jobs, 2 breakdowns, roughly $14,000 between living and production costs, and one more finished product on my kill list. It's been great! Let's see where it goes from here.

Aww jeeze

2009-10-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

Finally finished Day 6.

Just day 7 left.

And the extended remake of day 2.

And the music.

And the sound.

And the technical conversions for playing on DVD.

And the publicity train.

And film festival research.

And hundreds of dollars.

And TEHN I"LL FINALLY BE DONE.

Pterodactyl Fight

2009-09-25T22:54:00.000-07:00

Hypercubed

2009-09-07T22:01:00.000-07:00

If you're interested, there's also a vimeo version here.

IMDB

2009-09-02T11:12:00.000-07:00

Well, I managed to find myself registered in the Internet Movie Database for a side project I was helping with. I composed the accordion tracks for the film Alo! 86th Street, and helped a bit with general and animation advice. I don't think the film is public on the internet yet, and I don't know if it ever will be actually, but there's a slight chance you might be able to see it in a film festival near you, so check it out if you can. If it ever comes to fruition on the internet, I'll make you, my loyal reader, first to know.

Fire Operation Demo

2009-08-31T09:26:00.000-07:00

Been a while since my last post. Moon Diary has been on sabbatical for the last couple weeks as I've been learning how to use Blender so that I can make these educational videos for my job. It's got a near 90 degree learning curve, but once you memorize the capacities for the program it's pretty simple to put something together. I made this video in a little under two weeks, and in this format it wouldn't be too hard to extend it to an hour as proposed (I hope.)

I've also made another short film for submitting to the Olympia Film Festival. I'll put that up sometime this week, and it'll go on the main site, so official vid. It feels really great to get something finished. The current plan for Moon Diary is to record vocals for day 6 sometime this week, and once I have those full production will be back in effect.

NAESA Action Stills

2009-07-20T12:09:00.000-07:00

Here's a few action stills I made for a NAESA brochure. Hwat a happy little elevator man.

The First Sign

2009-07-19T14:03:00.001-07:00

The results are in!

2009-07-08T20:18:00.000-07:00

After being shown at conference in Canada, NAESA board members had this to say about the company profile I made for them:

This is a really nice deal. Very nice job.

-Jonathan Brooks

I LIKE IT !!!

I think Curtis did a good job with this infomercial.

-Bill Snyder

This is a great infomercial. Do we have it on DVD to share at our next Central Region Workshop?

-James Borwey

Well... I'm impressed!!! I think this is the start of something big.

My compliments to Curtis.

-Jim Runyan

Excellent presentation

-Larry Watson

Good Job

I like it

-Jim Brune

That is a very good infomercial and you and the staff should be commended.

-Douglas S. Warne

So there! It's a hit among the elevator industry!

Close to Starting Day 6

2009-07-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong, when I started Moon Diary, I intended it to be epic, but it keeps increasing in intensity at an accelerating acceleration. Just spent the last month brainstorming the script for day 6, which included reading half of Godel, Escher, Bach, to increase my understanding of what it means to mean something. The team held weekly brainstorming sessions where we would mix the ideas we had come up with since last week. I specifically spent hours researching paradoxes, both visual and literal, and despite everything we're not even really done yet. We've only nailed down the structure, not the details. I guess we'll try to work that out in story boarding to try and streamline a bit.

The one year anniversary of starting this project is vaguely around this month. Originally I intended it to be a short project that would only take a couple months. Woo yeah! All my efforts to reduce my workload just encourage me to get obsessive about other aspects! Moon Diary might not be done this Summer as the trailer suggests. How embarrassing.

NAESA International Company Profile

2009-06-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

Just finished the NAESA International company profile earlier today, just uploaded it to YouTube 10 minutes ago. Been working on this thing rather than Moon Diary for a while now, but I just got ahold of "Godel, Escher, Bach" and as soon as I've started making some good progress on that I'll be starting the storyboards for days 6 and 7, meaning the beginning of the end.

Any way, enjoy this informative diversion!

2009-05-28T16:06:00.000-07:00

Can you believe I'm being paid to make stuff like this?

1.6 Terabyte CDs

2009-05-20T13:49:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8060082.stm

Huh. It's seeming clearer and clearer to me that the benefit of Flash, that being small file size, is becoming a rapidly diminishing concern. In fact, I don't think any one really cares at all any more. A terabyte?? I wouldn't know what to do with that if I tried. I might as well switch to another program soon since they are generally better in every other way. As far as I understand it.

Cinco De Mayo Update

2009-05-05T21:56:00.000-07:00

Day 4 is DONE, as of several weeks ago, which means there's only day 6 and 7 left. I estimate day 6 to be two minutes long and day 7 to be three to four. Moon Diary is currently 12 minutes long, and once you add titles and chapter transitions that means this thing is going to be just under 20 minutes when it's done. It's already the longest thing I've ever made.

I got commissioned to do an infomercial type animation for naesai.org. That means that, for now any way, I am a PROFESSIONAL animator, in the literal sense. There is absolutely no mistaking it for a hobby any more, I'm being reimbursed for work with money. Since I've decided to post fewer screenshots from Moon Diary I might be focusing more on this paid animation on the blog for a while.

Here's the character design for the narrator.

Wolves

2009-04-19T20:12:00.001-07:00

Moon Diary has been progressing well the last couple of weeks. We got a sound guy who has been working on foley art, and we had a company picnic at wolf haven where we all got to observe real wolves in action. They didn't move too much while we were there, no surprise, but I feel like the experience has lead to a sense of authenticity in the wolf movement none the less, they have been turning out really well. Chris Duncan, our sound guy, tried to get some wolf howling while we were there but all we got was a bunch of ravens screeching, and the tour lady talking.

Like I said, work has been progressing nicely. If all goes well, Day 4 might be done by the end of this week.

Charlie's Back

2009-03-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

Charlie Daugherty has already been a major part of Moon Diary by drawing the teeth and candy in day 2, animating the ridiculous rotting ooze of the same day, drawing multiple backgrounds throughout, and being another animator for consultation in general. He's been busy being the TA for an animation class, and thus virtually animating every student's project for them. There's been a change of schedule though, and now he's back! He's starting off with some touch up work on previous animation, but is going to be animating wolves with me and soon as he's caught up to speed.

Also, I managed to get 3 day weekends for my work. Moon Diary has never had such facility for actualization! Prepare to be amazed as we animate multiple seconds in less than a week!

Sita Sings the Blues

2009-03-18T21:46:00.000-07:00

Nina Paley recently decided to release her full feature length flash animation, which she made by herself, for free on the internet. Not just to watch, but also to appropriate, without paying fees or even asking permission.

Check it all out. It's real good.

Her work has been somewhat of an inspiration for the aesthetic of Moon Diary. She manages to create very powerful ideas using very simple animation, not trying to hide from the "flash" look and instead embracing it as a medium. I feel like I'm not as good at it, I've started dabbling more and more into realism as I learn how to, but I'm going to try and get out of that as soon as this city scene is done. I realized I've been working on this 3 minutes of animation for nearly 4 months now, and I've got to speed it up a bit. Granted, I've had a part time job most of that time, and it's been cold all the time because my roommates don't turn on the heat, but I got the first two minutes done in about 3 weeks and I've got to get back to a pace closer to that.

It's not impossible, someone out there is doing it.

Super Speed

2009-03-14T14:17:00.000-07:00

I recorded myself drawing in the latest background over the course of 3 and a half hours, and then sped it up about a hundred times to see it all happen at once. I only recorded the drawing part, I didn't bother with the animating part since that would have been extremely repetitive and plus I wouldn't have had something big to end on. I probably spent another 3 or 4 hours animating and tweaking to get the final 5 seconds of animation. I didn't realize all that much about my process, except that I spend a lot of time tweaking and that windows take forever.

2009-03-07T18:09:00.000-08:00

I just decided it would be a good idea to flood the entire city, so I spent two hours going back and adding as much as 20 feet of water at the base of the buildings. It's okay though, because everyone is flying any way...

Moon Diary Trailer

2009-02-22T22:16:00.000-08:00

The Moon Diary trailer is FINALLY up. As you may remember, YouTube found out my video had a copyrighted song and disabled the audio. The song was originally Sleep, by Azure Ray. For those that are interested, I implore you to look up the original and then listen to the song that I created for the trailer. Mine isn't quite as savory, but I feel I did a good job of making a song that fills the same aural niche without actually copying.

Let's get this hype machine rolling! Show your friends the trailer, or whatever it is that you do that makes me famous! Please?

Presidents Day

2009-02-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

It's presidents day! No Work today! Everyone say "Screw you, Gravity!" and fly into space! No one can stop you from doing it!

2009-02-12T20:07:00.000-08:00

What a cutie!

In other news, I got another eyelash stuck in my upper punctum (although it was the other eye, wtf,) I just invested several hundred dollars in gold in case the economy collapses, and my supply of 36 cans of mountain dew is just about run out, so I'll need to go get more. These scenes with people take forever, since they have to be drawn and organized before they can be animated and plus there's so many of them. But I'm putting in some good long hours when I'm working, at least.

Money Pump

2009-02-07T18:42:00.000-08:00

We could really use one of these for the office.

Moon Diary Trailer Hits the Fan

2009-02-04T15:23:00.000-08:00

We made a new trailer for Moon Diary and it's really great, but we took a short cut and just used an Azure Ray song for the music. YouTube then deleted the audio, and, as you may know, audio is like 80% of what makes a trailer good. I need to read up on the law, I think that if we play a cover of the song then it's alright. If it's not then we'll probably make a song from scratch, but for now the trailer is delayed due to copyright infringement. Jeeze!

However, there is a new section to the site, the "Soon" page which shows the next upcoming project, in this case Moon Diary. It will be the future home of the trailer, as well as screen shots and a general progress report of how Moon Diary is going. There's a few new screenshots from finished parts of the animation.

You can visit the Soon page at http://www.yesbutwhatisit.com/moondiary/

Saving up for film festivals

2009-01-21T17:50:00.001-08:00

Today for lunch I ate a can of sliced clams.

2009-01-20T18:06:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago a loose eye lash fell into my eye. That's annoying. But you know the drill, right? You rub at it a little bit, and then if that doesn't work, you blink a lot. Blinking wasn't doing it either though. I thought for a while I was making some progress by rolling my eyes clockwise, but it always seemed to end up back in the same place. This continues to annoy me for almost two days before I try to just wash it out with water, by the then the corner of my eye is deep blood red. That doesn't work either, but I look in the mirror, and I realize that the lash somehow got lodged in my upper tear duct! It was literally lodged in my eyelid! My upper punctum, actually, as the image shows. I managed to finally get it out with some tweezers, a friend, and a great deal of concentration. It really sucked though!

2009-01-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

Our animation studio has three employees. There's me, there's Erin Tanner over at http://www.erintanner.blogspot.com, and then there's our most important member, Bay Bay the cat. Usually she's in on time and never complains.. But see, Erin Tanner took her outside for the first time a couple weeks ago, and she was for the first time able to look up into the vast and infinite sky. Can you imagine looking into that bleak void for the first time? Bay Bay's productivity has dropped sharply, but we'll try not to let that delay Moon Diary too much.

The image above was posted on Erin Tanner's blog. I thought it looked really cool as a screen shot, so I decided to post it too.

2009-01-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

Frame by frame gets pretty tricky. I recently got a part time job (Working for an Elevator Inspection Certification Company, yeah!) so the 8 hour animation days have been more like 2 or 3. I spent the last week or so working on this water effect pictured above. The image shows the outline of every shape in the water sequence, about 200 in all. It's a 5 second sequence in the animation, but at least it looks awesome!

10:39 am

2008-12-28T10:39:00.001-08:00

Sometimes I forget how crazy flash looks from a distance. Do I really know how all those buttons and knobs work? Seriously? Have I been wasting my life?

Teusday

2008-12-16T15:12:00.000-08:00

Things are going pretty slow on Moon Diary. The shots we are currently on are extremely complex, and difficult to figure out. Over a minute has been animated on day 4, and it is no more than one third of the way done. There has been some talk about cutting planned content for day 4 to get it done faster, but since this is a labor of love we decided to just keep plodding away at it. Hopefully by next week we can get a screen shot up of a new setting in day 4, we've been stuck in that dirty dusky ocean for weeks now.

One small update is I designed a website for http://www.thezestylibrarian.com. It's really simple, and only took about 4 hours to get this far once I had started. It was nice to really feel productive again, it's been a while.

Unrelated

2008-11-26T12:23:00.000-08:00

So yesterday my friends and I got into a minor discussion about animals and how all they are are nutrient processing intestinal tracks on wheels - brains are nice but not mandatory. One of them qualified this statement by saying that animals all at least have a central nervous system, and I was all like "Nuh-uh-uh, not bacteria." Then everyone said that bacteria were not animals, but I condescendingly disagreed over and over again. Of course, it turns out bacteria are as far away from animals as you can get, much further than plants, and even more distantly related than archaea, which share some metabolic processes with eukaryotes (multicellular organisms.)

Bacteria are freaking crazy! Look at this chart showing the structure of bacteria's protein enclosed organelles. It zooms in on the structure from left to right. On the left we have a bacteria with organelles visible within it. By the time we get to the right you can see actual atoms in one huge molecule. Bacteria aren't that far removed from atoms just floating around, relatively! It's close enough that you can almost visualize a group of atoms just following out their chemically reactive duty, and that's life! That large collection of interacting atoms is alive!

You know the flagella that some bacteria have? Bacteria don't have cells, and therefore don't have traditional muscles. How does a flagella work? "Flagella are driven by the energy released by the transfer of ions down an electrochemical gradient across the cell membrane" So basically the flagella is just an inert piece of filament, which flails in response to a bacteria based motor. It's similar to a muscle, just it's made directly out of molecules rather than cells.

To change gears slightly, now check out myxobacteria. When these bacteria find themselves in an environment where nutrients are scarce (and at this level, nutrients are just molecules (which are just atoms (which are not alive)) that the bacteria collects to make more bacteria) these myxobacteria send signals to neighboring bacteria and join together. They organize themselves by releasing chemicals and different bacteria take on different tasks to form a fruiting body. This fruiting body creates spores that remain dormant until nutrients return to that environment, and they hatch at the same time, ensuring that the bacteria always have a group available. That's a primitive multicellular organism! That's what we humans are! Albeit not primitive.

That's all pretty exhausting to think about, isn't it? Do you know why it's exhausting? Whenever you learn, you are physically changing the structure of your brain. You have to spend a bunch of chemical energy to go in there and reconnect synapses. I had to go in and modify a bunch of misconceptions I had gathered somewhere that bacteria are simple animals (well, they are, but not semantically.) The brain I had this morning is a different shape than the one I have now, after noticing some parts of the brain which were not reflecting reality and concentrating some energy to go in and adjust it.

Isn't that CRAZY?

Olympia Film Festival

2008-11-16T20:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the date of my showing of Trans Fat at the 25th Annual Olympia Film Festival. I was personally disappointed, the video quality of it was very poor. It was too bright, too few colors, bleeding of colors into each other (making trans fat the character unrecognizable,) visible video compression in some areas, and then there was the issue of frame skipping during the CPU intensive scenes. I need to spend more hours in the future figuring out how to make my flash videos into not-horrible movie files.

Despite that, I think I got the most decibels of laughter with the punch line, and despite the haze of low quality I think it was possible to tell that it was supposed to look really good, which in some ways is almost as good.

I got a certificate of appreciation from the Olympia Film Society. I'm hanging it up in the studio (bedroom.)

2008-11-07T00:13:00.000-08:00

Today starts the 25th annual Olympia Film Festival, which will be featuring my film Trans Fat on the 11th! Since I'm a film maker, I get a full pass and can participate in every film festival activity for free! This more than a $75 value! On the back of my pass it says my name followed by the word "film maker." How prestigious! Any one in the Olympia area should be sure to check me out on the 11th, I'll be there after the shows for a QnA session, where I'll have a chance to plug my next animation, Moon Diary, and my website, yesbutwhatisit.com. Good luck, me!

Keep it simple stupid

2008-11-05T14:24:00.000-08:00

Well, two full days of work has amounted to this nice shot. I mean, it's great, but if I spend this much time on every shot I'll never get done. This is just the opening! Today is not over yet, so hopefully I can draw a whale or two, and maybe add some sailors.

Back to work

2008-11-03T15:31:00.001-08:00

Day 4 is in the works. In the studio we've decided to make this day one of the longest in the series, adding two large scene changes and story developments that have doubled what this day would originally have been. Shown here are some of the preliminary schematics, original comics, studies, and note cards made out of napkins from the local chinese buffet. Since this picture we've started making even more, and the day still seems vague. Hopefully its not going to get out of control.

Moon Diary day 5

2008-10-25T12:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a preview frame from the upcoming animation Moon Diary. We just finished this scene, and I really liked the way this bush turned out. The leaves move in response to the rabbit hopping between them. I wish I wouldn't keep topping myself and forcing myself to make the whole animation more complicated, but look at that bush! How could I not?

Friday Night

2008-10-24T21:43:00.000-07:00

It's party time this Friday night. I finally figured out how to use PHP! You have to end the file with a ".php" extension rather than a ".html" extension. I had been doing everything else right all along. I knew it would be something simple yet totally obscure. In addition to that, I just got a new website, three new email accounts, and as of right now, a new blogger account . Things sure are changing for the better! What more could I possibly want?

Friends?

Bah!