I've been busy with a class in caricature and haven't had much time to work on 'Tulk', although I have been slowly working away at designing a little kitty puppet to start with. I found a wonderful book on drawing cats that goes into anatomy and even has muscles and skeletons, a treasure trove of detail!

I also have some ideas swimming around in my head for this new Eye-Fi wireless SD card that enables you to send images to your computer over a local network wireless connection. I want to couple this with framegrabbing concepts, and am working on a plugin for TVPaint (which has a framegrabber for DV and Canon cameras already) that can be used with this Eye-Fi unit.

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Wow, I just picked up a used surface gauge on eBay for less then 6 freaking dollars. It's a 9" gauge, which should hopefully be more than enough. When I was a kid trying to learn stop-motion, surface gauges were way too expensive for me... I had to use a wire stuck in a block of wood, which worked well enough, I suppose, but it wasn't very positional.

Tags: Animation Gear

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I wrote out a treatment for Tulk last night... it was partially inspired by the passing of one our cats this past Wednesday. My wife thought the story was too sad and that I should perhaps offset the sad ending with a tiny spark of hope -- sort of that eucatastrophe thing Tolkien wrote about.

Music-wise, I will probably use bits of Smettana (he wrote several polkas, including one used in the first act of his opera, The Bartered Bride) along with some original music. Music is always, for me, a very important part of filmmaking, and should be a major part of telling the story, and I am sure I will spend as much time working on music as I will on the animation (well, maybe not quite as much...).

BTW, for music, I am using a VST plugin called Miroslav Philharmonik. I use some other things, too, like SampleTank and Overture, and use a DAW called Reaper for mixing, mastering and final rendering.

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As I said before, the basis for my animation short will be inspired by Czech polka music... I may even adapt some of Smettana's music of that genre for this (he was a Czech composer). Oddly enough, the orchestral workstation plugin I use to write and record with is a rich collection of instrument samples recorded in, of call places, the Dvorak Hall in Prague!

The title of the film will be Tulk -- the name of the main character. And if anyone can catch the reference between the music and the title, I will count you mighty among the wise.

Tags: Pre-production Music Title

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OK, so I am working out a storyline as described in an earlier entry using a gypsy-ish character somewhat inspired by Monsieur Fleur from Cirque du Soleil. Here's a picture of Monsieur Fleur:

My character will be a bit darker and not quite as richly dressed, of course. I am going for a Eastern European feel, too... so this is leading me to musical themes, and I will likely do a polka for the main character theme (kind of fits in with the "Czech School" of animation, too).

Now I need to find an accordion player... :-)

Tags: Music Soundtrack Pre-production

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I'm kinda new to stop-motion... but then again I am not. I did stop-motion (with clay) back in the late 70s and early 80s with Super 8 gear. And have recently gotten the bug again and am throwing myself into it full throttle.

Today I got a spool of armature wire and a new camera. What to do with this stuff...?

I have a few ideas rumbling around in my head. One is more of a long-term project, an epic kind of thing (although I doubt the actual thing would be more than 15 minutes). Some other ideas for very short subjects that may be combined with 2D animation (hand-drawn, of course, I'm pretty old school).

I think the very first thing I am going to do is learn how to make the puppets. I have an idea for a clown-ish type character inspired by the character of Monsieur Fleur from Cirque du Soleil's Allegria. I don't have a story in mind, just the character.

Tags: Puppet-making

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