Winding Down Winding Up Ever Winding

In life I tend to think, "When THIS is over, I'll be OK." Well, there's always another "THIS" out there somewhere, and usually overlapping whatever "THIS" I might be in the middle of muddling through. It's not all bad, many of the "THIS"'s are positive.

For example, the winding down of the semester is really going to be the winding up of my coming show. And I'm winding up to the first paying gig I've had in a very long time, the opening of the Summer market. And then after that I have to get Christine on a plane to Abu Dhabi, and I'll have to move into an apartment. Ever winding.

At this point, I quit waiting for "THIS" to be over and try instead to catch my breath and enjoy the process.

Design-wise, this blog has not dealt much with web-design, but it has occasionally dealt with animation issues. Speaking of which, my new video (a revamped version of my "Hanglide" video) is ever so close to being wrapped up.

And the Mara animation is coming along slowly but what I have sampled in After Effects looks promising. I have been trying to include as many of Frank and Ollie's 12 principles of animation as possible:

http://www.frankanollie.com/PhysicalAnimation.html

The little Mara animation loop is looking great but there are some specifics of timing and staging, as well as editing, that need to be addressed. The plan today is for me to sit down and work out some very specific storyboards. I need to have it all laid out. I'm with Tony Samangy (the teacher of my animation course) when it comes to storyboards for things like this. I am discovering how critical it is when the narrative is literal. But, I still have to admit that when it comes to making psychedelic videos (especially for my own pleasure) I prefer to work in a stream of consciousness chaos. Different methods for different results and projects. I can see myself storyboarding out some parts of even the most experimental psychedelic videos, though. Anyhow, the point here is really that with this Mara piece the storyboards will have to be specific almost from frame to frame. Everything will be important, the first hurdle will be staging the foot-twitching and background pan. The next will be timing out the cuts in the fall sequence, as well as working out her rate of speed, the grounds rate of speed, and when it stops moving, how fast she'll need to be going, and how it will all time out to give the sequence credibility.