Tonight was definitely not my night for animating but I got there in the end...after about 5 hours of animating.
The program I'm using has been really temperamental. It was absolutely fine the last time I used it but tonight it decided to hate me by just quitting unexpectedly all the time...like every few minutes. At first it was great...I spent about 20minutes doing a second of animation and forgot to save it and it decided to play the quitting game...maybe it just hated what I was doing and was trying to tell me to start again and do a better job...I don't know...but I surely didn't appreciate it because it meant that I had to clear my chopping board of coffee grains and start again.
And so I slugged along for the first hour or so just to get something done and then decided to turn the computer off and give it a rest and it worked...but I still saved after about every frame after that, just in case! That's the hard thing about stop-mo animating...if something happens like you lose the last 10 frames you did...you're stuffed because it's really hard to just go back and do it again. Maybe with cut-outs it'd be a bit easier but with something like coffee grains it's really hard to get it looking exactly the same.
Soooo...I've done 43 seconds tonight so that's about 1 minute and 9 seconds done and 1 minute and 21 seconds to go. My song has 3 verses and 3 choruses...so I've done 2 verses so far...one more to go...and then the choruses. For the chorus of the songs I'm being more abstract and experimental so I think it'll be a bit faster to animate. I'll be painting with the coffee...just randomly so that the audience can make their own visions from the strokes and textures painted. I hope it looks good. Luckily I'm really ahead so if it doesn't work out I can think of something else to do.
Tonight with the second verse everything went pretty much according to plan apart from the third part of the verse (and the program being temperamental). I wanted leaves to weave in and out of squiggles of coffee...but it proved to be a lot harder than I thought! I'm sure that if I had hours and hours of spare time I could achieve it but it was just too hard to do for 340 frames! So I changed the end and decided to grow a tree instead using basil leaves from my garden. It looks pretty cool and I think it matches the lyrics of the song much better.
All in all I'm relieved to have done another part of my animation. It's pretty daunting because I have to do my animation in chunks. I can't just leave it because the coffee dries on the wooden board...but at least it means that I put aside time and just focus on my animation for a few hours at a time instead of doing little bits which might get me lost and I might not be as into it if I just do little bits. It's amazing because you just zone out doing this and don't realise how tired you are and how late it is till you're finished a few hours later! Luckily I had blueberry muffins to get me through tonight. =P
And let's just hope that I don't spend the next 8 hours dreaming about stop-mo animating like the last time I did stop-mo before bed. Haha.
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