Lintlandia

So the construction process is taking a wee bit longer than I had expected. Surprise! So I'm going to give myself another week before filming to finish that up and then do a few tests. One to determine how the pacing of the camera move. Another to determine the pacing of the lint floor coverage, and then a final one to determine the movement the lint spores. And then I'll x-sheet dat stoof.
Here is the lint ground-cover

And then the sproutlings of lint

Shot from last week

Here is the shot that I wasn't able to bring into class last week. I've been noticing a weird phenomenon where my scene are being sped up. I shot 167 frames for this shot, which at 24 fps should be just about 7 seconds, plus the 2 second hold at the beginning of the shot should be 9 seconds total. So why is it only 7 seconds. My export info says that it's at 24 fps, and when I set up the premier file, it was at 24 fps. WHAT"S GOING ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lintsprout from Caitlin Craggs on Vimeo.

Updated Animatic as of New Year

Here it is buoys and gulls!

Untitled from Caitlin Craggs on Vimeo.
Note, as discussed in my last post, the CU of the lint attacking the face is not really doing it for me. Also, during final critique I was giving some great advice about pacing the sequence. More time while the woman is stooped over, building tension. And then lots of cuts while the lint attacks. I can do so much more with this.

But for now I must turn my efforts to the final shot of the lint world. I spent a few hours on the phone with Canon support trying to figure out why I couldn't remote capture animation form my camera for more that a minute without it freezing up. We finally decided that the recent update to my operating system probably was creating bugs in the image capture software. Blerg. Gosh apple, why do you always have to show off! We get it already! Anyway, the short of the long story is that I can still use my good old Tiger laptop to capture images. So i'm signing off to do just that! hot dog.

Schmappy New Year

It's that time of the year when we get real serious about things. Things like finishing our senior thesis. Tra la la! And with that come resolutions. I want to begin with a promise to post more. I have been attempting to write this post for the last week, but keep getting way-layed because Vimeo refuses to upload my current animatic. Hold tight. I'll get it up there somehow and it is very pertinent to my post today.

So...
I began sorting out my lint into matching shades and tones.

I'm currently researching ways to dye the material. And i've hit a bit of a road block. In the dying process, it seems that the texture of the lint is completely compromised. Lint that was tricky to animate before dying has now turned in to a disgusting, immobile blob.

Cool looking, but not suitable for animating.


So, as i can see it, I have 2 options:
1) skip the dying process and simply use the lint in the color it is right now. as you can see in the first photo, i have a pretty decent range of colors, though not outstandingly bright, they would still be relatively captivating.
2) have some of the lint spores be dyed and some not. have the ones that are NOT dyed grow and then pull out to a full shot of all the lint spores after growth has occurred.

I'm leaning towards the first option, scrap all the dying. However, this brings me to my next point issue. How to animate the lint growth: straight ahead or in reverse. I wish I had that video uploaded because it shows the problems of animating with lint. In the attack scene on the CU of the woman's face , the lint didn't have the wonderful, "cobwebbing-over, mold-growing-on-left-over-chili" movement that i so desired. As i moved the lint around the face, it broke off into chunks. So it looked like a bunch of little lint babies swarming her face. (video is soon follow, i promise).

So, I need to do a little testing on that matter, but also with the growing lint spores. I'm going to do one test spore of the lint growing straight ahead and then one where i have the spore already constructed and i'll deconstruct it, animating backwards.

Anyway, hope this drivel makes sense. I'm getting that overwhelmed feeling already. And the semester has just begun. Tra la la!