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!