It’s ma birthday. Gonna party…. Well at least it was on Thursday. Roach got me that Bogen tripod attachment! I also got a copy of Muybridge’s Human Figure in motion so I can get some high res copies for the mouth segment. I’ve also been storyboarding the stopmo segments. The puppets and sets are next. It’s looking pretty promising.

I also registered www.betweentheframes.com so my animation can have a permanent home.

Here’s a rough sketch for “My Uncle’s Dental Health” done in Photoshop. (A rough sketch that took about 2 hours of collage work.)

Just a rough sketch, but it gives me an idea of where to go.

I got a lot of work done. I have the entire short for “My Uncle’s Dental Health” sketched out. I think it’s exactly what I’m looking for. A mixture of traditonal stopmo and cutout.

I keep coming back to humans being pattern finders. There is no pattern more mysterious or even magical than that of coincidence. I wrote the Ungeheuer stories back in ‘93-’95. They’re a decade old. (God, really?). Every now and then someone stumbles across them and posts about them or drops me an e-mail.

The day after deciding to revisit the stories and mine them for content I get an email linking to a podcast of bedtime stories. Miette narrates Ungeheuer’s “The Rain Colletor”, one of my personal faves. How odd that she was mining Ungeheuer for content at the same time I was. Synchonicity, coincidence, some would say proof of a higher power. Nah. We’re just beasts with an unsatitable desire for patterns. When they occur where we expect chaos, it’s a joyous thing.

I’ve been working on “My Uncle’s Dental Health”. I’m not quite sure how to animate the so-called “Tooth Queen”. I want to do it as traditional cut-out, but where I do get the initial images without it looking just silly? I’ve been going through Muybridge online. He’s a godsend, but again, where am I going to get the initial images?

In freezing ass Normal, IL. Ugh. Stuck in the Hotel room and no Cartoon Network. I’m in withdraw. At least I can watch my copies of Masters of Russian Animation vols 1-3. 6 hours of some friggin’ killer animation. Fyodor Khitruk rocks. The cut-out/traditional animation gives me a better feel for how I want to approach my cut-out/stopmo animation.

I’ve been looking for something really short to animate and have been revisiting my K. Ungeheuer stories. “My Uncle’s Dental Health” seems like a good candidate.

I keep mentioning Don Hertzfeldt. No other animator makes me laugh like him. He’s my hero (eyelashes all aflutter). I keep reading his production journals which is a lot more like this diary of rantings than a production schedule. It gives me motivation. I identify a little too much maybe, but entries like:

“but it works for right now i guess as otherwife life would be an undistracted and rather straightforward trainwreck of pain and alcohol. … instead of cnn in the mornings i’ve been watching sesame street. i kinda want a dog”

could have been written here (with the same sense of “I hope I’m writing this with tongue in cheek”).

Comedy is just not my thing. I’ve never been funny. My sense of humor always comes out like a lead balloon. It’s been described as a man crawling through the desert with his tongue dragging on the sand. In other words, DRY. I’m o.k. with that. Action, horror, panic, love, joy. These are all almost untapped in animation (at least in the US) and it’s more up my alley. I could be in a worse position.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987……..

Humans are pattern finders and pattern creators. It is a fundamental function of our consciousness. It’s why we have language, math, art, music. It’s what makes us human.

Fibonacci was a pattern finder extraordinaire. There is something amazing about the Fibonacci sequence. A pattern that shows up in so many places in man’s bubble and in nature. A pattern with patterns in it. I’m basing my next short on it. I can’t quite decide how to best show the sequence.

Some of my research is being done from this link.

Changed the [current project] section to list all of the different projects I’m working on. Which one will get done first? Christ, isn’t the suspense killing you?