Animations… and more!

For this flythrough video, I wanted to get a better idea of scale for this first set, so I tossed in a bunch of robot extras wandering around, orbiting support columns, and in general trying to get in the camera’s way. There were a couple of small enhancements to the room’s design, too — see if you can spot them through the crappy MPEG compression…

Click here or on the image below to watch the video in Media Player or Quicktime:

Nope, that didn’t last long. Reviewing my notes, folders, To-Do lists, etc, I’ve come to the conclusion (right or wrong) that Goofy Graffix is as organized as it can be. And it’s a lovely piece of work, too — all my movies use the exact same folder structure, with places to put storyboards, source code, scripts, and all the other bits and pieces that make my films go. I have a notebook that put any procedural step-by-steps and interface documentation that I don’t use every day, and the notebook is kept close by, ready for use when I need it. In short, I have a system, and the system works…

DanBee’s Doodles, on the other hand, is a obsfucated nightmare, and as the complexity of the drawings gets ever higher, it’s becoming worse. There are drawings, doodles, scribbles, inked vellum, and the occasional finished piece thrown in a pile in one drawer on my desk. Tracking is non-existant - I have absolutely no idea what stage of completion my unfinished illustrations are in, and if I did know, I probably wouldn’t be able to do anything about it because I won’t be able to find the drawing in question. Chaos! That said, when it comes to projects competing for brain bandwidth, DanBee’s Doodles happens to be pretty darn low on the food chain. Most likely it will remain a mess until after soccer season is over, and then I’ll allocate more memory and processor cycles to clean it up. Mind you, we’re talking about my brain here, which is a runty little 1987-era-technology piece of crud. I keep hoping Stephen Hawking rolls down my street so I can mug him and steal some of his gray matter, but he’s on to me, and has been avoiding me like the plague. Bastard!

This weekend was a bonafide lip-beater, chock full of Real Life wackiness, so not a whole lot got done on the film front. The forecast for this week ain’t lookin’ too good, either, with more volleyball-soccer-school tomfoolery than you can shake a stick at. I was really hoping to get rolling on the first Three-eyed Larry sequel, but that might have to wait until after next weekend - Labor Day holds more non-movie crap that needs my attention. Short of cloning myself, there’s not much I can do about it…

One thing I’m going to attempt to do in the scant free time between events is work on a better organizational system for Goofy Graffix. Juggling production on two-plus films, two blogs, and the assorted insanity of Real Life, I never get the feeling I’ve got both arms wrapped around what’s happening. I would love it if I had a single source/location/cheat-sheet/whatever that I could look at and at a glance know exactly where I am now and what needs to be done next. I’m sure Corporate America has been looking for a similar solution and there are software vendors galore with a widget to sell to fill that need, but most likely they’ll be out of my price range, so I need to figure out a solution on my own. I figure with all the experience I have with SQL and databases and programming I can whip something together - I just need to pull my head out and define what exactly it is I want see and have it do (BTW every now and then I wake up and realize how completely unorganized I am and vow to do something about it, but it never pans out, so just hang loose for a spell and I’ll revert back to my normal clueless-but-happily-animating self before long)…

For this video, I added greebles to the walls and changed the columns to be squared off and more greebly (Is that a word? Someone look it up for me - I’m too lazy). Unfortunately, ffmpeg has been doing a marginal job of encoding MPEG-1 videos, which in English means you may or may not see the changes clearly. Don’t worry, it’ll look snacky cool on the DVD…

Click on the image to watch the clip…

Okay, commenting on the individual movie pages has been switched back on again (Why was it off? Gremlins? Satan? Who????), so you can finally leave comments about your favorite Goofy Graffix films. And I know you were just dying to do that, too. Yeah. Sure you were… Anyway, share the love, okay? Thanks