Anotherblog

17 weeks and counting

Von visited the obstetrician yesterday. All is still well. The headaches seem to be going away too, for which both of us are very thankful.

I’m feeling quite relaxed now that the Cars short film is finished. My unfinished (but still active) projects are now:
- Lotus
- Fork
- Dave’s Wedding Video
- Mezzacotta Cafe
- Irregular Webcomic making-of video
- Kidnapping Movie
- Finish Hard & Easy short film
- “Always On” game
- Kung Fu Masters
- State Machine game
- Carddraft
- Fix up stop motion animator
- Guitar performance

A much shorter list than before! First up, I think, is Dave’s wedding video. It’s ten years behind schedule, and I’m beginning to feel some pangs of guilt.

We All Wanna Drive our Cars

Here it is. Written and directed by Andrew Shellshear, with help from The People People, Veronica Luke, David Luu, Jon Blum, Kate Orman, Kyla Ward, David Carroll, the Comic Irregulars, many other CiSRAns and ex-CiSRAns, and too many others over the last five years to count.

Still, thank you all.

…aaaaand done.

The video clip for “We All Want To Drive Our Cars” is done and mailed off to Ev. In the rush I didn’t upload it to youtube. But there are only a few changes, most notably changing the time lapse to be accelerating from longer shots to shorter ones, and the final mini hero shot to start in fast motion and end in slow motion.

I could (in theory) do a whole lot more wire removal, but it’s getting progressively more difficult to do using my current method. If I find a cheap or free line removal algorithm, I’ll think about it.

Five years in the making! Complete at last!

Almost done!

I’ve almost finished the “We All Want To Drive Our Cars” music video. Latest draft here, after four hours of editing last night and a tremendously fun lunchtime filming session with the Irregulars to get the last Minis shot.
I’m interested in opinions. Currently, I’m only looking to redo the sequence with the red mini stationary as other cars move around it and darkness falls – instead of having each shot the same length, I think I’ll make the initial shot longer and speed up as it goes along. Also, I might shorten the end sequence by a second or so, so that the last shot ends at the same time as the music.
In any case, the final bit of editing is going to happen tonight, hopefully before D&D starts. I mail a DVD to Ev on Thursday morning.

Rain interrupting play

I’m working pretty hard on the Cars short at the moment, trying to wrap it up by the end of February. Wait, what’s the date? Crap.

Anyway, I managed some filming over the weekend, despite the weather, and now I’ve only got one shot to capture. The trouble is, it’s an outdoors shot and my luck ran out: it started raining at lunchtime just as we were about to go out and start filming. I still have plenty of editing to do tonight. In particular, I have to splice in the concert footage thus (hopefully) synchronising the action to the song a bit better.

There’s a new version up on youtube.

Kung Fu Baby

Kung Fu Baby

Monkey appears capable of some awesome Kung Fu moves, as demonstrated in this ultrasound. Sadly, although Von can now feel Monkey’s practice sessions (presumably during the “fluttering butterfly” attack, ’cause that’s apparently what it feels like) the alleged end-of-nausea phase of the pregnancy has failed to eventuate. Fifteen weeks now.

Birthday

Thanks for the 40th birthday wishes, peoples! Much appreciated. It still hasn’t quite sunken in, though. When Mum & Dad were my age, they had a 17 year old son.
I got some excellently nerdy presents, but none more so than from Veronica. I will post a photo at some point.
In other news, I showed the Cars film to Jon & Kate and they had some excellent feedback, and I did a wee bit of editing, but it’s not done yet. There’s still some more filming to go, and I’ve identified an extra couple of shots I really need to get. Also, it’s proving quite difficult to get the film to thematically sync with the music. I’m hoping the final bits of footage will help with that.

Filming

There was a brief gap in the rain yesterday, so I took the opportunity to draft Von and David L. and did a couple of hours of night filming, including one shot that I think looks spectacular. I think we’ve got all the night footage now. Only two or three shots to go!

Cars short film

I spent some time on the weekend working on the Cars short film, and now have a much tighter rough edit:

We All Want To Drive Our Cars. Feeling good now. When the rain finally stops, I can get those last shots and get my biggest millstone out of the way – this project has been about five years in the works!

13 weeks, 5 days

…and counting! The morning sickness seems to be subsiding, which is nice.

The ultrasound from Tuesday went well:

Heya monkey!