No Animation, Again

Once again my best plan for getting my animation done has been obliterated by things out of my control. As if stuff wasn't already insane, last weekend I had to take my mom to the hospital. She's doing better now, but having been a hospital bed since Saturday she's going to need physical therapy before she is able to walk without someone (me) helping her. Her doc said she would need more assistance than before. So rather than coming home when discharged she's going straight to a nursing facility for two weeks. After spending nine hours in ER Saturday, the week since has been all about consults with my mom's doctor, discussions with nurses, phone tag with the discharge planner, notifying relatives (most of whom don't visit anyway), and taking my dad to see her. Meanwhile, in other areas there are also phone calls to make and take, paperwork to fill out, appointments to make--I am solely responsible for every healthcare decision for both my parents plus myself. Hell, I'm responsible for everything. And in the background, my tax issue still looms, unresolved. This has not been a simple week.

I think I'm handling it all okay, trying to do a little at a time so it's bite size, but the stress probably has me right at the edge of losing my mind. I'm trying to do (or not do) things to keep my head from imploding (like blogging) and an unfortunate consequence of all this is that I can't concentrate very well creatively. There's little point trying to animate with so many other things running through my mind. It's totally non-productive. I don't know where this leaves my assignment, but it doesn't look good at the moment. I haven't even watched all of last week's lecture video. For weekly AM assignments I've usually found time and inspiration Thursday through Saturday, so I can only hope the ani-muse and extra-time genie pay me a visit in the next few days.

Playing Catch Up

It's been a crazy, stressful few weeks and this morning around 2am I finally got my 409 assignment done, a full 6 days late. Instead of continuing to refine the shots I worked on for week 407, I decided it would be a good idea to refine shots 1 and 2. There are some things I'd like to refine further, especially Green's lip sync. I've been having a hard time making the mouth do exactly what I want, so that is something I'll have to work on mastering. I had Tan animated to a degree, but after changes I didn't get him out of "swimmy" stage this week so I just have him hold in the second shot for now. I thought it would be too distracting. From here on out I will probably be intensely focussing on shots 3 & 4, though time-permitting I would also like to turn in finals of 1 & 2.

So yeah, life has been nuts. At least I'm finally getting some help. Of course, even that has complications because of well-intended yet seriously stupid laws. My quest for tax and IHSS trouble has finally led me to someone who is actually helping me instead of just giving me the phone number of yet another person to call. This person admitted my problem might not be fully fixable without changing some federal or state laws! But at least there might be some kind of workaround. For now that's enough to relieve just a bit of the stress.

Search Continues

I'm not sure when I will make time for animating this week, being it's Friday. I spent most of Thursday and today taking care of family stuff, making phone calls seemingly to nowhere. I was up most of the night searching the Net for some kind of useful information for my tax fiasco and sifting through piles of papers and forms various agencies have sent me. So far nothing I've found pans out. As an example, one tax credit that could have helped ended in 2004. I am kinda stressed about this, not as if the deadline for filing is tomorrow, but just how little help there is out there for people in my situation. I'm sure I'm not the only one in this precockament. Why are the laws so screwy regarding this issue? Doing this seemingly futile search on top of ordinary caregiving duties is exhaustment on top of the usual exhaustion. I'm a bit too tired for it, but maybe I'll go out later tonight, try to forget about it for awhile. Then hopefully I'll find some energy to further refine my assignment before noon Sunday. Sheesh.

Here's another WACoodle, again done in Art Rage 2. This one is a girl. Not that it's so great, but it came out better than usual. I find girls harder to draw for some reason. The way I've drawn her, can you tell which way her body is facing?

Fence

Good grief! The huge storm we had last month tore up our fence, which is more than 20 years old. 60mph- gusts had pushed the rainsoaked fence to a 45-degree lean into our yard, threatening my dad's rose bushes and a yellow flower I planted last year for my mom. I had gone out in the extreme rain and propped up the fence with whatever wood stakes and metal rods I could find that my dad had laying around. The fence hadn't fallen all the way and a few weeks ago when a contractor came to make measurements he had propped the fence upright. After another heavy but shorter storm Wednesday night, the fence collapsed at 2:30 this morning the other way. Luckily the neigbors didn't have any plants along their side of the fence to be squished. Fortunately, my mom's yellow flower plant was not injured.

Back to the Drawing Board

My scene takes place in a jungle and I've been wondering how I'm going to do the jungle set for the final version. I could try doing it with geometry. I could build the set in max and import it into the Maya scene (I don't yet know how to model to that level in Maya). But have you ever tried to model a jungle? That could take a long time and leave little time for animation. Not only that geometry would slow down work and rendering. Instead I decided to grab some frames out of the movie my audio is from and make some clean background plates using Photoshop and some compositing tricks (nothing fancy). This was also the first time I had really looked at the scene from the movie since starting the assignment and it was interesting to see how it was covered in the film.

Since I was only working on a section of the scene this week I went ahead and tested the lighting and rendering, to get an idea if everything would blend. Most people seem to like it a lot, including Ike.

I apparently went off course a bit on the animation. Ike said I've got too many keys and in one shot, too many poses. After getting consistent grades for the past 6 weeks, for this assignment I suddenly dropped a bit. So I've got a tremendous amount of work to do on the scene, taking out some keys and some poses and replacing them according to Ike's advice. Should make it much stronger. Ike wants me to have Tan Bishop do his turn around using his left foot as the pivot rather than the right foot the way I've animated it. When I acted it out, it seemed more natural doing the turn with my right foot planted, but if done well it will probably look smoother the way Ike suggested. This will require some adjustments of the camera or Bishop's starting position and some other things. So it's back to the drawing board, or back to the computer since it's a 3d scene.