This morning I disturbed the end of my roommate’s yoga practice with a blood-curdling scream. She ran into my room, thinking there was an axe murderer on my fire escape or perhaps a mouse (both are equally terrifying).
“What is it? Are you okay?” she asked.
Oh yes, everything was okay, everything was more than okay because I had discovered The Muppets Studio YouTube channel and their Twitter feed. And this amazing, amazing video of the cast performing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
I then proceeded to do an actual Kermit flail. My arms were flapping about the place as I cried, “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!” at the top of my voice.
I’ve actually been fairly good about working these past few days (just got the soundtrack for Battlestar Galactica—what?), but a while back, in a fit of huge procrastination, White-Harp and I indulged in a little silliness.
So when I said I don’t want to be an animator anymore…I might have been lying. I discovered this great programme for Mac called Pencil and it may be the most awesome piece of software in the world (except for Scrivener, the greatest writing tool in all of existence). To prove my point, I made a little animation last night in under 10 minutes.
96 frames in under 10 minutes. That is GENIUS. Granted, 96 frames is only 8 seconds (I’m drawing at 12 frames per second, not 24), but most of my animation isn’t for feature film length purposes—just clips I can stick into White-Harp’s book review vlogs. Instead of individually drawing pictures over and over and scanning them individually, I can simply “onion-skin” the next drawing over it, like an actual flipbook. You should have seen the setup I had the last time: I don’t have a lightdesk, so I was hunched with a lamp between my legs, trying to shine it through a semi-transparent clipboard. Oi.
Speaking of which, I’m hoping to get her review of A CURSE DARK AS GOLD filmed and edited tonight. We shall see. I have a million things to do and on top of that, it is Bones night, which means it’s Sofa and my time to be together with me in New York and her in Virginia. I miss my Soph. :(
NOT ANYMORE. No wonder traditional handdrawn animation became passé. Even drawing the scant 25 frames in here almost drove me batshit insane.
I procrastinate a lot. I often procrastinate from doing creative things by…making other creative things. In this case, I’m trying not to look at the flaws Scrivener keeps pointing out in my manuscript.
Mostly I’ve been inspired by Maggie Stiefvater who, in addition to being a wonderful writer, is a multi-talented woman. I just loved her stop-motion trailer for SHIVER that I decided to have a go at something similar myself. White-Harp has also been pestering me for ages to make her into a famous internet star and gladly jumped at the opportunity to make her opinions known via video blog.
Uncreated Conscience is JJ's blog, in which she rambles about the toils and tribulations of writing her first novel, why CSS eats her brain, or how skydiving takes all of her money.
And when she's done with that, she's reviewing books and looking for fiction to publish for postadolescent "new adults".
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