A new hope

I begin to feel my motivation getting back again.  Many inches of snow had fall around here and there is one week left of day work before my Christmas vacations.  Thats very good for my moral.  

I'm currently working on our bathroom (home) renovations by now.  Which includes: plastering, painting, cutting wood pieces, using my drill and putting props in place.  That's pretty near what i was doing on my project, but at a different scale :)

There's also a friend of mine who had done a music live performance on stage last November.  I shooted it with my DV camera and i am currently working on it to put it on DVD.

My routine was very messed up in the last weeks by these new projects and i have to rebuild one which will include my stopmotion works. I hope to be able to finish the shot i've begin before Christmas, to stick with my deadlines.

Thanks again for your support.

Lacking motivation, enthusiasm, energy...

I feel bad about me (my project) and about all of you who support me with my project...

After i finished my last sequence, i started the setup for the next one but, i didn't really touched it in the last month.  Every year, i go through this mood in this period.  I have a big lack of motivation, enthusiasm and energy.  I think this have something to do with the lack of light with the winter coming.  I think it's called "Seasonal affective disorder".  It's generally coming back with the fall of snow (it's only raining by now).

Since the beginning of this project, i commit myself to do at least one hour of work on my project each day and that wasn't really difficult.  It took me around one month to complete each sequence so far.  One week to build a new setup, one week to shoot the animation and one week to edit the pictures.  After that, i took a week off and slowly starting to think about the next one.  I didn't have to force myself into doing my project and i have always thought, that i would never work on it under pressure.  This project is something that i do for fun and i don't feel like working on it right now.

I'm not giving up if this is what you are thinking.  I felt like you deserve to have some news about my progress.  You were here, following and supporting me since the beginningm and the least that i can do is to tell you that i'm still here and that i'll continue this project in the next weeks.

The "Head" sequence

A short, but though, new sequence is done.  This is the one that we see, from a kind of point of view, the character turning upright the statue's head.

The challenge here was to move the statue's head and the character's arm in a smooth way.  That was a shooting filled with heavy pressure.  When you work with a soil ground, you can't never touch it or this will be seen.  There must be a way to use spay glue to fix that, but i didn't try it.  I used hairpins to move the arm to prevent touching the soil.   The other problem is that there wasn't much room around to move the arm in a proper way.  So i decided to shoot this sequence in reverse.  I've find it easier to push the arm by moving the statue's head on it.

I had to fixed down the character's upper body in order to move only his arm.  So, i built a very basic character's support for it with a screw and 2 bolts.   The support was screwed on a room desk.

The head was also fixed on the room desk.  Two tin metal rods were glued in holes i did in the head with a drill.  The other ends of the rods were also glued in holes drilled in the room desk.  

That way, i was able to move the head from left to right.

For the set, i put some soil under and around the head.  The same mirror as seen in the previous sequence "Puddle" was put next to it.  In order to see the sky's reflection in it, i put a clouds board over it (see "The city" post to learn how i built it).

For the camera's support, a 2''x4'' wood stud was put upright.  The camera is fixed to it as seen on the previous post "The Puddle sequence".

The earthquake at the end of the sequence was done by moving the last frames from left to right at high speed in post production.

Here's an animation frame.