AA, Apostrophes and Abraham Lincoln

Friday February 1 2008

Currently I'm in Melbourne and will be here for 5 months. I have another stint of 'Max and Mary' the Adam Elliot stop-motion feature. I'm an Animation Assistant which we call an AA to save time - as enough is wasted building cabinets that I swore I measured but ended up backward engineering and chipping away at a load bearing strut trying to squeeze the damn thing into... Oh don't worry.

Anyhoo, I'm assisting 3 of the 6 animators. I quite enjoy the work of John Lewis who I feel moves between two points as opposed to walks. In life that is not his animation style. Jason Lynch told me today that when you animate an arc of say a dog grabbing a newspaper you have the arm at a length before it grabs it then a moment after the grab as the audience will fill in the rest. You don't need a frame of the fingers wrapping around, similarly you have the car a small distance away from the wall then a moment after the impact rather than wasting a frame on the car stopped on the wall, the audience will assume that happens. I hope that makes sense. But what I'm getting at is that I'm learning stuff, and in my usual style the current project in Perth of Cedric and Hope seems doable but if I am to do it at a level of my new peers then now until 2010 will be spent in a dark wet studio with dogs barking at me, the deranged throwing rocks with my father in the corner shaking his head saying "so disappointing" while I try to animate. Yes that's how I like to animate.

Melbourne water tastes like mould. It's gross. I'm not a la-de-dar kinda person but I can't drink the stuff. Half the buildings and people are covered in mould too, and the artists... so mouldy.

The apartment I've rented is a single studio apartment. It's small or one single room-ish. There's not a lot to do in it as I don't have a chair but I have a torch and a blank wall and nimble fingers and an imagination. I can do Godzilla, a rabbit, a macaw and the top half of Abraham Lincoln. This shadow puppet thing is interesting and could easily take over Television as a form of entertainment for the moldy people of this town. I could be a traveling shadow puppeteer telling the story Godzilla's fight with Half-Lincoln. Maybe a macaw has to rescue his rabbit friend from the battle. I wish I could do a shadow of a ninja. That'd be hot. I'd call him 'Ginger'.

Today the line producer corrected me on the use of the apostrophe in terms of ownership. He cited the example of charlottes web (which he worked on) asking “whose web is it?” I mentioned this only because my mind is wandering and the lengths he went to find me. I should have said "it's charlottes web, oh yes - I hear the apostrophe now". I hope you don't think this is a blog that peewee cites comeback lines he should have used hours ago. But that would have been funny. [Jacob, feel free to edit this out]

Well, I'm finding some interesting techniques and a heavy reliance on hot glue, super glue and sculpy. I never really used any of those products but understand how they are relied upon. I've not been surrounded by so many people of the same ilk since that half-hour in the gutter last weekend. Talking about animation all day is great. And they all have amazing tips. Ormonoid, I think is the spelling, is bitumen paint and you do a light spray from a cheap spray bottle then a spray of water and it suddenly looks old, I learnt flocking which is great as I sculpted a horse. And a bunch of other stuff. I always thought our sets were good but I need to learn some animating techniques. Hopefully eating the brains of the animators will give me their skill which was suggested by a moldy crazy man at a bus stop. I can hear my neighbors showering. Gross.

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