So It Came Back After All...

I'd got to the point, this time last year, when I really didn't think Arbitrary Stopframe would be coming back, having been replaced on the slate by things like Papercuts and The Murkum Show.

As of this Christmas, the allegedly-defunct series has aired another 25 episodes.  So much for predictions.

I won't bore you by recapping the tale of how Episode 14 got made.  If you don't know already, you can read it here.  Having written off Series 2 back in January, though, I promptly came down with a new idea for how I could go ahead with Series 2 - as one does.  The phrase 'animated advent calendar' popped into my head, I realised that it would mesh nicely with the AS format, and that was kinda that.

In the earlier stages of development, I considered various stylistic options, e.g. trying to set up the title sequence so it would do a traditional Advent Calendar opening-door effect, but I never got round to implementing that; the actual title sequence ended up being very short (which is probably a good thing when it's going to get used 24 times in rapid succession), cutting out the signature segment and Zooky's appearance at the end, giving everything a vaguely-frost-ish colour-grading, and reverting to the original AS theme tune, albeit in a specially-commissioned jingle-bell-ified remix. The format of the episodes in general ended up being broadly similar to the original episodes, although a bit shorter, and of course featuring the number of the day in each clip.

I had hoped to have a bit more of the series in the can before December rolled around, but I didn't, so that was that.  When I published Day 1, I'd only finished editing up to Day 5, and filmed up to Day 9.  I spent most of my spare time throughout Advent producing the remainder of the Calendar in a bit of a frantic rush, and there were two days (Tues 9 and Tues 16) when I actually ran out of finished episodes and had to spend the rest of the day editing some more so I could carry on publishing without an interruption!

In case you haven't seen it already, here's the complete Advent Calendar playlist:


And finally, here's a selection of behind-the-scenes fun facts from the project, in a vaguely chronological order:

• The Animated Advent Calendar was written by the same four people who have penned The Murkum Show Series 1 and 2 - me, Tim Johnston, Sarah Johnston and Sam Arthur.  Sarah was the most prolific guest writer, bucking the usual trend of Tim taking that accolade.
• The episodes weren't written in anything like the 'correct' order - the first storyline I came up with was the one with Monster Movie spitting bits of another chewed-up DVD case at Murkum, which became Day 15, and the last episode written was Day 22.
• Some episodes contain less-than-subtle back-references to the original series, most notably Odom weilding a Sharpie again on Day 1, Cylinder making a nuisance of himself on Day 3, Zooky interfering with a jar of instant coffee on Day 5, and of course Monster Movie making a few more appearances and usually roaring a lot.
• Some of the cast had only been in one episode each by the end of the original series; this time round I wanted to make sure everyone had been in multiple episodes.  In the end, Arthur got two more outings in the Calendar and three overall, and every other character (apart from the webcam, which arguably doesn't count) had been in at least four overall.  Murkum has made the most appearances in AS overall, with six.  Harrison is the only character whose AS appearances have all been solo.
• The episodes have individual titles - although they don't appear within the videos themselves or in the YouTube descriptions, they will be published soon on the AS page at mattghc.com.
• This was the first animated project I filmed using my new Nikon D7100.  As a side-effect, it's also my first animated project with source imagery created at a higher resolution than 1080p.  I could shoot 4K stopmotion if i wanted - but I can't edit 4K with my current version of Sony Vegas, so that'd be a bit pointless.
• The first five episodes, plus nos 9, 12 and 24, were filmed in the correct sequence, but the rest were all shot out of order - 7 and 8 were shot before 6, 11 before 10, and 13 to 23 were hopelessly scrambled.  The reshuffles were made for practical reasons, such as availability of the kitchen (which was why I pulled 7 and 8 forwards), or filming episodes with a shared character or prop together (most notably 12 and 21, which were shot as a pair, and the three with Monster Movie - 15, 20 and 23 - which were all shot on the same day).
• You might not have realised it, but if you've been watching my other animation output this year then you'll already have seen that little battery-operated string of LEDs several times before - it was an integral part of the lighting setup for most of the episodes of The Murkum Show Series 2 and its spin-off Greasy Food with Gonce.
• The longest episode in the Calendar was Day 3 (52.44 seconds), and the shortest was Day 14 (33.72 seconds).  All 24 days were shorter than the previous-shortest AS video, Episode 2 Fruit Pastilles (56.52 seconds).
• Murkum's little grumble at the end of Day 4 was the first piece of actual dialogue ever used in AS (his screams in Series 1 don't really count as dialogue, and they were stock sounds rather than original recordings anyway); I performed, recorded and processed his lines for Days 4, 10 and 15 using exactly the same techniques as I do for The Murkum Show, except that the AS lines were recorded after I'd shot the videos, instead of before rolling cameras like I would do on his main series.
• After filming Days 6 and 9, I left the string of blue lights sellotaped to my desk for several days (mostly because it had been such a faff sellotaping them down that I couldn't quite bring myself to rip them off again already), before clearing them up so I could shoot Day 11.
• The episode with the most troubled production was probably Day 10 - I shot the first half three times, and had to scrap the first two and revise my plans due to technical problems.
• Day 11 was not only the scariest episode of the Calendar to film, but the scariest bit of animation I've ever done, point blank.  Working with live flame in both that episode and in Day 22 was pretty nerve-wracking, but at least the tealight candles in Day 22 were fairly staid; the matches used in Day 11 burnt a lot faster than I'd hoped, and came upsettingly close to melting Snow to a dirty yellow blob a couple of times.  In the half-dozen-or-so frames it takes her to spin around between lighting the match and igniting the 'fuse' in the crisp packet, I had to film faster than I can ever remember working before (apart from live-action stuff, obviously!) and actually had to swap out the original match in her hand for a new one after 3 or 4 frames, because they burnt so fast.  I ate the crisps afterwards.
• The most productive filming day was Thursday 4 December - I shot an unprecedented five videos back-to-back: 12 to 14, plus 16 and 21.
• The disappearing number on the gift label in Day 14 was done with a combination of practical and digital trickery - but I won't tell you all the details because that would spoil the fun.
• In case you were wondering, the other DVD whose remains Monster Movie spits out in Day 15 was 300.  I didn't want to tear up something from my own DVD collection, so I went into the charity shop a few doors up from where I work and rummaged around for something with a cover that featured a BBFC '15' logo on a suitable background; they were all the same price, and most of the '15' logos were about the same size, so I picked 300 based mainly on the background texture.  As a consequence, there might (although I can't confirm) be a tiny little fragment of Gerard Butler's leg somewhere on-screen for a couple of frames' worth of Day 15.  I haven't actually watched the film, just ripped the corner off the cover and got a plasticene-legged South Korean kaiju DVD to spit out the shreds.
• Day 15 was also the first episode in any of my animated mini-series to credit somebody else for creating or co-creating a featured character (Sam, for providing the original concept for Monster Movie).  I suppose I could have credited or co-credited Tim for various characters who have featured in Arbitrary Stopframe or The Murkum Show over the years, but there are so many characters in the Murk Army and the history of their creation has been so complicated that it would have added several extra credit screens to each episode trying to explain who was responsible for writing who, so Tim and I have a tacit agreement that we don't bother with character credits for Murk Army videos, for the sake of people's mental health.
• The idea for Day 18 emerged out of discussions over Tim's pitch for Day 14 - but I ended up filming Day 14 as originally pitched as well.
• Day 20 was the first time Arthur has ever been heard speaking - his original film Arthur & the Punk was silent.  I had a cold the day I edited Days 20 to 24, and the otherwise-annoying throatful of phlegm came in surprisingly useful when I was trying to do an old-person voice.  I still ended up recording all of his lines twice.
• Day 23 re-used some of the chocolates Cylinder was messing with in Day 3, and some of the dolly mixtures that Murkum got mixed up with in Day 10.  I don't know if you'd noticed, but I like to sneak a dolly-mixture joke into my stopmotion work every now and then, particularly in the X-Battles GT shorts.  As with the crisps from Day 11, I ate some of the sweets after filming with them.
• This was the first project to feature the revised mnimation logo - the logo's lighting colours have been subtly altered, the text style has been changed to match that used in the main M.C.Media logo (stronger overall corporate image, and all that... heheh), and the awkward capital N has been dropped, leaving the official stylisation entirely lowercase.  I like the fact that the previous mnimation logo made its debut on the same video as the D80, and this one made its debut on the same video as the D7100.

- The Colclough

The Remnants of 2

Don't get used to this.  Arbitrary Stopframe isn't back on a permanent basis, or anything approaching one - this is just a one-off special.

When I finished Series 1 back in November 2011, after filming Sam's rather excellent literal-Monster-Movie script, I decided that enough desk was enough, and if I did a second series then I'd try setting it in the kitchen.  It didn't take me long to come up with two work-in-progress storylines, which I earmarked for Episodes 14 and 15 - one with Zooky the Alien Dog Thing getting into the kitchen and finding a new food source (which may or may not have ended up being chocolate drops), and one with Emily and Snow making a mug of coffee for their animator.

Two years later, however, neither idea had reached a fully-developed filmable state, no more ideas had presented themselves, my attention was being increasingly taken up by Papercuts and The Murkum Show, and I'd been slowly drifting towards the opinion that Arbitrary Stopframe was dead - good and proper dead.  But then (I think on Sunday 5 January) I had an inspired idea: mash those two stories into a single episode, and produce it as a one-off special after Murkum Show Series 2.  That was followed by an even better idea: why wait?  Why not go ahead and do it right now, before TMS S2 had even got started?

So I did.

The revised title sequence is a hint at what might have been - I designed it at the end of 2011, with a view to using it for the entire second season, but now it'll probably only ever appear on this one episode.  The new music is part of the same 7-movement suite as the original theme tune (thanks again to Tim), and already appeared on the show once, as one of the radio selections which Odom doesn't approve of in Episode 8 Headphones.

Turns out our kitchen isn't a great working environment for animation.  A large part of the problem is that it's almost impossible to block out natural light, which neccessitated filming in the evenings when it'd gone dark outside, and it was surprisingly difficult to find an evening when I could have the room to myself - Episode 14 ended up being shot in two halves a week apart, on the last two Wednesday evenings (I'd be interested to see if anybody can spot the break).

Also worth noting: I had no assistance filming the shots of myself holding the mug, and I'm wondering whether anybody can figure out how I got to the shutter release for the frames where both of my hands are visible on screen... not that I'm offering any prizes.

Anyway, as I said, don't get used to this.  My little Arbitrary Stopframe revival thingy is over, and I'm now gearing up for the second season of The Murkum Show.  But I hope you enjoyed the blip while it lasted.




- The Colclough

All Quiet at the Front End of the Camera

It's been a mere (yeah, right) three and a half months since I recorded the dialogue for the first two episodes of Papercuts, way back on the first of March.  I've had several patches since then when I felt as if there was far too much work involved in the project and it was all taking far too long and I wanted to just pack it all in and cancel the show.

However, after 48 hours of focussed work on the project (it's amazing what you can achieve in 48 hours of focussed work sometimes), I've fnally finished Episode 1, and very nearly finished Episode 2... and then jumped straight back in and started recording dialogue for Production Block B (i.e. Episodes 3 and 4).

A large part of Thursday was spent filming the last bits of Production Block A: specifically, Ep 2 Scene 10, then the last snippets of the title sequence with the ink barely dried on the background I was using, and last but not least Ep 2 Scene 11.  Rounded off the day with a bit of editing.

Yesterday was all about the noise.  Depending what time of day you dropped in, you would have seen me scuttling in and out of my room clutching various ill-gotten gains including the old clock of the mantelpiece, the cutlery drawer, a plastic bucket full of dirt, a full watering can, and a trowel... not to mention the various strange sounds I ended up making a capella.  I also pestered Tim into writing a snippet of incidental music for Episode 1, so that I could complete and publish the episode.  Which, about an hour after I should have been in bed, is just what I did.

Here's what all the fuss has been about - or at least, the first instalment of it:



Episode 2 is complete apart from one track of incidental music, which I'm hoping Tim might be able to sort out while I'm in Kent over the next week, and the general plan is to publish the second instalment about two weeks after the first one, followed by the third as soon as it's ready.  Beyond that, I don't really know yet.  If the scripts for episodes 5, 6 and maybe 7 are ready to go by the time I finish making 4, then I might go straight into Production Block C.  Otherwise, I might look at re-starting Arbitrary Stopframe.  But don't take any of that as final - the only definite decision I've made so far is to stick with Papercuts until at least Episode 4 is finished.

I'm really hoping the second pair of episodes won't take as long as the first did.  I do have a bit of a head start this time in terms of major sets already existing, and things like that.  Watch this space.


In unrelated news, I've been meaning to do a post about how I might have handled certain challenges from The Apprentice Series 8, but that'll have to wait for at least another week, if it happens at all.  And I'm sure I've got some drawings and paintings that I haven't shown you.  Must try and remember to do that before too long...


- The Colclough

That Concludes That

After ten months in the making, I can finally lay Arbitrary Stopframe to rest.  Episode 13, the finale to the group of episodes which I'm calling 'Series 1', is now out on YouTube not just once, but twice.

Monster Movie was guest-written about two months ago by Root Hill veteran and Godzilla buff Sam Arthur, and I've kept it back on purpose because I thought it was one of the better stories/jokes the series has had, and I wanted to make it the closing instalment to send the show off with a bang.  The prospect of Murkum running for his life from a giant, angry DVD amused me.

For the pun to work, the DVD obviously had to be a monster movie.  I might have used my copy of Jurassic Park, but I'd loaned it to a friend, and I'm not sure it counts as a 'monster movie' anyway, in the strictest sense.  So I went on Amazon, and ended up with a copy of The Host, partly because I'd heard good things about it (including a review from Sam), and partly because at £3.99 it was the cheapest out of the ones I looked at.  Which makes Episode 13 the only one with a budget greater than zero pence, and puts the average cost per episode so far at £1.07.61538461538461538461538461538.  Or so my Windows calculator tells me.

Anyway, budget stats aside, here's the finished article:



And then, since I was in Monster Movie territory, I couldn't resist the urge to create a second version, turned monochrome and matted to 2.40:1 cinematic widescreen, as a homage to the monster films of old.  Here's the result of that little tangent:



Judging by the commentary in his latest blog post, it seems that Sam is happy with how his script has translated onto the screen.  Which is good, of course - if your writer isn't happy then you've probably got a problem!

Finally, one more video to round off the project: my sign-off blog, including a montage of some of my favourite moments from the series, and some waffly commentary on the show's future:



There you have it.  End of Series 1.


- The Colclough

Sellotape Defeated

I've been having a staring match with my sellotape dispenser, on and off, for the last two months.  Since finishing Arbitrary Stopframe 11, basically.  Thing is, I've been pretty darn sure it must be possible to do an Arbitrary Stopframe episode with sellotape, but I couldn't get the story to hold together.

But as of yesterday afternoon, I've won.  At long, long last, I worked out what to do with the tape, and I've spent a large chunk of today shooting and editing the episode.  Was it worth the wait?  Dunno.  I'll leave that for you lot to decide.  Embed follows...



I could have made a 12th episode a while back, as I've had Sam Arthur's spec script sitting on my hard disk for a few weeks now.  But I wanted to keep that back to use as the grand finale to the series, so it's been waiting around until I could sort out the sellotape.  However, now that the obstacle of Episode 12 is out of the way, I'm hoping to film Sam's script as Episode 13 next week, and put the series on an indefinite hiatus.

In case anyone's panicking, reading that stuff about 'finale' and 'hiatus', I suppose I should clarify: I don't mean I'm permenantly terminating the series.  I'm just going to take a deliberate several-month break (maybe multi-year, but I hope not), and if/when I restart the project then I'll probably make a couple of alterations, mainly moving away from my desk and finding a different location to work in - most likely the kitchen - as this would open up new possibilities for things the characters could interact with.  It's been getting harder to keep coming up with the ideas, as there are only so many items on my desk that are animatable with.

And before you all go cold turkey on me, remember there's still Episode 13 to come before the hiatus...


- The Colclough

Stuff I Made: September 2011

Been a while since I did one of those several-different-paragraphs-on-unrelated-subjects blogs...


1) Arbitrary Stopframe: I mentioned the other week that I was working on an idea for Episode 11.  Here it is.





2) Painting: did a little painting the other day, experimenting with paint surface effects and trying to make it look like running water, but I forgot to photograph it yet.  Also did more to the kingfisher - new photo follows.

Untitled Kingfisher Painting - now with some paint on the kingfisher!

3) Root Hill on Camera 2011: pretty much finished editing the Concert reel (runtime circa 70 minutes).  Might go back in and add some video filters on one little segment, but otherwise I think the Concert's all done and dusted.


4) Writing Megastropulodon: now nearly 2/3 of the way through the third draft for the opening episode.  Haven't decided yet whether my next move will be the third draft for Episode 5, or starting work on a first draft for Episode 2.


- The Colclough

Into Double Figures

For the first time ever, one of my film/animation projects has reached its 10th instalment (well, there was a very small thing that I made as a bad in-joke, that got to 30, but most of you don't want to know about that) - as of this afternon, Arbitrary Stopframe has gone into double figures!

I brought back Doctor Murkum, partly because everybody seemed to like his previous appearance (Episode 4), and this time I pitted him against my magnetic-sculpture set.  Originally, I was planning to use the magnet sculpture in Episode 9, along with Forkley, but I discovered that they didn't make a particularly interesting combination, hence the fact that Forkley got the pencil jar instead in a last-minute rewrite.

I would have done this episode last Monday, but I cracked the storyline literally ten minutes after my parents had driven off for a few day's holiday for their wedding anniversary - and taken the Nikon D80 with them, which left me with an idea, but no DSLR to shoot it on.  Which is why you've had to wait for today instead.  But anyway, enough of that.  The point is, Episode 10 is now online.  Enjoy.



And I'm working on an idea for Episode 11 already...


- The Colclough

Arbitrary Again

So, I'm back from Root Hill (might blog about that later), and Doctor Who is back on the air (I'm still confused, but my gut reaction is that I liked Let's Kill Hitler better than A Good Man Goes to War, even though there wasn't as much bashing of the Fuhrer as the title might lead you to expect).  However, it's gone half ten at night, and unlike certain other people, that's a bit late for me to be starting to write an ambitious blog post.  So I'll just leave you with a couple of little videos.

I forgot to embed Arbitrary Stopframe 8 when I uploaded it a few weeks ago.  I've just uploaded episode 9, so I may as well take the opportunity to rectify my mistake, and embed both at once:






Now that I've finished my big crazy glut of travellings, I might try and get back to doing these things on a weekly basis.  Ooh, how ambitious.


- The Colclough

Random Shoes

No relation to the Torchwood episode of the same name.  I just couldn't be bothered to think up a clever title for another anthology post.


1) A painting that I somehow ended up not posting when I first did it:

#00A: Another Day

Yes, that serial number is in hexadecimal.  Because I can.  Interpret that fact (and the rest of the painting, for that matter) as you will.

On a related note, I've started painting the kingfisher, but it's not really worth uploading another photo yet as I've only done the sky so far.


2) CGI robots!  Another one.  I've had this idea at the back of my mind for a while, for a computer-animated short film about dolly mixtures, called Golden Cube.  A few months ago I finally managed to work out what was going on with the story (with some help from a friend at church), and then started experimenting with production design.  I re-used a load of elements from a previous CGI project which had fallen through, including the robot which was meant to be the main character, but the robot design just never looked right.  So over the weekend I decided to throw it out and start again from scratch, taking more than a little inspiration from Dyson vacuum cleaners in terms of the elemental geometry, the semi-exposed gubbins and the bold colour schemes.  Here's the latest render of the new droid (still WIP, I might add - the eye needs a lot more work, and the arm is mostly missing), along with a piccy of its spiritual predecessor, courtesy of the internets:

Ancestor on the left, Descendant on the right

There's probably a bit of WALL-E in there somewhere as well, but that's beside the point.


3) Arbitrary Stopframe still hasn't officially ended.  I've sort of got a plan for Episode 8, and I've had Odom the Grud sitting on my desk for about a month, in intermittent peril from marauding hamsters (I'm not sure if hamsters like the taste of plasticene, but I haven't left Odom within range for long enough to find out), waiting to film, but there are one or two little creative obstacles to be overcome first.  My apologies for the ridiculously long wait.


4) Cylinder and Miserable has its fifth anniversary a week on Thursday.  It's been half a decade (as close as makes no difference) since I started writing it.  And for once, it feels like it.  To be honest, it doesn't really feel like it was only yesterday, or any of that stuff.

I feel all old and decrepit now, saying things like that...


- The Colclough

Night of the Last Shower

Oh dear, nearly a month since my last post.  Don't know what happened there. Well, I sort of do: guests staying, and a comprehensive bathroom refit.  And a relative lack of inspiration.  Among other things.  There might be another blog challenge thing versus Hannah in the offing, but that idea's still embryonic.

Some updates:

• I do plan on resuming Arbitrary Stopframe sometime - just not sure when.
• I've finished the second draft of Megastropulodon Episode 1, Day of the Goldfish.
• I've finished second drafts for the first three episodes of Frozen Bones.
• I've just had my last shower in the old tub.  I won't show you a picture - for one thing, I'm not allowed to take the camera in the shower; for another, you really don't want to see that.

Our very small bathroom currently has two tubs in it, one on each side, with just enough space to squeeze the old toilet in between.  The plan for tomorrow, while the rest of the country is glued to their TVs watching the Royal Wedding, is to take out the old bath and its associated gubbins, and plumb in the new one.  All the tiles above the old bath will need taking off the wall, and I'm rather looking forward to doing that.  I like the demolition bits.

It was a bit weird standing in the same tub that I've been using for over 11 years, and knowing that after all those hundreds of showers in there, this was the very last, and that within 24 hours the whole setup would have ceased to exist.  Slightly bittersweet.

Still, there's a lovely new shower waiting to go just a few feet away...


- The Colclough

Living in Analogue

So... another anthology blog thing.

1) Arbitrary Stopframe - I scraped my self-imposed deadline pretty darn close on Saturday, but did manage (just about) to get Episode 7 uploaded before going to bed.  My supply of desktop objects and episode ideas is starting to run a bit dry, hence the fact that Tim guest-wrote this instalment, and I'm not too sure how much longer this thing's going to last.  But I don't plan on making #7 the last episode.  Not yet...



Anybody else got ideas for future episodes?  I can't promise that all suggestions made will be automatically accepted, but they will at least be duly analysed for animatability.

2) Painting.  Took my paints outside on Sunday afternoon and ran off this little sketch alla prima (apparently that's Italian, and basically means doing the whole painting in one go, without waiting for one bit to dry before applying the next).  It's a strange one in that it looks absolutely rubbish from some angles - especially upside-down and from a few yards' distance, but I quite like it so long as you look at it the right way up and at fairly close range.

#009: Impressionist Glade

3) Routines.  It's been bothering me of late how much of my life has been tied up in electronically-mediated activities, be they work or leisure.  So I decided last week to do something about it: I rearranged my morning routine from something like this:

• wake up
• find and apply socks
• read Bible while still in bed
• start computer
• find breakfast
• return to computer
• update webcomics
• eat breakfast while watching TV / DVD / YouTube
• get dressed
• ...and onwards

to something like this:

• wake up
• socks
• find breakfast and armchair
• eat breakfast while reading Bible
• get dressed
• walk (yes, really!)
• and only then fire up the electronics, update the webcomics, and resume business proper

Not sure how much difference it's making so far - I've only been at it a week - but I'll keep at it and see what happens.  This would also explain why my webcomics have been updating a bit later in the morning for the last few days.

4) Alien President.  I finished another batch of episodes yesterday (numbers 29, 31, 32 and 33 in terms of their positions in the story, but they bring the total to 37 as I've illustrated some episodes out of narrative order for technical reasons).  Number 29 in particular was a real pain to draw and colour - you'll probably see why when I publish it in a few weeks - but I was happy with the final result, which is the main thing.  Only 8 more left to illustrate now...

5) The fitful progress of Megastropulodon: a week or two ago, I managed to plug the last major hole in my character profiles, and started work on the second drafts of Episodes 1, 5 and 6, and for a few days it really felt like progress was being made.  But then I sort of dried up again.  I sometimes (read: often) doubt that I could actually make a living from creative expression, what with the way my ideas come in fits and starts, with productive patches separated by significantly longer dry ones.

6) Lack of blogging.  This is the first post on A White Horizon in 10 days.  Most of my recent posts have been triggered by having an episode of Arbitrary Stopframe to embed.  Is the lack of blogs indicative of a lack of life?  I wonder sometimes.  It might seem a bit ironic to make this connection, but: see point 3 above...

7) Firefox 4!  Mozilla have finally released the new, shinier version of my web browser of choice.  It's supposed to be several times faster than its predecessor.  Well, sometimes it is (smoother scrolling is noticeable), but it still takes a long time to load.  Version 4 has most of the same old good points (stability, for example), and several of the same old flaws, including the fact that whenever I open a new tab it comes up blank instead of going to my homepage.  The new interface is much prettier though, and the speed has improved a bit, so I'm generally happy with it.

8)


- The Colclough

Another Lack of Horror Stories

Once again, Arbitrary Stopframe has slunk into existence without any protest or complications.  I have no horror stories to inflict on you.  I have only the finished product, hot off the press:



One thing worth noting is that I took Sam's point about not having used enough sound FX in Episode 5.  There are a lot more sound FX in number 6.

On the topic of "stuff I finished making recently", here's another painting:

#008: Stained Glass I

Yes, the 'I' signals the intent to produce a 'II', and maybe even a 'III' and beyond...


*****


I've just realised: I spoke too soon.  There may not be a horror story in this blog post, but the post itself is arguably part of one: this is my 57th post on A White Horizon.  That darn number again!


- The Colclough

The One I Didn't See Coming

I had the basic idea for Arbitrary Stopframe 4 some weeks before I got round to animating it.  Not so number 5, which only popped into my head a day or two ago.

I don't have any tales of woe from the soundstage to regale you all with either.  So here, without further ado or embellishment, is the latest of my weekly stopmotion exercises:



To try and compensate for the fact that this post is so short, I've decided to open a little opinion poll: which Arbitrary Stopframe episode so far is your favourite?

Also: I will try and remember to post the answers to Fifty Facts and Fifty Fibs soon... I've given up waiting for anyone to post their answers...


- The Colclough

Lenses, Coins, and Action

After a couple of weeks' delay, I've finally made Arbitrary Stopframe 4 - but it was an uphill battle to get it filmed.

The root of the problem was a small dark speck which has been appearing frequently at the same position on various photos taken on our Nikon D80.  I decided to try and get rid of it before shooting AS4, so I took off the lens (the default zoom one that comes with the camera body), cleaned it as best I could, and then reattached it.

The camera and the lens then refused to talk to each other, making it impossible to control the aperture, and therefore impossible to set up properly for the stopmotion piece.  I detached and reattached the lens a few times, but it didn't fix the issue.

So I decided to give up on the zoom lens altogether, and instead dug out one of our alternative lenses - a fixed-length, mid-angle model with an aperture control ring (which the zoom doesn't have).  Attached this, took a test photo... and then discovered that that same darn speck showed up in exactly the same place - which meant it wasn't in the zoom lens at all, but on the image sensor.

I ummed and aahed, and then remembered that I've got a very soft paintbrush which I've never actually used for paint.  So I set up the camera in full manual mode with a 30-second exposure time (thank goodness the D80 will still take photos with no lens on it), and while it thought it was taking an arty-farty time-lapse picture I flipped it over, stuck my paintbrush into its gubbins, and flicked away the offending bit of grot, which was fortunately visible to the naked eye so I could see what I was doing.

Reattach the alternative lens, take another test photo... and the speck was gone.  That felt good.

All that remained then was to animate Doctor Murkum having a bad time with a £1 coin.  Or rather, a few £1 coins.  I've currently got thirty-something pound coins lurking around my room, but for the purposes of the animation I picked out the post-April-2008 Matthew Dent ones with the royal shield on them, because in my humble opinion they look better than the old ones.  That's the one and only reason behind the particular number of coins that appear in the clip: that's just how many 2008-design £1s I've currently got.

I've noticed that the light flickers a bit in this episode.  This is probably due the fluctuations in the natural light sneaking in through the window, as I forgot to fully close the curtains before I started animating.  Note to self for next time...

Anywho, now that I've had my nice long rant about electronics and aesthetics, here's the clip from the centre of the furore:



...and now that I've got started again, I shall try and get back to doing these clips on a weekly basis.  Watch this space!


- The Colclough

PS. unrelated: I reached a rather momentous landmark the day before yesterday: I drew my 2000th comic-strip episode!  In case you want to know, it was Fort Paradox 56, and was executed with fibre-tip pens, with dialogue added in the computer using the dreaded font Comic Sans.

What's Possible

Possible Stuff:

As of Wednesday afternoon, I've actually got a paid commission - making a 90-second computer-graphics-based advert for Day One Publications.  Still doesn't seem possible, but apparently it is.  Crumbs.

Following on from that: it is possible to handle financial and legal matters without your brain turning to an off-green goo and exiting your skull via the earholes.  Or so I'm told.

After seven months in the making, Fort Paradox gained its fiftieth episode last weekend.  Half-way to a hundred.  Wow.  And as if that wasn't enough, the project has its first episode or two by a guest illustrator.  I don't know about the rest of you, but from my POV that's all terribly exciting.  And it does seem possible (like I said, it's been a while since we started), but again, I haven't quite got my head around it.

It is entirely possible (and I hope probable) that I'll get round to doing Arbitrary Stopframe 4 in the next few weeks.  I've been a little distracted for the last fortnight by long-stay visitors, paid employment, and the fact that I'm running out of finished Alien President episodes, but I've got story plans for a couple more Arbitrary Stopframe clips.  Watch this space.

It is possible, but difficult, to design a bathroom by committee.  The way it's going in our family at the moment is that we came up with a perfectly serviceable plan several months ago (before discovering that Mum and Dad's bedroom was going mouldy around the corners, and deciding to de-fungus and decorate in there before doing the bathroom), and ever since then Mum's been revising the plan in every conceivable way, working out why the revisions won't work, and coming back to the original plan.

It is possible for the same composer to create some music that's crazy and thrilling, some that's beautiful and uplifting, and one little track that's deliberately, pervertedly, infuriatingly, brilliantly cringible, all on the same album. Case in point: Thomas Newman's soundtrack from WALL-E, which I've currently got on my hi-fi.  Oddly enough, exactly the same guy pulled exactly the same stunt on Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is also in my CD collection.

Speaking of music: it's probably possible to sit through the entire 2-disc Doctor Who Series 5 soundtrack by Murray Gold (had it as a birthday present), and not feel the slightest bit like you're having any fun for the whole two hours plus.  But I suspect you might have to be a corpse in order to achieve this.


Impossible Stuff:

I'm sorry, but a dying man simply can't do what he did, with that implement, without missing at least a little bit.  IMHO, that scene went beyond the bounds of Suspension of Disbelief and into the territory of Plain Impossible.  If you've seen Tangled, you should know what I mean, although whether or not you agree is another matter.  I've phrased it that way to try and avoid being spoiler-ish.

It is impossible to sit in the same room for too long without starting to feel like you're going to go bonkers.  It's taken me a long time to realise this, but it's finally dawning on me.

And finally: IMPOSSIBLE GEOMETRY!!!

#007: Impossible Triangle

It was really tempting to paint a big letter 'S' inside the middle hexagon thing, but I resisted.


- The Colclough

Part III and All About It

Here's the third instalment of Arbitrary Stopframe, followed by a lot of verbosity relating to the clip:



Sam asked last week whether the episodes are going to fit together to form a bigger story.  The answer is: to be honest, I have no idea.  As of now, I'm not planning a bigger story, but as I go along I might start spotting connections.  Watch this space, basically!

I rambled on last week about the problem of YouTube series that start well but fall apart on or around their second episode, and listed Problem C as being when there are two instalments, and every indication that the series is set for a long and excellent run, but it somehow vanishes into thin air and Ep 3 never shows.  I've managed to avoid that one, as you can see from the presence of Episode 3 above.

I might not do one next week, as I'll have a guest staying, and it'd be a bit antisocial to ignore them for a day just to get a bit of animation done.  Normal service (i.e. Ep 4) will resume on the week commencing Monday 21st.

But having avoided Problem C, I've discovered something much more worrying:

• Problem D: you're busy animating, and after a few moments squinting into the viewfinder you suddenly find that you can't focus one of your eyes.

That happened to me yesterday while I was shooting Inkjet, and persisted for several minutes.  I couldn't get my right eye to focus on some normal-sized text on my monitor from about two feet away.  Very worrying.  As a visual artist, if I lost the use of my eyes then every worthwhile skill I've ever had would evaporate instantly, and life on this planet would become a blank, both literally and metaphorically.

On a brighter note, in case anyone's wondering what all that stuff says on the computer monitor in the clip, here's a transcript:

*****

How to Animate in Confined Spaces

Without Going Totally Insane

Contrary to popular belief, it is in fact possible to execute a stopmotion animation in a very small and hard-to-access location (such as the inside of an inkjet printer) without going stark staring bonkers in the process.  There are three main ways of achieving this.

The first way to avoid going stark staring bonkers during your animation session is if you are already stark staring bonkers to begin with.  Many of the best animators take this approach, and are always careful to remove any lingering traces of sanity and leave them at the studio door before commencing work.  While there is no reliable scientific evidence, it is widely believed that this is the approach taken by Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline.

The second approach is to channel in impending insanity through your characters instead of bottling it up in your own brain and allowing it to ferment there.  This is particularly effective if you are animating a character who is already deranged (e.g. Ron Haggard), or at least moderately eccentric (e.g. Wallace).  The results from this technique can sometimes be impressive – see for example the relative collectedness still exhibited by Nick Park after all these years – but they are not always reliable, particularly for method directors.

The third approach is not recommended, as its primary ingredient is paracetamol, in a dose which would be lethal to most known human-based life forms, even animators.

*****

Mea culpa: there's a typo in the third paragraph.  It was meant to say 'channel any impending insanity'.

And finally, on an unrelated topic, here's another painting I finished the other day:

#006: Arbitrary Strata

No relation to Arbitrary Stopframe, despite the similar-sounding names.  It began life as a random pattern of leftover watercolours dribbled onto the canvas, and then added to with acrylics.


- The Colclough

The Second Instalment

So, I've made it to Number 2.



Back in the early days of my YouTuber-ness, I came across this phenomenon with several different web series, where Episode 1 was really good and then Episode 2, in one way or another, was where it all fell apart.  I found three major variants:

• Problem A: they make something labelled 'Episode 1', but they might as well not have said 'Episode' anything, because there's never a second one.
• Problem B: the second instalment does show up, but it's a massive letdown, and the series either ends forthwith, or else straggles along as a pathetic shadow of what it could have been.
• Problem C: there are two instalments, and every indication that the series is set for a long and excellent run, but it somehow vanishes into thin air and Ep 3 never shows.

Once you get to three or more, there seems to be some sort of critical-mass effect, so Ep 2 is generally the cruch point.  At least, that's what happened in the series I looked at.

Which all raises the question of how I'm getting on:

• I've obviously managed to avoid Problem A, because as you can see, I've got a second episode right here.
• I'll leave it to you to decide whether I've fallen foul of Problem B... is 'Fruit Pastilles' up to par compared with 'Marker Pen'?
• And I've got some plans for another Arbitrary Stopframe clip for next week, so hopefully I'll avoid Problem C.

And speaking of long-running series and things: my next post on A White Horizon will be the fiftieth.  Fifty already?  Crumbs 8/


- The Colclough

The Animator and the Animated

I am an animator.  I have recently remembered this facet of my life, after more or less neglecting it for a few months, and I've decided to do something about it.

And this right here is that something:


On a not-so-distantly-related note, last night I finally got round to seeing Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away.  It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2003, making it the only cel-animated film and the only Japanese film ever to have done so.  And until last night, it was the only Best Animated Feature Oscar winner which I hadn't seen.  So now I can claim my viewing to be complete, unless you want to get really nit-picky and claim that the English dub doesn't count and I have to go and watch it again in the original Japanese.  Please don't get nit-picky; I don't speak any Japanese.

I must admit it was quite a bizarre experience, and not something for the easily confused (a film set in a bath-house for the spirits?  Not something you're likely to find in any western-made movie), but enjoyable nonetheless.  It was the second Miyazaki film I've seen, following his 1979 feature debut The Castle of Cagliostro, which was a bit easier to get one's head around by dint of it being set in Europe.

I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to maintain my claim to have seen all of the Oscar-winning animated films, what with the next round of awards due in just a few weeks, but chances are the next winner will be either Toy Story 3 (which would be the first sequel to win the award), or just-maybe How to Train Your Dragon (which would be the first win for DreamWorks Animation since Shrek, nine years ago) - and I've already seen both of them.  So I might be safe for a bit.

And in the meanwhile, I've got a couple more ideas up my sleeve for Arbitrary Stopframe 2 and beyond...

Keep watching this space!


- The Colclough

A New Incentive

For the benefit of anyone who hasn't already seen it on my YT channel, here's a vlog I did today about my recent lack of animated output, and what I intend to do about it:



Check back tomorrow or Saturday for the first instalment of Arbitrary Stopmotion!


- The Colclough