I took a gig helping out local artist Carl Knickerbocker, founder of the Suburban Primitive Art movement, with his first short film, A Dog Goes From Here to There.  It was a ton of fun to shoot, and I’ve met some great people too.  Doing some additional special FX for him now, and also helping to create the final version of the film.  Laying in audio tracks, making the DVD, etc.  Should be premiering in New York City first weekend in December.

With all this going on, I haven’t had too much time to work on the Pitch Reel.  Kevin McGuire and I toiled in the miniatures studio and got some shots of the triplane and the pirate ship that we like.  I’ve stabalized Pupsock’s footage, keyed him out, and got a really nice key on the triplane.  I’m pretty sure I’ve got the virtual camera move locked down, and a fairly nice sky.  Had to do digital clouds unfortunately, but they look nice enough.  I want to add some more clouds, and get the magic hour colors in the sky to be bolder.  Still need to get Pupsock locked into place on the wing of the plane, then I can start working on the pirate ship footage.  Once I get all the elements I have working, then I need to make/film/key/place propellors for the triplane and pirate ship (it’s an air ship!), film/key/place Anastasia in the pilot’s seat, and see if I can create a wake in the digital clouds as the pirate ship sails on top of them.  All this for 1 shot!  To be fair, though, we did film the footage of the triplane for all the shots in the film, and most of the pirate ship shots.

That’s all for now.  Take care!

• Stabilize the footage of Pupsock
• Lock Pupsock in place on the wing of the triplane
• Get a perfect chroma key on Pupsock, rotoscoping as necessary
• Get a perfect chroma key on the triplane, rotoscoping as necessary
• Find just the right shot of the pirate ship
• Get a perfect chroma key on the pirate ship, rotoscoping as necessary
• Finalize the virtual camera move
• Figure out how to create wake in clouds generated by Trapcode Form
• Film Anastasia in pilot costume (need to get pilot costume)
• Lock Anastasia in place on the triplane
• Get a perfect chroma key on Anastasia, rotoscoping as necessary
• Color correct everything
• Put light spill on everything
• Final color correction

So, yeah, everything is coming along nicely…….

In other news, Adam finished editing a first pass of the non-pirate-ship scenes, and it looks pretty OK.  First cuts always are a bit weak, especially when one of your main characters doesn’t exist yet.  Very cool to see it together, though!

Also, I started a new blog.  I was accepted to Animation Mentor, the Online Animation School, and am very excited about it.  I start on June 29th, and would say that I can’t wait, except that I have a pitch reel to get finished before then. So I can wait.   Though, maybe if I overlap the start of school with the finish of the pitch reel I can get feedback on my Wendell shots from my mentor.  Hmmm….  Anyway, AM encourages its students to keep blogs of their progress, so I went ahead and started mine.  It’s a bit frustrating being in the nebulous phase, post-acceptance, pre-class 1.  I wanted to know everything that was supposed to be happening between now and then, and unfortunately not too many blogs had any information about this. So I started mine, and am trying to keep detailed information about the waiting period on it.  It can be found here, if you’re interested:

http://animationmentorblog.wordpress.com/

I’ll let it dry tonight, and then hopefully I’ll get to film it before the day job sends me to Alaska on Monday.  Then I’ll really be able to tell if I did a good job or not.

Orion drove down with Joey Monasterios, who played Princess Stacie in the movie, and the theatre was packed with kids.  Orion’s car broke down on the trip just before the screening and Kevin went to their rescue.  Unfortunately they missed the first half of the films, which included THE SURE SHEEP (which Kevin & I also worked on), and came in while I was doing Q&A for that.  The kids really responded well to it, and had a lot of applause to share, and actually asked a lot of questions afterward.  After the Q&A, puppeteer Alan Cook (of the International Puppetry Museum in Pasadena) put on his wonderful Billy Goats Gruff shadow-puppet show, and followed up with a shadow-puppet workshop.  After all this, the tiniest kids were advised to leave and a second set of films started, now aimed at ages 7 and up instead of All Ages.  GALLERY OF DOOM closed out this set, and got the biggest applause of the entire show.  I came up for another Q&A, and the kids had a lot more questions, and some even came up to me for autographs and personal advice, which I was happy to give.  It was a really good feeling getting to speak with some of the kids one-on-one, and I felt like I was getting to inspire the next generation of filmmakers.

The other major high point of the trip was the fact that Heather Henson was still in town when we were there on Friday, and offered to give us a personal tour of The Jim Henson Company lot on La Brea Ave. in Hollywood.  It was amazing beyond words.  So, I won’t attempt to use them here.  I’ll simply say that, at the end of THE MUPPET MOVIE, there is a lyric which says, “Then somebody out there loves you / Stand up and hollers for more (MORE!) / You’ve found a home at the Magic Store.”  Now I know where they were singing about.  In addition to being the Henson lot, it was originally built by Charlie Chaplin and it is where he made most of his biggest movies.  The sense of magic and history was palpable, especially inside the soundstage.  It was amazing.

We recorded some audio to use on the shots in my demo reel, and Anastasia went out to actor Kevin McGuire’s house with me to lay down the tracks.  I ran the camera (recorded the lines on-camera because I don’t have a fancy audio setup.  I usually go to a studio for this sort of thing, but thePitch Reel is being done on-the-cheap), and let Anastasia call “Action.”  Though, ultimately she got sick of that and refused to say “Action!” because she felt it was a bad word, and that “Stop!” would be a nicer word to use.  I convinced her that “Start!” would be more appropriate, but ended up calling the last few takes myself.  Once we got what we needed, we headed home and she sat with me and helped me pick the best take.  The one she picked really was the best, so I think I may have a new collaborator under my roof.

Lately she’s been helping me turn an old swivel-chair into a rig for shooting the miniatures.  I have a good toy pirate ship that’s fairly large that I think will work for the air ship, but I will need to paint it to give it character and figure out if I can make mechanical propellers to sit on top of the thing and spin, or if I should attempt to do them as CG elements.  I’m philosophically opposed to doing them in CG, but it may be a necessary evil.  I also need to find a good miniature biplane.  Tom lent me one of his kids’, but I don’t think it will work.  It looks a little too toy-ish in a bad way, and I couldn’t use it with the propeller it has, and it’s his kids’ toy, so I can’t very well break it off.   I found a very nice hobby shop near my day-job that has some good model planes for under $30, so I’ll probably end up getting one of those and painting it.

Also I turned 30 last week.  Disney has a promotion this year where you can go into one of the parks for free on your birthday, so I took a day off life and went to the Disney Hollywood Studios to reboot.  I think I saw Samuel L. Jackson entering the park at the same time as me, so that was a cool way to start the day.  I had a great time, and got some much-needed relaxation.  I wanted to bring a laptop so I could do some writing, but my wife put me under strict orders to just have fun and reboot.  Which was wise.

I went on Star Tours (just days after Tom shot an interview with George Lucas for a documentary about Drew Struzan), and realized ole George must have forgotten that this existed, because he hasn’t marred it with his CGI crayons.  And I noticed a big difference in the way it felt.  Everything on screen felt real.  Sure, it uses optical tricks, but everything on the screen exists (or at least existed) on the planet in tangible form, and it showed.  It made everything just feel right.  That is when I decided that I never want to use CG to emulate something real.  CG is great for cartoons (as long as it doesn’t completely replace hand-drawn animation), but not as a tangibility substitute.  Which is the root of my philosophical problems with using CG propellers.

After Star Tours, I went into the Writer’s Corner shop fully intending to obtain a bottle of Coca-Cola and indulge myself in caffeine to fuel the rest of the night.  However, they a machine with red slush swirling seductively inside its chilled chambers. I could not deafen my ears to its song, and I dashed myself upon its icy rocks.  Looking for a cozy place to consume my chilling concoction, I spied what is perhaps the most comfortable chair at Disney, stationed strategically next to a small televisor televising Goofy cartoons.  I sat.  I drank.  I shivered.  I smilied at animated shenanegians.  And then I fell asleep.  Right in the chair.  In front of the TV.  In the middle of the store.  Right across from the counter.  For about an hour. Eventually I woke up, peeled myself from the leather bed, and tried to walk out innocuously.  I was almost out the door when one of the nice old ladies working the store asked me if I had a pleasant nap.  I sure did.

So, Disney day aside, things have been really busy at my day job.  I’ve had to start working Saturdays (yay for extra income!  Boo for not having time to work on personal stuff!)  I have a fairly long commute, so when I get home it tends to be rather late.  I give Eva a bit of a break by hanging out with one of the kids for the rest of the evening.  Then we put Anastasia to bed, which usually results in Daciana (the baby) waking up and staying awake until 1 AM.  So, I hang out with her and Eva, and by the time she goes to sleep it is way too late for me to start working on stuff.  So, things are proceeding slower than I would like.  However, I am bonding with both my girls stronger than I have in a long time, so maybe having less time to myself is really a blessing after all.

Though I haven’t been working as much as I’d like, my fame does continue to grow.  GALLERY OF DOOM, without my involvement at all, has been invited to screen at the Screen4 Shorts festival in England this summer!  Also, it continues to tour with Heather Henson’s Handmade Puppet Dreams for Kids.  It will screen on April 26th at the Newport Beach Film Festival, which it looks like Kevin and I will be attending, then again at the Del Ray Beach Film Festival on May 25th.  Hope to see you there!

http://www.greenroomorlando.com/Article.aspx?ID=1298

I’m very honored, as  my films make up 30 of the 180 minute schedule.  In additon, my puppet stars will be on display in the 1st Thursday gallery.  The whole event runs 6-9pm, with my films showing @ 7:30.  I know it’s short notice, but I hope you can make it!

The reason for my recent lack of updates is the recent birth of my second daughter, Daciana Guinevere Algermissen.  She’s been taking up most of my attention lately, one way or another.  Much to my delight

I actually have 3 games I want to write, one of which is a Pupsock & Wendell adventure game that would flow well with the brand.  Another is fairly original while still fitting precisely into a well-established genre that I think I could make some money with.  The last is a remake of a game I did in college, and I would only do that because it would be fairly simple to do and would provide a nice framework to test out my engine, and it would allow me to see how far I’ve come as a programmer since 2001.  Looking back through my old code while developing this new engine has shown me that I’ve come a very long way.

So, with all this going on, I’ve had to schedule my time pretty precisely as far as what project I’m allowed to work on on what day.  This rotation of projects allows me to actually get things done on each project, and prevents me from getting burned out on any one thing.  Tonight is tie-up-loose-ends night, where I can work on whicever project has a step that’s really close to getting finished that I just couldn’t wrap up in the allotted time slot.  So, I’m working on Pitch Reel.

This first shot (yes, I’m still on the first shot) has so many subtle things going on in it.  I’ve had to model a CG door, sandwich it between two live-action layers who’s timing has to match up, and have Pupsock open the door.  On the other side of the door is a bunch of crazy action, and some of the puppeteers and puppet equipment ended up being visible for a few frames, so I’ve been doing a lot of painting frame-by-frame, and playing with timing, and working on making the door look right, and getting the door animation right, and adding shadows, and hand rotoing Pupsock’s white hat against the green screen, and adding lens distortion to the door, and color correcting, and so on.

Looks like the latest door render has finished, so I better get back to it.

Tom, the Producer, started making calls and secured the three locations we needed very quickly.  He got us a movie theatre (thank you, Premiere Oaks 10 in Melbourne, FL), an old-timey Sam Spade-style office (thank you Spectre3D, Inc.) and a green screen stage (thank you, Tight Line Productions, Inc.) to stand in for the Air Ship.  This is in addition to getting craft services, DP’ing the film, getting extra crew in, and the million other things a Producer does that I don’t realize.

John Kennedy came through with all of the villain puppets, including a group of Air Pirates and a 12-foot tall Goliath to serve as the main villain (you can see him in the pictures from my previous post).  John is a very talented puppeteer, who has performed almost all of the Muppets at various times, such as Sam the Eagle in A VERY MUPPET CHRISTMAS, and Fozzie Bear in MUPPETS FROM SPACE, and has performed Elmo’s Right Hand for many years on SESAME STREET.  We became friends last year, and I got to work on a couple of his shows, and he agreed to help me out with this Pitch Reel, even performing Pupsock during the theatre shoot.

Jamie Donmoyer, who built Pupsock and performed most of his scenes on GALLERY OF DOOM, came back for the weekend shoot to lend her brilliance to the character once more.  She only had a limited time off for the holidays, and I’m honored that she spent some of it with us.

Kevin McGuire  was a big help, and a presence whom I’ve sorely missed on previous shoots.  We did so many films together in college, and then life got in the way and he wasn’t around much.  Finally he rejoined us for this shoot, having been reminded how much fun it is after having done a day on GALLERY OF DOOM and assisting me on THE SURE SHEEP.  He was there every day, took on any task we gave him, and always did a great job with a positive attitude.

One of Tom’s friends whom I hadn’t met before, Josh Malyn, swiped his fiancee’s brand new DSLR camera and was there for the whole shoot taking stills for us, and taking videos when the battery left the land of the living.  We posted the pics from the first night, as linked to in my last post, but haven’t gotten the others ones up yet, as we’re still recovering from the shoot.  I’ll let you know as soon as they’re up.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Here’s a link to some pictures from the first day of the shoot, where Pupsock battled a 12-foot puppet to rescue the Princess.