40 HOUR WEEK

I think Yoko is still shaking her head.

All this week, I have been working on my Dulci-Toons cartoons. Maybe not hard enough .... But Hey!!! It is vacation.

I have been working on my changes I wanted to ... needed to make to something that was already finished. But there were 3 parts that didn't quite work. The first was a part that was where I yelled into the camera, "I'm crazy!!!" Redid it with a Terry Gilliam styled animation with me as a straight jacketed bobble head. Much better!

The second was the explanation of the work process and the amount of labor. Not wanting to try and match scenes, I did a montage of found footage with my voice over. Mucho Bettero!

Yesterday I started on the first piece I had started to redo. The ending. The scene is a combination of live action and rotoscope. I shot my part in front of a green screen, with the idea of running it through a filter in Photoshop to give it a drawn look. The problem was that I did not think it was strong enough. So using the drawing tablet and Photoshop I am taking every grabbed frame (30 frames per second) and am drawing over them. I'm afraid they will be a little wobbly (there is a learning curve in this ... Hell, there's a learning curve in just using the tablet) but it will just make it look more of a drawing.

Maybe I should of listened to my own montage. The old method of filtering the drawing took appropriately 3 minutes to render. The drawing takes 5 times as long. At 4 an hour, we are looking at 25 hours left of work. In total ... 4o hours for about 4 seconds of footage.

Makes me think ... I want to do quality work ... but it takes so long. And I got some ideas on how to make this work ... I'm just not sure. I've just seen a whole bunch of UPA shorts. Don't know if I ever really saw these ... except for the Magoos. But this style would really work for Flash. but do I want to redesign EVERYTHING again. I need to look at the Snuffy Smiths and get Beany/Cecil and Rocky/Bullwinkle and really study them. The nuts and bolts. Can I use them to get things out in a reasonable time?

Time will tell.