Lightbox Litany

I didn't plan to, but yesterday's small act turned out to be building an ad hoc ligtbox on the newly made practice animation desk. (note: this post's photos were hacked through Flickr as Blogger's upload was down.)
I attached wooden frames to the desktop with small L-brackets and used tiedowns for the post uprights so they can easily be moved around. You may be able to make out the two sizes of make-shift bracket tripods that the Strider cam o'joy can clip to conveniently. Right now I use odds and ends lamps, which still give a soft pleasing light on objects and puppets in the box (seen on the now completed Bosq sleeping cat puppet.) Later, I can add stronger "can" lights from outside the stretchy white nylon as well. Backdrops and flying rigs can be clipped onto the frame for my animation practice sessions. This will be where I test shooting ideas and special effect techniques on a small scale before building them out larger for the full-sized Halfland set.

I also finally wired Bosq the cat's ears by drilling a small hole through his head (me-ow!) and gluing the ears back onto either end. I filled in the gaps with glued bits of fur from the cat's belly. Now his ears can be animated as though they were alive. It's a remarkable illusion.

Good news on the sound front as well, I borrowed a USB mic and found I could input dialog directly into iMovie. This means I can buy a modest headset and use it to practice dialog and generally add sounds to films at will. It doesn't enable me to distort the voices, like Sven showed me, as there aren't any audio file filters available for iMovie like there are for Garageband. But I can always go large later with more sophisticated applications. Right now I have enough to do with using what's right here on hand.

Art Bonus: The birthday card I made for Corey never made to France, so I'm showing her a saved little picture of what the inside looked like. It was a coin-sized pair of hand-made red velvet shorts (or culottes) on a miniature wire hanger with the line, "C'est le petit Jésus en culottes de velours!". That's a quaint French saying Corey wrote about on her wonderful blog that her hunky French husband might murmur when something is really good, so good he almost can't stand it! It translates to something like, "Holy cow, that's as smooth as the baby Jesus wearing red velvet shorts!" I made these shorts to fit on the miniature soft-sculpture bas relief portrait of her Yann on the front of the card. Happy Birthday, Corey!