Ain't No Mountain High Enough and Basecoat!

Color virginity LOST!: I gave up trying to arrange the mise-en-scené-mess of how to size and place the distant mountains and was able to fill in the seams in the afternoon and slop apply an olive green basecoat to the main set before sleep last night. Getting rid of the chaos of the surface is satisfying.

Painting the boulders with Ralph Laren's river stone flecked paint was a real thrill. I had bought a pint on sale years ago for this purpose. They will need a lot more detailing and shadow to show as stone on film but in person they look like real granite stone. This morning as I was dropping Paul at his workplace I noticed about 200 cans of dirty rusty old paint cans were sitting by the dumpsters there. Turns out they had just cleared out their paint shed and it was trash to them! Scored several gallons of great quality low VOC/fume free paint (yay) for sky, ground, and clouds. That's some fancy good timing right there.

The shot of (and on) the bottom right is a rough mock of where the distant mountains are so far. I need to position them far enough away to look distant but not so far that there's a gap between them and the edge of the main set. This puzzle is giving me fits so far. I'll keep working on it.

Here's little mock up clip of the opening shot sequence. I've been making dozens of these, to get the idea of how much background needs sky and mountains to flesh out the shot.



Christmas in August: Today Ceri Watling's wonderful package from the UK arrived! And I was absolutely delighted when I opened up the box and found the truly beautiful, witty, and well done school Alphabafish inside! Ceri, they are so incredible! And the hand-crocheted Woolly Glove Fish is equally a WOW! You are so great at making these woolly beasties! I was so excited I made little clips with each of them. THANK YOU! I adore having these works of art in the ensemble of wonderful undersea things!





Ceri Watling made a totally rad bonus fish for Halfland, a school of them. So pretty, especially in person, each hand-painted and embellished with gold eyes and transparent seed beads, all perfectly animatable. I left her epoxy/wire armature and flying rig in this quickie play so you could see how well it works! (catch the word in the middle?!) Well done, Clever Ceri! I love love love these!

(*shot these for heck of it on my new $150 Nikon L15 silverbox with spiffy 2,000 frame stop motion onion skinning feature right in it. I had autofocus on but that can be switched off. Not a bad way for folks to make their first movies. The first hit's free, people.)