Frank

Checking Sound F/X

I was just trying to learn to put the right sounds in the right places with the movements of the characters. Also I had been messing with various morphs of Lammy and a new character I call Wikki Wakki. In the first clip, it was really the voice of Sarah Palen, or Palin, however you spell her name.

The Camera and Characters

Everything in the movie is programmed or scripted. I noticed that the camera can be set to move, and one of the settings was to fix it on a particular subject so that when the character moves, the camera moves so it constantly points at her. In the first scene I set the camera to always point at Filthy Fae's head, so whenever she moved her head, the camera kept the head exactly in the center of the frame which made the background move and look sort of strange. I was just curious how that would look. The character's moves are in blocks and the blocks are dragged onto the timeline of the movie with the mouse. We put several blocks together, and can even edit an individual block that scripts how the subject moves. The blocks are from a second to several and sometimes up to ten seconds. The sound is also in little files which I have downloaded from the net. The first one Lammy speaks is from Sex In The City, I think. I'm not sure where most of the sound files came from. Many from movie clips. In the last scene, Lammy, which is an Aiko 4.0 doll, is without her wig.

More Testing

For these little tiny videos for a post, I used 15 frames/sec and got the video down to under 2 Mb. That uploads fast. But I also made one for dvd to play on a tv. The voices are hard to understand because I was trying a text to speech program along with a voice changer program. My microphone is broke, I spilled coffee on it.

Lip-Sync Testing

I have a program to lip-sync a character as long as they are still or really from a single photo (Crazy Talk). Now I am trying to use Mimic that moves their lips while the character is moving at 30 pictures per second.

On Stage At Ugly Grace's

This is silly stuff. It is really just practice. Like a basketball player might spend hours shooting at the foul line or dribbling the ball up and down the court to sharpen his control. That's practice. And I do this to get used to the controls of the programs as well as see how they look here. They look pretty cool when I put them on a dvd and watch them on a regular TV.

Fluffy The Zombie Slayer

Don't Mess With Sexy Sadie!

Setting Up For A Picture

This is just to show how we can take pictures with 3D scenes. I put a girl doll or model on a stage with setting and told her to just move around while I showed how preparing for a picture was much like setting up a scene for a play with props. I wanted to show how we could move the camera to get different angles and perspectives of the model and even fly above the scene. The problems with movies is that the clothes and hair are stiff as you can see how they just hang and there is what we call "collision" where the legs and slacks pass through the half-skirt or v.v. And the back of the hair passes through the body stiffly. That is why those Japanese Anime cartoons have girls in very short skirts or they have to wear slacks or shorts. Dresses are a pain in animation. When making single photo shots these things can be corrected and the hair and clothes can be moved to adjust to the body movement.

Xin and Frank Hook Up

Xin and Frank N. Ferter hit it off right away when they met at the bar.