My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue

“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” as they say. I had scheduled my first short film shoot in a couple years for Wednesday and now I am on several large paid gigs, all in a single week. I refused to give up on the FRAMELINES shoot so I just rearranged it. This one is required to be shot ASAP, so I’m okay with this all, just a little disheartening to lose the other. When I got these gigs, I knew I had to prioritize them. It’s income, a requirement of life and one that will pay off for me regardless. It’s unsettling to make so much money in such a short period of time. And then go back to making so little for a couple weeks. Life as a freelancer, I guess.

I have been working on a new Sonnyboo Podcast that has a ton of animation in it. I’ve been researching and refining the Adobe Character Animator software. I had the artist Brad Sherman do up the designs and backgrounds, and I have now fully rigged and prepped them for animation. The actual process won’t take more than 2-3 hours.

I am still blown away by Adobe Character Animator. What used to take weeks, even months even 5 years ago is now a real time endeavor, at least “real time” after spending hours naming and rigging your “puppet”, meaning photoshop or Illustrator files. I’m at the very beginning of taking this software on.

The possibilities are near endless. Much like life.

I got a new hot rodded like hell Laptop. It’s an i7 with 16 gig of RAM monster with a 4 gig of Ram graphics card on Adobe’s approved list, and I loaded it up with the Adobe Creative Suite. In fact I am using it for all of the Adobe Character Animator stuff mentioned earlier because of the built in HD Webcam to record the actors’ performances for the animations. To be honest, this thing is smoking so hot, it can render some things faster than my desktop!

I sold my old laptops to pay for this and it already worked out. Now I am using this to teach and edit from remotely. It looks and sounds amazing. This Lenovo laptop was made for gaming, and the specs wound up being perfect for Video Editing and Effects work. Windows 10 was not the enormous trainwreck I normally expect from Microsoft.

This has completely changed my mind about getting a solid state C: drive for my desktop too. The Laptop Beast has a SSD drive and a regular hard drive. It’s so lightening fast I can’t believe I ever doubted the speed of these things. As soon as I get paid for these jobs, that is high on the list for productivity on the desktop at home.

Hopefully I can still get this short film shot soon. Hmmmm. I won’t life stuff wreck the masterplan.

“Did you think that your feet had been bound
By what gravity brings to the ground?
Did you feel you were tricked
By the future you picked?
Well, come on down

We’re coming down to the ground
There’s no better place to go
We’ve got snow up on the mountains
We’ve got rivers down below”
– Peter Gabriel