Reel Expression

Which is worse - creative block or creative overflow? I’m not entirely sure anymore. For far too long now I’ve had increasing amount of ideas and things I really want to do creativly that it’s becoming a bit exhaustive to be honest. I just have this odd feeling like I have to get everything out before SL goes corporate or implodes.

For Pose/build/furniture ideas alone I have:
- Over 800 pictures in my pose ideas folders.
- Stack of Vanity Fair mags with pages marked by post-its.
- Closing in on 3 notebooks mostly filled with drawn ideas including stick figure poses.
- 1 very thick book on Deco interiors.
- 3 books on Deco architecture.

Website:
- A full products listing
- Poser tutorials
- Machinima section
- Quick start guide from what I’ve learned/will learn with making my commercial.
- Smallish tutorials on pre-production & production from the bits I remember from film school.
- Indepth tutorials on post production (mostly editing) from 5 years of film school and 8 years working knowledge.

Commercial:
- Building sets
- Photo storyboarding
- Creating animations
- Filming
- Editing

That’s all what I’m working on right now. If that isn’t enough, there are many things on the back burner.

I really want to do more animations. But whenever I do, I get so frustrated. See, poser sucks. I mean really sucks. Whenever I tell anyone who’s worked with it ever, that the lindy hop set I made is 100% hand animated they are shocked. After I made those, I found out most of the animations that people sell as their work are actually motion capture files. Either downloaded for free, at a small fee, or purchased from professional mocap places. Of course every place you can get them from has different expectations for the use, but I’m not sure that selling as an animation file within SL is included with “for commercial use” tags. Then there are some that do little to no editing of it to work with SL, while others do extensive fixes.

That is why animations are so inexpensive. Is it worth it that an animation which took 4 months (at least 4 hours a day on a laptop no less) costs $3.25 (L$900)? Luckily I think I may have figured out a way to make the animation process easier while keeping my high level of ethics in tact. What that is, I’m not going to share just yet.

On the same and yet seperate note… I was writing the intro to the poser tutorial and I was talking about my background in animation. When I got accepted to art school, it was for 3d modeling and animation. In the weeks before classes started, I found out they had a program for visual effects that stradled the film department and the computer department. It took a lot of meetings, interviews and testing, but I finally was able to switch 1 week before my first class. I knew a lot about computers, graphics, animations, ect but absolutly nothing about film. If I’d known how far behind I was going to be from everyone else in my film classes, I don’t think I’d have made that sort of snap judgement.

Anyways… I was trained on such programs as Maya, Shake and Houdini. Houdini was fucking brilliant. Even though back then it was new and in one of it’s first versions, it had what seemed to be limitless possibilities. You could do just about everything. What was cool about it was that it was node based. Huh, you say? Simple explination - say you are building a staircase with the in world build tool in SL. You then want to change the thickness of each stair. You’d have to edit each one, change the size, then reposition. Bleh. In Houdini, you go to the node which states the paramter for the thichness and *poof* they all are affected and reposition accordingly. You could do other cool things like animate based on mathmatical equations - great for things like rain. And even cooler then that? You could import music and animate based on the beat of the music. Talk about a smart animation program.

Talking about all of that made me really miss working with that $7,000 program. On a whim, I looked it up to see if they were still making copies and found out that not only is it way better now, but they actually have an “apprentice program” where you download it (free) with no time limit, auto updates, full options, and can render out watermark free!! So not only am I going to reteach myself how to use it, but I found out that it should be able to import the SL avatar figure and export a bvh. YAY!!

If it couldn’t get any worse then all of that, Alle and I have been kicking the idea of a review site. Who needs another fashion review site? Ours won’t be mostly fashion and not specifically for new releases.