I suppose I'll start by posting some pictures of our family visit from over Christmas-time. It was certainly one of the best Christmases we've ever had, and extra special since it was Xander's first one, and the first meeting for my mom and brothers. Very special indeed.
It was really nice to relax for a few days before returning to work. Since then, life has been pretty much all about coming home, playing with the kids for awhile and then cracking open multiple Coke Zeros to work on the new book. At this point, my interview chapters are pretty much done, pending a few more images, so the rest of it is the 'instructional' stuff on cameras, puppets, animation and effects, plus the history of feature-length puppet films. The next few months will involve lots more writing, along with lots of puppet-building and animation, which I really need to get crackin' on. I've been debating my preference for the book's title. Currently the publishers have it tentatively titled 'The Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation', which is true in the sense that this book covers more advanced material than the first one. But part of me is wondering if 'The Art of Stop-Motion Animation, Volume 2' would work better. Any thoughts?
My stop-motion course has also started up again and I have 4 enthusiastic students so I'm expecting it will be a good run. In my opening history lecture, one of my students brought up a freaky stop-motion series she remembered as a kid growing up in Iran based on Rupert the Bear. I had seen hand-drawn cartoon versions of Rupert but didn't realize there was a stop-motion version too. So we quickly looked it up on YouTube, and I was absolutely TERRIFIED!!! The shots of these freaky puppet heads zooming towards the camera is incredibly disturbing. Of course I love stuff like this, but this is almost too much.
My online students start up again in a couple weeks too. Also this week is Spark FX, which I'll be volunteering at and checking out a few events...looking forward to catching up with whoever I run into from our local animation/fx community.
I shall try to post more as I move forward into my marathon of book writing and other stuff. We shall see.
