WEEKLY MONSTER 128

Good evening. How are you? If you chose to celebrate yesterday, how was it? I hope you had a good day, either way! I have to say that what I notice most about major holidays now is the disturbing slowdown of information. I usually get about 50 to 100 actual non-spam e-mails a day. Yesterday: Five. That’s just wrong. I was happy that some normalcy was restored today.

The sudden silence did give me time to do some extra detailed animation for you, though. I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in a second, but first,
please enjoy this week’s clip:

I’m curious what you think the story is. At the same time, I’m curiouser still what your New Year’s Resolutions are. If you’re game, maybe you’ll post them here to get the rest of us inspired. As always, you can post stories and comments by clicking the big, green block of type:

OK. A few production notes on this particular installment of the Monsters: Usually, each animation is put together out of 10 to 15 layers — 4 eyelids, upper and lower jaw, movable arms and legs, maybe a little waving hair — that sort of thing. But since we’re dealing with three close-up monsters here — monsters with tricky party hats, hidden teeth, and big dreams — the animation has 46 layers. Each eye has three parts, for example — the pupil, the iris ring, and a background. Plus the aforementioned eyelids.

As it turns out, 46 layers have a tendency to crash my otherwise fabulous anime software. I tried rendering with different settings, but nothing worked. The only thing that did the trick was to render the animation sequence 10 frames at a time. This left me with 138 separate files, which I then reassembled in Quicktime. That last step didn’t actually take that long, but the piecemeal render ate up about five hours. But whaddaya gonna do? Simplify? I think not!

I shot a few seconds of the render process for you, because
it’s actually oddly soothing to watch in real time. Take a look:

So… just imagine this times 1380. Ha! I do wonder if staring at this kind of thing all day has some sort of effect on me has some sort of effect on me has some sort of effect on me. But what can I do? I’m a slave to love. Because as you well know 344 LOVES YOU