Processes, processes. I’m always tinkering with something. It’s usually something needlessly gargantuan that sees little payoff outside of the actual process of doing the thing—which is kind of the perfect description for knitting. Big workload, small and meticulous results. Just-shy-of-worried looks from people when I tell them about the project.
I’m supposed to be teaching myself how to knit a sweater. That’s the ultimate goal and when I finally get around to it and make the subsequent tutorial about it for my YouTube channel, then I think I will retire from everything. Or just poof into dust. But it’s summer (April, actually, fake-summer) and I’m procrastinating knitting with even more ridiculous hobbies such as… whatever this thing is:
That’s an animation of my living room magically cleaning itself up?
I spent an embarrassing sum of money on professional 2D animation software from a company called TVPaint based out of France. I had to let a French guy (Frenchman? Frenchman) ghost onto my computer in order to get it all installed, which was not the first or the last time I wondered if the purchase was the best use of my time and money (what money, actually?).
It’s the equivalent of a dad’s tool shed out back. A workbench in the garage. 1990s tinkertime. But instead of fixing a sink or building a something-or-other (what are dads [or moms, OK] building these days?), I’m drawing the same thing over and over and over again at 24, sometimes 48, frames a second. It’s terribly addictive. I’ve always loved animation and 2D, hand drawn animation has always been what I admire the most. I’ve experimented with plenty of stop motion (see: my wacky intros for my older knitting videos) but never found the perfect software for 2D. I had heard about TVPaint and it was always a temptation in the periphery. Until now!
Well the work is slow. The software has an interface kind of like Photoshop in terms of layers, but it has a level of intuitiveness that is bonkers. I’ll be wanting to do something complicated with a particular sequence and TVPaint will just know exactly what I need to do and will do it for me. It’s addictive and the end result is… well, what is the end result?
Here’s another animation. This was mainly a test of my walk cycle skills and once I nailed that, I didn’t want to just have a walk cycle, so I put him on a treadmill and sort of cycle-through-the-seasons thing.
Has a bit of a bleak end to it, but all pedestrian ideas do. My next project involves a cheeseburger. You’ll see it in probably 10 years judging by the rate I’m working at. And the view counts are below 100 because I keep these on a channel separate from my knitting so as not to confuse what I should be working on with what I’m actually working on.