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Animation tests

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. 

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The Great Wave and The Inheritance Part I

One of my favorite t-shirts is a dark blue one that has an all-over, stylized print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave. I’ve had it for at least 6 years and have lately only been wearing it as a running/gym shirt, which probably contributed to what cumulated in my finger ripping right through the fabric the other day. “Ripping” suggests the fabric still had a bit of toughness to it though, which it definitely did not. The thread had been worn completely thin and a huge hole opened up like a wet tissue paper tearing in half. There’s lots of Hokusai shirts out there but I’ve yet to find a decent replacement.

That’s the long way of saying I went to see a play called The Great Wave the other day at the National Theatre. Is that an earned transition? A new year of theater is kicking off and I’m already hugely satisfied with what I’ve seen. The Great Wave, so far, is my favorite. It’s about two sisters—the typical setup of bookish vs. wild child—who are torn apart by the titular great wave. One sister is swept away, leaving the other and their mother to cope with the aftermath: a whodunit police investigation and a twisting (and shockingly relevant) political scandal that unfold with a thriller’s pace. The set rotates with each changing scene. Time expands menacingly, with years ticking by from the 70s to present day.

In a way, the play is a spiritual sequel to Pachinko, which I read earlier this year. It uses intimate family bonds to tackle issues of cultural identity and global politics in a way that makes you feel completely inside of and connected to the world presented to you—as you should because, in actuality, it really is your world. It’s a brave play. The acting is astounding and even the played-straight villains have their moments of heartbreak and empathy. You see the ending coming, then you don’t, then you do, and then it doesn’t even matter and you want to see it all over again.

Then I saw another play, like, less than a week after seeing The Great Wave. I tend to go on unhealthy media binges like this (see post below where I saw Black Panther and Lady Bird in one weekend for some reason). I don’t consider myself a theater person and sometimes I’ll even say, seemingly offhandedly but usually just after seeing something, that I don’t like plays, I don’t like musicals, I don’t like tha theataaah. Yet somehow I end up seeing way too many shows not to call myself one (one in the amateur sense… not to stick my neck out too far).

The Inheritance is what I saw next. It’s another blockbuster play. It has sweeping, Angels in America ambitions and in many ways exceeds them. Its structure is ingenious and complicated: ten men stay on the stage for the length of the play, acting as a sort of collective subconscious of the modern gay man in America. They’re joined by the aged ghost of E. M. Forster, who uses his novel Howard’s End to create a narrative that interrogates the gay experience of today vs. the one of just a few decades ago. It looks back at the dangerous world in which Angels in America was conceived and asks how far we’ve come, what have we lost, what have we gained, where do we go from here, etc. It’s a two part play, of course.

It’s a credit to the writing that you never get lost in the surreality of it all. The story-within-a-story-and-then-some has clear delineations and the boys on stage are all fleshed out (emphasis on the flesh in some cases!).

I still have to go see part 2, so I can’t yet gather all of my thoughts together. Part 1 is funny, daring, and has a moving, tear-jerking, perfect finale, but it’s not without its frustrations. For a play that wants to be about a huge swath of humanity, there needed to be a female voice(es, actually). Vanessa Redgrave pops in for part 2, so I’m looking forward to where that goes. And while the methods of storytelling are innovative, the actual plot line is fairly tame, almost cliche, with kitchen table relationship drama, eviction notice drama, AIDS drama, and of course, swooning over New York. Some of the beats are lifted directly from Howard’s End and others feel cobbled together from other gay touchstones. There are shades of Rent, Angels in America, A Little Life, Dead Poets Society, and The Normal Heart. The similarities seem intentional, but not always warranted.

Comparing The Great Wave and The Inheritance is impossible, but I will say they both use up-to-the-minute contemporary life to frame their stories. However, where The Great Wave uses that to compel the plot along and keep things in context of current events, The Inheritance does something that I struggled the most with. The play stays ultra-relevant, including a scene set at a 2016 election night gathering where the stage literally begins to sink. But it starts to flounder with its commentary. At times, it’s not clear whether the play is mocking the liberal bourgeoisie or blindly engaging with it. The characters do and say things that flirt with parody and satire, but without the amount of integrity required so that the audience can clearly tell. I had a similar feeling while reading (ploughing, slowly, reluctantly) through A Little Life, which has moments of brilliant, hilarious parody… until you realise it’s not intentional.

I could go on and on, but I haven’t even seen part 2, so I have to stop myself! Maybe everything will change, who knows. I will say that The Inheritance succeeds in what it wants to feel like. It’s like a music video, in a way, where the feeling or the essence of the thing is there and the audience is clearly clued in, but the clockwork underneath isn’t exactly sensical. It knows what it wants to feel like, not necessarily what it wants to be about. Nevertheless, you instantly want to play it again when it’s over.

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Summer Movies in Winter

I saw Lady Bird and Black Panther this weekend and what a bad pairing that was! (Never thought about the very similar titles though, which has me too intrigued than necessary.) They were both great movies—a solid B+ to both (B+ being solidly above average) if I had any sense of cinema scorekeeping—but also, I haven’t thought about either one since. I would like to think about them still. I would like to have a scene or an image pop in my head and remind me of how great the show was, but there’s nothing there.

Black Panther suffers from the usual Disney/Marvel toothpaste packaging. The fact that it can rise above that inevitable flaw of corporate overlordship is a testament to how it’s the best Marvel movie to date—but it’s still a flaw that adds to its forgetability. The message of the movie, the performances, the directing, all of it was top notch and especially good for a superhero movie, but then there’s all that other fluff (the particularly well-framed Lexus, the detour to South Korea that felt like it was decided upon by a committee) that doesn’t contribute anything besides what fluff contributes, which is a strangely hollow bloating. So the actual movie is fantastic, it’s what Marvel/Disney insist on injecting into it that brings it down like all the others.

Then again, that’s just what a BLOCKBUSTER is I guess. But should it be? What would be so bad if Misney just handed the filmmaker a sack of cash without any strings attached, no sponsorships, product placements, ratings guidelines, test audiences to appease, even their incessantly Christian need to canonized everything together into a Universe™. Who cares if you need to show so-and-so doing something-or-other in this movie in order to build up to their upcoming appearance in this other movie when all it does is hamper everything else. I say, let those movies actually play with all the toys in the toy box, make a mess.

But anyway, Black Panther was good for all the reasons a movie is good and bad for all the reasons Misney has extraneously introduced into their movie-making.

But then here’s where I contradict myself because Lady Bird was practically the exact opposite from a BLOCKBUSTER and I found it equally unmemorable but for the exact opposite reasons: it was too real, too quiet, too meandering.

Can a movie be too real? Lady Bird was one of those fly-on-the-wall, slice-of-life movies like Boyhood where it commits to absolute realism and accuracy. Boyhood though, had the advent of a “gimmick” of sorts in terms of how it was filmed over the course of the main actor’s life, which made it stand apart. Lady Bird doesn’t have that, it just has its expert portrayal of reality, which makes for an all right movie—I saw myself and my family in more than one instance of the film—but still feels, again, hollow.

It reminded me of The Descendants, which is another movie committed to absolute realism and showing you exactly what this specific family goes through in exacting detail, where you walk away from the movie being impressed with everything, but eager to get away, as if you’ve been spying on someone’s life. These kinds of movies lure you in with their intimacy, but when they’re over you feel as miffed as if a stranger stopped you on the street and told you their live store, then disappeared without explanation.

Anyway. I’ve thought for a few minutes about writing a good closer that wraps all these ideas up nicely (something about how I need a movie that’s a perfect mix of Black Panther’s politics and fantasia with Lady Bird’s documentary eye) but then I remembered that uhhh, this is a blog and I can do whatever I want!

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Some Notes on Pachinko

I’m reading the book Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which is actually three books wrapped up in one! Books, not parts. It’s always a nice surprise when a book does that. It forces your reading-brain to recalibrate itself and think “OK, what I just read was a book. Now this next bit is also a book,” and figure out what the story was (or wasn’t) and what that means. The breaks feels more solid as opposed to a book that’s only broken up into parts.

The structure is surprising because Pachinko has no story! Jokes. It does, but it doesn’t. If you were to ask me the plot of the novel, I wouldn’t be able to say anything other than, “It’s about a Korean family in Japan, whose lives thicken and complicate and expand with every generation.” The specifics of that thickening and complicating are less important than the simple observation of it, which Lee seems to be aware of and writes so that it take precedence, but not in the ways you would expect from this kind of book. A lot of rules get broken. There’s a lot of “head-hopping,” with the reader weaving inside and outside the heads of different characters, sometimes within the same paragraph, which is jilting (and I want to know the internal conversations that had to have taken place about this choice), but it’s a clear choice by Lee.

The more I read (and yes, I’m still reading it, almost finished), and the more the book strays from Sunja into the lives of her sons and other peripheral characters, the more I start to understand the choices Lee makes. It’s cheap to say the characters don’t matter, or that history itself is a character, or some kind of “joy in the journey” type thing, because Pachinko does what it does so much better than most generational Dramas with a capital D. A few points while reading I got the strange, uncomfortable feeling that I was holding a slimy, beating organ, not a book. The story morphs into its own thing and it refuses to be precious. But then there were other points while reading where everything felt rote, almost phonebooky. It’s a book that never wants you to think you know what it’s doing so you’re passive and meldable and open to its massive history—and it’s an incredibly good history book.

No ending for this little review because I haven’t finished reading!

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New Year’s Resolutions

  • Not get off the couch.
  • Find a new workaround for the New York Times paywall.
  • Keep eating past that strange feeling I get in the back of my esophagus when I eat too much bread, attaining bread nirvana.
  • Watch the neighbor’s two cats (for five minutes, through the window, across the courtyard, in the opposite building).
  • Finally reply to one of the twenty or so YouTube comments I’ve gotten from people concerned about the wellbeing of my pet goldfish and let them know that the video in question is four years old, the goldfish is gone (not dead! Sold. Along with the fish tank, though, to a guy who looked like he might have gone and eaten it alive. I don’t know his YouTube channel.)

That’s about it. I like how my first blog post was all about how I was done with the internet status quo and how I wasn’t going to be using dates on my posts (as if that’s some grand gesture against the status quo?) and yet every subsequent post so far has been implicitly but very obviously dated. Not to mention the metadata that anyone could easily dig up and find the date. Nothing is real. Or everything is real, but the shallow aesthetics of ambiguity is king.

Maybe I’ll be vague and not mention the year.

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Fav Moves o’ 17

When Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582 (*wikipedia-exhale of exhaustion*), did he envision all the BEST OF lists that would be churned out as early as November? I can’t think of anything more arbitrary (in every sense of the word) than the word BEST and using it almost like an expiration date. BEST MOVIES OF 2017. TO BE CONSUMED WITHIN 365 DAYS. Yum.

That being said, and in direct contradiction of the above paragraph’s stuck-up nose, here are my FAVORITE MOVIES OF 2017. I would say TOP 10 or TOP 5 or whatever, but I don’t know how many there will be yet, so I’ll let you know at the bottom.

(*begins*)

1: God’s Own Country

This was the best movie of the year, all the others can go home. Bye!

Kidding. But really, it’s the only movie I’ve seen this year that has stayed with me. When I was thinking about all the movies I saw this year, this was the first one that came to mind, and for a good few minutes, the only one I could think of. Every once in a while I’ll remember something from the movie – a specific scene, an image, one of its many subtle messages – and feel a little squeeze of how much I loved it. It’s the kind of movie that instantly claims an authority out of the space between knowing exactly what it wants to be and knowing exactly what you expect it to be, and commanding your attention, pulling you through images that each have their own gravity and, as far as I’m concerned, images that I’ve never seen before in my life (let alone on film), but ones I’ll remember forever. It helps that the directing is effortless, the scenery is gorgeous, the acting is without ego, and where there is little there is more and where there is more there is little, if that makes any sense.

And in context of this year’s gay cinema round-robin, what with Call Me By Your Name (which, in my opinion [see: blog, domain name] is a far inferior movie), God’s Own Country feels more accomplished, subversive, and politically relevant than anything else released this year. Right now, it can be viewed through a lens tinted (tainted?) with Brexit, Trump, and the nullifying of the self those two comet craters created this year, but I hope that years from now, I’ll be able to watch God’s Own Country again and feel it propel me through a whole new series of lessons and emotions, and with just as much dramatic intelligence as it does now.

2: The Party

Another movie that was just made good and lets you trust it all the way through – until the end, though, which is devastating only because it ends too soon. I could have done with one hour more, two hours more, three, just give me more, and I’ve never ever wanted a movie to be longer. It’s addictive. It helps that it’s one of those real-time, kitchen-table-dramas that I love, and could be just as good performed live on stage, but it’s not, and you get to be up close with Patricia Clarkson’s face and let it pinch and scold you all the way to the end. She has her own orbit.

There were other comedies I saw this year that I wish were more like The Party. Baby Driver comes to mind, maybe even Guardians of the Galaxy 2, but I don’t know how they could begin to fix themselves. Have more fun? Be more bonkers? The Party outdoes it all.

3: mother! and The Killing of a Sacred Deer

It’s a tie for these two. In both of them: Allegories galore. Gore galore. Madness teetering on drivel, flirting with pretension, but coming out on top in the end. If I had to choose one to see again, it would be mother!, and that’s mainly for Jennifer Lawrence, not for the riddle it’s trying too loudly to get you to guess. I like what both of these are trying to say with their darkness, but after The Killing of a Sacred Deer, or more specifically, when said allegorical sacred deer is quite literally killed at the end of the movie, I left the theatre wondering just how much you can justify using extreme violence to get your point across. On the other hand, I left mother! almost… admiring? the violence. Don’t quote me on that, no I did not admire the violence, but I admired the daftness (note: not the deftness) of it. Both of these movies are shouting into the wind and maybe, hopefully, there will be an expiration on the need to do that. But for now, let ‘er rip.

Other stuff:

Lots of disappointments this year. I’ve wanted to see the original Blade Runner since high school and I finally did the deed and rented it, then saw Blade Runner 2049 probably too soon after and it was all sort of an epic deflating. I spent the whole time wishing Robin Wright had been given Ryan Gosling’s part and wishing the story would zoom out better. It zooms out enough and does the right amount of world building, but just not in the right way. Whatever artistry was there (“Stick your hand in this beehive for a while, Ryan!”), was corrupted and muddy from the false-start.

The Beguiled was the second best thing I saw Nicole Kidman in this year, right after Big Little Lies, and before The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Top of the Lake.

Call Me By Your Name wasted a lot of space in my head but I’ll happily give Sufjan Stevens some coins whenever I can.

Everyone should have been fired from Murder on the Orient Express except for Judi Dench and Olivia Colman.

Crispy M&Ms mixed with popcorn are OK.

 

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Hobbies v. Work

After reaching 50 (unceremoniously counted and not celebrated) videos, I’ve got all the YouTube ingredients down. Put some ALL CAPS words in your video title, don’t type or speak in complete sentences, if you do speak in complete sentences, make sure you chop them all up in the edit; and make sure you’re always launching a new series or rebranding yourself or something. That being said, I have a new video up called “WHAT I ACTUALLY KNIT: Cables & Diamonds Scarf” and if that doesn’t tick all those boxes, I don’t know what does.

So it’s a new series.

Now, I’ve started more knitting serieseseses on my YouTube channel than I’ve finished (why is that? There’s got to be some psychology behind the thrill of an amateur saying “This is the first in a new series of videos about ___” that someone should study), but this is one that I’m excited about and hope to keep building on. Building on very slowly because knitting but building nonetheless! As the title says, it’s all about what I’m actually doing with my time. What I actually like to knit when I’m not knitting for a tutorial.

And what is it I actually like to knit? I guess I’m still figuring that out. The actual number of knitting projects that I’ve truly sat down and knit for myself, for fun, for no other reason is very small. The actual number that I’ve actually finished? Even smaller. There’s maybe a hat and a scarf or two. So these “WHAT I ACTUALLY KNIT” (the caps are required in all instances of course) videos are a way of A: showing the world what real knitter really knits and B: forcing myself to commit to a project for once.

This project is a diamond cable pattern I’ve seen here and there. The video shows it off better than I can explain it.

The hardest part about the scarf? Finishing it. Since posting the video I’ve maybe added ten inches to the thing and oh my goshhhhh the desire to yank it apart and start something else is HIGH right now. I make mistakes, I get new ideas I want to incorporate, I get generally bored. If anything, knitting is about patience and actually tuckering down and working.

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Probably Not But Who Knows

This is my first blog post. Isn’t it awful how we’ve reached a point of Being On The Internet where we have to qualify stuff like that? Isn’t it enough that these words just exist online? Why bother with dates?

The only thing blogs consist of most days is this:

[Address a nameless mass] + [apologize profusely for not having blogged in forever] + [talk about your rebanding]

I used to have a LiveJournal back in the day and I would say that the sweet memory of using that platform with all my friends is enough to energize me to keep up a regular blogging habit here, but I don’t think it is. Blogging, commenting, sharing—things used to be much more of a two-way street instead of shouting into a void. My LiveJournal in high school’s reach was 10 people—11 when my brother found it, then 10 again when I made it private. Is something like that possible anymore?

Not that that’s what I’m expecting this to be. This, what I’m writing right now, is promo letsbehonest.

Maybe that certain kind of small-sweetness on the internet is only for kids and can’t be replicated on Professional Branded Platforms. Is Snapchat the thing that provides that for kids? Probably not, but who knows.

Anyway.

That’s another thing all blogs consist of: [negation of previous paragraph] + “Anyway/Anywayyy”

Probably not, but who knows, anywayyyy. It’s like an FDA warning at the bottom of a drug ad. You want to make sure you can say “Well, I even said in the blog post that I didn’t know for sure” if someone calls you out on something. We don’t want to be wrong! I don’t even want to be wrong about likening it to an FDA warning. Is it an FDA warning or something else? Originally I had typed “Surgeon General’s warning” but that didn’t seem right, so I googled it and found out that a Surgeon General warning is for cigarette cartons and the warnings that play during drug commercials are mandated by the FDA but I’m still not sure if they can actually be called FDA warnings so probably not, but who knows anyway.

It’s a nerve wracking thing.