And it isn't. Not technically, not quite a month, not here and now in the Gregorian West. Perhaps I have sinned on Roman terms, or Mayan, but one of our modern months pass by? Not so. A mere 26 days, no more, skinnier than even the skinniest of the twelve. Pish.
(There then followed a long apologetic focusing chiefly on the writer's many burdens, his foolish commitments to other causes, a jumbled and wholly unpersuasive farrago of nightmarish tales concerning book revisions, page proofs, conference papers, technical briefs and the like, all of which he would have us believe he signed on to execute in the space of a few short months. Cry me a river, as an ex-colleague used to say, though he tended to spice it up with a few expletives depending on audience).
This is a way of warning the reader that this post will be ... short, I believe is the current term. In the place of narrative, I offer something even more precious: media. One must stay current, after all.
Firstly, I just offer you a look at what might be considered a well-stocked bookshelf. Certainly nothing of the sort graced my shelves at eight or so:
I'll indulge the fiction, perhaps not absolute, that the image speaks for itself, and move onward. E. for a long time has been interested in how one might make a movie. Periodically he announces he will be a movie maker when he grows. (Just this morning he said to me "Dad, who gets paid when a movie gets made? When you say it cost a lot to make, who got the money?" We then have a discussion of movie economics, in which I can draw on many hours of bonus Lord of the Rings features in which the movie animators describe the one thousand days they worked continuously on Peter Jackson's miniatures). So we've been talking about movie technology, and then just recently we broke down and decided our young ones were no longer too young for Star Wars, which led to a discussion of "older" special effects technology, and how the Hoth walkers are jittery because they are using a form of stop-motion, and somewhere in all of this I decided to put my money where my mouth was and make good my claim that simple stop-motion animation was "not all that hard."
Indeed it isn't, but then, the results aren't all that good, but it gives me an excuse to experiment with YouTube, and another to divert your attention with colors and, in this case, some movement.
Hmm, what's more, I find YouTube seems to have cut off the last little bit! Nothing dramatic, just the jaws gaping ever wider.
Well, I regret the meagerness of this post, but a long bout of proofing and reading copy edits looms sharply in the foreground ...
2 comments:
Ok. It's cool.
Very amusing post, and, with the provision of media, all is forgiven. But should we say the Hoth walkers look "jittery"--as though they've had too much of the Advanced Strength Sudafed? I thought they were supposed to look that way, part n' parcel of the space jalopy aesthetic begun with the Millenium Falcon.
True, the ice kangaroos, or whatever they are, aren't stop motion's best moment, especially in the famous scene where Han Solo literally hops up on one to rescue Luke.
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