I had the intention of doing some serious work on the film. Instead, I made a cartoon. At least I did something.

I'm hoping this flower-painting deal will pay off soon, so's I can get back to film work. Shit.

Been a bit tied up recently doing paintings; here's one.

Still goofing about with the same HDR pictures. Its amazing how many different images you can make from the same three exposures. Makes sense; you've got alot of tonal information to pick from.

More HDR.

Did a wide-ish HDR shot of the old set; looks pretty neat. May not be tossing the thing after all. I'm going to sleep on it still, we'll see. The HDR really highlights the texture and curves (like in the floor), which isn't all that evident in regular snapshots. These shots are still 'snapshots' though, in that they're isn't any lighting going on per se. Just one big industrial light.

Some new HDR shots (details); the bottom one didn't turn out too good, but you get the idea. It really emphasizes detail and texture.

Gonna start again on making props for the set - I can't really be wasting weeks while I decide the fate of my set (whether or not to rebuild it). Gonna make some little cases, of specific colour and size, to fit into my 'pile of crap' composition. I'm also going to make the birdcage, which should be a day's work. In one of the first scenes, Cornelisz brings out a big-ass evil bird. I figure he's got to keep it somewhere.

Dave Sikma, of Dave Sikma fame, is going to cook me up some HDR shots of the old set (the one that I don't like). I remember that we photohraphed it before when it was just a few pieces of junk, and I thought it looked awesome. We'll see what I have. It may be that a little lighting tomfoolery will fix the main beefs I have with the thing; we'll see.

It would be real nice to be able to say that i'm not back at square one. That would be sweet.

Videotaped me up a show of my friend's band at 'The Black Door'. It's fun to make quick and dirty things like that. You can see how the best way to learn how to direct is to shoot and edit, shoot and edit, repeat, repeat, etc. The sound is distorted. Oh well.

I'm taking a very brief hiatus (two weeks at the most) while I whip up some art that i'll hopefully be able to sell. Then i'll be back on track. Might even be sooner.

Here's me mockup - its ugly, but it tells me lots. The bottom picture is an extremely rough photoshop job of the thing with some planks nad junk. Won't look quite like that; not many right angles - a regular funhouse. The funhouse angles are hard to communicate here.

Here's one last pic of the 'ol set. It'll still be around in case I change my mind about it. Doesn't seem very likely, though.

I've been examining various permutations of set design, trying to see what does and doesn't work. I made a crude photoshop sketch, trying to really exaggerate the 'gestural architecture' thing; the picture is what a side wall could possibly look like; the painting would be perpendicular to this plane, on the left. I thought it was a bit crazy looking, but i'm starting to like it.

SHIT

It's looking almost certain that i'm going to be scrapping the 'Interior Cornelisz's Studio' set, i.e. the one i've been working on for a month and a half and have spent alot of money on.

The problem with the thing is the layout; the design of the thing didn't emerge from a coherent spark or single image of an interior; its a frankenstein, composed of various ideas and concepts and past decisions made that i'm no longer even aware of. It doesn't look like a coherent or logical interior ; its quite odd looking.

The main problem though is the the angles are almost all awkward looking, and unphotogenic. This is a problem with film.

Making wee musical instruments is pretty hard, it turns out. This is the most carefully built prop i've made yet, and it still looks a bit gimpy. Oh well.

The finishing work isn't quite done on the thing, but you get the idea.

Made a trunk. It's going to be buried in a pile of junk - probably won't even see it. So I didn't try to hard with the thing. Turned out pretty good anyways; its hard to predict what is or isn't going to suck.

I did a little photo shoot of some of the debris arranged together; seems to be working pretty good.

And here's the Print Cabinet, version 2. It took a long time to make; most of it is mahogany plywood (about 1/16" thick) which is much harder to work with than balsa. The bottom picture in the two-picture snapshot is the cabinet before I finished the paint job on the thing; my standard procedure now is to stain it, and then put a very thin wash of flat paint over it to flatten it out and hide the grain.

REJECT

I made a wee cabinet for holdings prints/sketches etc. I knew it was a bit shitty when I was doing it, but I plowed through to the end. The next day (today), I decided that the thing just didn't cut it. Its always the right decision to do it over, but it sure sucks to have to write off so much work. Maybe it'll make an appearance in the shadows some where, in the big pile of junk i'm planning.

I made more books. Whoop dee doo. I made a 'new' book; top right corner. It's much harder than making old gnarly books. Making small things is spoiling my attention span; having to make something that takes hours feels like murder after making something that takes a half hour.

Made me some little pages for my little books. Won't be able to read the text; too small. But it's still fun to write goofy stuff on them.

Some of the books have titles on their front's; can't really read them, but it's fun to know they're there.

Wee Books

I've found a pretty easy way to make book covers; make a design in Photoshop, then stuff a piece of vinyl wallpaper (pages from discontinued wallpaper books) in the printer, taped to a standard sheet of 8.5"x11" paper. Works pretty good. Though i've found that it's good to seal the ink in with some sort of matte varnish/artist's medium, as the ink rubs off when you work with them.

This week i'm going to be working on assorted junk; books, brushes, furniture, and other misc. items you might find in an artist's studio. I made a book; turned out okay, but could be alot better. Making small items sure is alot less tedious that set building - an hour or two from start to finish, and its no big deal if it doesn't turn out that well.

I'm getting pretty tired of balsa and brown stain. I'd like to move into 'phase 2', when I really get into the painting, finishing, and putting in all the bric-a-brac crap. It's more satisfying to make small items, that are begun and finished in a few hours. Rather than endless oceans of balsa brown walls.

Built me up some stairs. The lower part will be visible in a few shots. Not much screen time though.

Boy, this prject i'm working on sure is goddamn huge. Sometimes when I come home I look at the thing and go 'what the hell is this thing, where did it come from'.

Its too bad I didn't have a group of people helping me with this thing - its so much goddamn work, and I have a finite amount of youth to do such projects. However, working with groups never seems to work well, unless they're paid, and paid fully. Otherwise, people just have 'off' periods, like I do.

It's been a month since I started working on the 'Interior Cornelisz's Studio' set. Thought it was coming along quickly, but that feels a little slow. I'd really like to have the thing pretty much done in a year.

Gonna have to pick up the pace.

I stuck my CGI 'test painting' in this shot. I like the effect; the bendy floor and the table with the angles top are doing their work.

I started building the upstairs attic thingy; I wasn't sure how it would look with the painting, so I decided to go ahead and build the mega-easel, and put in a mock-up frame the represent the painting. It seems to all be working fine.

I've never seen anything like a modern easel in my research, but my rule of thumb is that if was well within their capability to build, I can use it. As long as it isn't anything that requires an industrial revolution to exist. One example is tubes of paint; they didn't have them. They grinded raw pigments, and mixed them with linseed oil. I'm going to have such a setup in the set,

The 'window wall & dias' (the only window in the picture, that's the one) is now raised about 4" from the middle of the set. I dig it; looks real uphill.

This is as wide as i'm going to be able to get from this angle; pretty damn wide. In the past when i've built sets, they always seem big, but then I found that I didn't have enough foreground to pull back and see everything. Not this time. I gots assloads of foreground, though we'll usually only see the front half of it.

The idea here is that the floor is 'gesturing' towards the painting, in an abstract expessionist formal sense. When done, it'll feel like the whole room is pointing at the painting (to a degree, it always seems to get watered down in construction'.

Started working on the base. Here's some pictures from yesterday.

HELL

I've been farting around with 'hell' in Vue 5 (layman's CGI program, good for landscapes). I'm NOT going to make a CGI hell; I generally can't stand obvious CGI - doesn't get any more lifeless than that stuff. Of course there is good CGI, but i'm not going to get into that.

Anyways, my plan is to make hell in Vue, and then paint over top; literally paint it, with artist's paints. The idea is that the painted version will look like it has some sort of 'force of truth' to it, like as if the painter (main character) was chanelling the underworld.

The painting is going to be visible in the set, obviously. I plan to just paint it, set scale size (24" x 16"). It won't have the appropriate level of detail obviously, but as it will always be seen, within the set, in an in-progress state, I think it will work. I thought of some more fancy solutions, but this one feels right.

Design-y Stuff

It's not terribly fun, but I intend to have a very solid idea of how the rest of the thing is going to be built - previsualization. I'd like to say that I was a smarty pants and designed everything down to the last detail before starting anything, but there's alot you just can't see until you can see part of it built or mocked up. I'm pretty happy with the design though. And there's lots of room for making decisions as I go along. As long as I have a firm idea of the general construction.

I was also aware of where my highlights are; here's the 'whites' composition.

New Design

I've finished my Photoshop drafting (my favorite tool for it, but obviously not the best tool). It's really not much different from the design I started with, but there were a couple of key changes.

HRD (High Dynamic Range Imaging)

Dave came over and popped off some shots (just the mock up, alot of what you're seeing is table top and bits of paper/loose balsa. He used some software that compresses multiple exposures into one image, that gives you lots of rich detail, and luminosity. Looks pretty sweet. Even the worst parts of what i've built looks pretty damn good. These pictures are a little over the top, but they show what you can do.

After all that work, I finally found something that's exciting. These are some (very crudely) photoshopped pictures of the mockup. It's going to be alot more work, but that's fine with me. It still contains the good points of my previous design, but it's got more framing possibilites. That's the ideo; I want to be able to frame shots with architecture, beams, etc. Still needs work, but the core idea is there.

Set Design

Today was a tedious day, but a useful one. I mocked up half a dozen different versions of possible set layout - that's the only way to do it, really. Can't tell much on paper. Every permutation looked like ass; very boring and uninspired. They all revolved around the above designs (top picture is the 'old' design, bottom is new). I kept coming back to the bottom design; has a certain logic to it that works with my approach.

The above image is a photoshop file i'm using to study my set layout; all the little bits represent elements, furniture, etc, and are separate layers so I can move them around.

I've been thinking for a while that my redesigned layout isn't working; I may have made the same mistake I made with my big 'Exterior Studio' set, in that I designed it for one camera angle; other camera angles being therefore awkward looking.

My reasons for this design were sound, I think - i'm trying to make it look a bit like a stage, and intend to use straight on, long-take camera angles rather than alot of 180 degree cuts.

My first layout just looks better from multiple angles, though.

I'm going to try to incorporate the two designs somehow.

I intentionally left all the elements i've made movable- I figured I might want to rearrange things once I had actually built them and seen them on camera.

I made a large 'studio-size' easel. I don't have any specific plans for where it'll go in the set, just felt like making something small. And its rewarding to build things that only take a few hours from start to finish.

I seem to have my painting/finishing routine down; a coat of stain, then very thin washes of flat brown paint to partially hide the grain, and to make it very flat.