Bozzetto al Tropo

I've spent a lot of my downtime lately watching cartoons and drawing. Mostly old Looney Toons and 1920's Mickey Mouse, but yesterday, Stacey let me buy a DVD version of Allegro Non Tropo I hadn't seen this film in years and years and of course, the only other time I'd seen it was a worn out VHS copy from blockbuster (read: Edited for Content)

I'm familiar with some of Bozzetto's other films, so I wasn't shocked by the sexual content, just amused. Very good to see the full thing with it's real colours instead of the dark dusty print I'd seen. Stretch and squash and ooze. :)

Perhaps even better than the feature was that the DVD also contains about a dozen shorts, only 3 of which I'd seen before. Watching those plus an interview with Bozzetto seems to have broken the pack ice away from my ship. I'd been stuck between projects and lacking motiviation but today I feel full of fire and direction again.

I think his films commentary on war and ecology got me thinking about the messages I'd like to be making. It was raining this morning so I drove the car. Worked out what was missing on the Ugly Baby animation so now I think I can do it and enjoy it and have it mean something for me. I also whistled/hummed/acted out a full soundtrack for the Persimmon animation. Needs a lot of work but I have something to go off of now at least. :)

And finally. I did a first pass at an idea for a score for a new short I think I'll work on between the stupid baby and Persimmon. The baby has the easiest sound track, this one is next, and Persi is the hardest. More on this concept when I have some storyboards and stuff.

Anyhow, I guess that's all for now. :)

MIDI Connection

So, I started to get started on my animation stuff. Decided the first step was to get the Midi output thing working properly. Joy of joys, this turned out not to be anything even remotely like simple. GarageBand doesn't do MIDI output. *sigh* After a bit of searching, Caspian on FM found me this. http://home.comcast.net/~retroware/ It took some tinkering but yay! It seems to work. I've tried 4 channels concurrently (More than I'll likely use for a while) and the trickest bit seems to be setting which voice it's using without clobbering the voice for another channel. (You have to lock the speakers for the other channels and then channel up or channel down on the keyboard, play once, and then lock that channel (ALL channels that are unlocked will be changed so you haveta be careful about that) the downside is that it doesn't save the instrument if the keyboard is powered off so a little note-taking is required to store this information in the notes section of the track. Ohwell. For single-session stuff it's good though and it perserves through closing and re-opening garage band, just not cycling the keyboard.
The short form is that it'll work for my needs. Yay! Now what was I doing again?

Oh right. Animation.