stick with the stuff you know…
Work this morning. Just for a change it rained.
Very subdued workteam today comprising me, my least favourite work colleague who I would best describe as ‘mardy’, the childrens’ librarian who is precisely what you would imagine when you hear the profession ‘children’s librarian’ – very sweet, nice, teacher-ish and speaks the whole time as though she is addressing children and reading them a story, and one of the Saturday assistants who is a very nice lad but only 10 years older than my son, putting him closer in age to my offspring than me and thus someone I am likely to embarrass both myself and him by attempting to find any common ground. In his eyes I am quite clearly ‘a grown up’ and as I always struggle to act like one it seems best to be silent rather than cock it up by coming over as a bad parody of a grown up (the best I can manage) or trying to by ‘down with the kids’ and say things like ‘well bad’ or ‘minging’ which are probably way adrift of what all the cool kids say nowadays anyway. 😆 The rain brought the borrowers in in droves though where they all sat about on computers or browsing the shelves with slight steam rising off their damp clothes. I was on the counter most of the morning where I said a rotation of about 3 different things for most of the four hours;
‘well it is a morning at least’ in repsonse to ‘well it’s hardly good’ when I said ‘good morning’ to people as they walked in.
‘no, it’s not lovely it is?’ in repsonse to ‘it’s horrible out there’ as people came in shaking their brollies.
‘I know, we were on the beach most days in April’ to ‘what’s happened to the seasons, it’s June in a couple of days?’
All of which I must have said about 57 times each 😆 I did come home with a big pile of dvds that had come in for me though including HSM (again) that Davies has been after watching again and they put on (twice) this afternoon singing along to, so I have all the songs buzzing round my head yet again 🙄 We were indeed soaring and flying all afternoon long :lol:.
Everyone seemed to have had a nice morning here with Davies putting on a magic show for us when I got home ably assisted by junior audience members. He is toying with the idea of being the compere for Cabaret Night at Kessingland, which I think he’d be great at, but then he’s also toying with a magic act, some singing and dancing along to Mika and a stand up comedy session, so we might have to wait and see what he delights us with on the day.
Once we’d had our fill of HSM I started telling Davies about the animation on Ivor the Engine from the show we’d watched the other night and we got the pens and paper out to make some of our own. Then having demonstrated the idea we put an Ivor the Engine video on so he could see it all in action. He really liked that idea (it’s very basic animation with a static background and lots of pieces of drawn things which simply move across the background. Characters are created with various heads, limbs etc and then the bits are swapped over on the background accordingly – no need to do things like animate mouths or faces, just swap for a different head) and we talked about some ideas for making an animation like that. All the digital cameras in the house take pictures that make the stills too long and I can’t work out how to shorten them sufficiently to properly animate, so after looking at them in shops and online for ages I bought a webcam off ebay which should be here by the weekend so we can have a go with that – a friend made an excellent lego animation film with her son using a webcam recently so I know it can be done better than with digital camera.
Davies has been going to sleep later and later this last few weeks, often not going to sleep before 10pm, which would be fine if he slept in the following morning, but he doesn’t so he is getting lots of tics and twitches as he does when he is tired and his eyes are all sore and slitted, so I sent them both to bed at 630pm tonight. I read Scarlett a pile of books including an excellent story called Beware of girls which is a good twist on the big bad wolf stories, then a collection of Wicked Wolves Tales to complete a load of wolfy type stuff and a couple more about witches and little girls. Ady read to Davies – they have been looking at a comic style Wallace and Gromit storybook for ages which I refuse to read – comics are all but impossible to read out loud with all the non verbal sound effects, speech bubbles and words along the bottom, particularly as they have tried to spell all of Wallace’s Yorkshire-isms phonetically which makes it really hard to read. But Davies was still playing with toys while I cooked dinner and appeared just before someone was fired in The Apprentice, so it was 10pm again tonight despite him having been in bed for more than 3 hours 🙄
In animals in the Goddards household news Candle is fine, I am clearly forgiven and she has not done any dreadful acts since, the chicks have been cleaned out (again – man, can those creatures poo!) and Freddie – the oldest, two weeks old tonight, can now fly/jump/hop out of the box if the lid isn’t on 😯 and is looking ever more feathered with every passing hour. They are incredibly tame and will happily hop onto your hand or arm and when their box gets hoovered round at least once a day will come nosily over to see what’s going on rather than hiding at the back of the box behind each other like you’d expect (it’s what I feel like doing when I see a hoover 😉 ).
Hi Nic
All the digital cameras in the house take pictures that make the stills too long and I can’t work out how to shorten them sufficiently to properly animate
What do you mean? Is the exposure too long? You should be able to set it with most cameras. What problem are you having?
You should be able to produce an animation with any camera just keep the camera still for each shot (preferably locked with a tripod).
A webcam will be usefull for instant messaging and is worth getting but does not give you any advantage for making an animation. I’m sure your friend produced a wonderfull animation using a webcam but you could do the same with any of your digital cameras. I might be missing something here but I can’t see why you couldn’t use your digital camera?
Comment by Simon — 31 May 2007 @ 11:52 am
You’d also make a better quality animation with a digital camera too as most webcams have low resoluton sensors and cruddy fixed focus lenses.
Comment by Simon — 31 May 2007 @ 11:55 am
Of course the tripod may be the issue here….. without a tripod you would have a very hard time keeping the camera locked in the same place particularly as you have to touch it to press the shutter release. Whereas webcams usually have there own tripod or similar and you can take stills without touching the camera. I’m willing to bet you could take pictures with the digital camera from the PC using a usb cable (so you wouldn’t have to touch it – I can with mine) but that is probably a bit of a PITA.
I’m rambling now…. Forcing myself to take a lunch hour as I got it to work 45 minutes early to finish some work and I need a break. Though I’m come to your blog and argue with myself!
Comment by Simon — 31 May 2007 @ 12:05 pm
there own
Bloody hell.
Comment by Simon — 31 May 2007 @ 12:06 pm
😆 hope you had time for a sandwich inbetween all that Si 😉
I think actually it is more the software I am using to put together the animation (windows moviemaker) but when I load each individual photo into it and then play them in a row it stays on each photo (frame) for too long, meaning it doesn’t have the moving appearance I want from an animation. I have shortened the frames as much as moviemaker will allow me to do but they still need to be shorter frames. The lego animation was really short frames so the lego really did appear to be moving even though it was stop start animation using a series of still images and I assumed it was the shots being smaller somehow. Am I talking complete rubbish? 😆
Comment by Nic — 31 May 2007 @ 7:47 pm
Sounds like the images are too big for the software to cope with … they’d probably be ok if they were compressed and/or resized.
Comment by Simon — 01 June 2007 @ 11:41 am