Friday, February 17, 2017
That Buick Girl
Since my discovery/rediscovery of the ravishing Buick ad with the girl leaning on the even-more-ravishing 1946 Buick, I've been tinkering and retooling this post. Naturally, when you see an image this tasty, you're going to want to animate it (or, at least, I am). About the only thing that looked animate-able was her arm. My first few attempts were so stiff that they looked laughable - but then I got onto bending her arm at the elbow. Really, it doesn't look too bad.
Here I alternated the basic wave with a wider gesture which looked a little silly by itself, but seems to fit here. Naturally, these actions aren't going to be smooth. When I get a little better at this, I might find a way to make the actions more natural.
This is the fist-pump, which took quite a long time to do, because I had to mess with the hand to make it look more fist-like.
The free-style. I incorporated several different waves into this one. One of them is a kind of modified fist-pump, or "rah-rah" gesture.
I am SO sick of looking at this now that maybe it was a mistake to work on it. This is one of my all-time-favorite vintage car images. It's just so frickin' perfect. Maybe I need to put it away for a while.
There's something happening here
This is my attempt to record that deathly sound I was writing about, you know, that doomy night noise that no one believes. It's there, but did not record very well, and I talked too much, perhaps out of nervousness. Bentley appears in this one, as he does in so many of my videos. He is my guide and my familiar.
More and more I notice another kind of sound during the day, whatever the hell it is. Am I imagining this? At first I fervently hoped it was the refrigerator going on and off, since it did seem to stop once in a while. But I checked when it was loudest, and the fridge was off.
It's always on one pitch, very low, very doomy. I hate it. I can't wear a headset or earplugs because they seem to concentrate it. I can't have music on all the time. If I'm totally absorbed in something else, it seems to go away, but it doesn't. If I focus on it, it becomes almost unbelievably loud.
The noise on the video, however, is definitely an aircraft. We've had some weird violence in our neighborhood lately, the kind of things we never used to hear of when we moved here. Recently there was a murder behind the recreation centre. Maybe the cops DO fly over, or the military, or someone else. Bill said he saw a police helicopter circling in the air above our local Walmart, where someone had threatened a clerk in the Customer Service department. For God's sake, people! If you have an item to return, bring your receipt. Don't wear the socks before you bring them back.
That sound MUST be coming from somewhere. It doesn't even seem to be outside. When I'm outside, there's too much ambient noise to pick this up. I swear, every so often it completely stops.
A noise machine?
I just had this weird memory. In Chatham, when I was growing up, the environment was very strange. I see now that we weren't a normal family. We used to get static on the TV all the time, for no reason that was apparent. There was an old lady named Mrs. Clackett, and for some reason my mother used to say, "Mrs. Clackett is running the static machine again."
Does someone around here have a static machine? A doom machine? A what?
Now I remember something else. In Chatham, there was a local whore. She had a lot of children, rumored to be by different men. One of her children was red-haired. A nice lady asked her, "Does his father have red hair?"
"I don't know. He didn't take his hat off."
I don't know what's wrong with me.
A George Takei moment
I have been looking for this for YEARS! You know those Pinterest atrocities - chunks and hunks of images, half the text cut off - abominations, really. I found a piece of this image several years ago and went looking for the rest of it, and couldn't find anything. Nothing whole, anyway. People carve things up into Facebook profile pictures/covers, YouTube avatars, etc. But at last, when I least expected it, when I was looking for something else, this popped out at me.
I think it is simply glorious, and in pristine condition. It is THE post-War spirit, complete freedom from care and restriction. No more rationing of happiness or anything else! The fierce glare of the car only adds to the atmosphere, the bared teeth and aggressive, staring headlights.
And then I found this:
I think this was originally two pages in a magazine. I have seen, somewhere, a poster-ish version of the first page, but it's inaccessible to me.
I am having a George Takei moment.
OH MY.
Meanwhile, please join my Festival of Old Red Buicks. I would have made a slideshow out of this, as usual, but the proportions didn't work, so I'll glom them all together into one "thing".
An old guy driving a beautiful old Buick.
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Why do we live and die? Thoughts late at night
These are a few thoughts from late at night. I didn't know I was going to say them. Please forgive the cliche-y thumbnail. There was no thumbnail to this one at all, because the video was so dark. I'm slowly learning that a video needs a decent thumbnail. For years my eye has been caught by them, but I didn't know it was happening. At any rate, these are the thoughts that come to you late at night, just from wherever, from your life.
Paperback writer: come take a look
So what is this? Anyway?? For a long time, I posted a gif at the bottom of my blog entries, along with a link to my Amazon author page. It was a kind of signature, along with a little publicity for my actual work. So why did I stop? I got soooooooo sick of doing it, and felt it was so utterly futile ( I mean, WHO goes on my Amazon author page?) that I dropped it. But I was left with this super-cute collection of signature gifs. I have a few thousand gifs in my collection, most of which I made myself. It would be nice to think that SOMEONE might go on my page, just to take a look at everything I've written - and by the way, all three of my novels are still for sale! Maybe I'll start doing it again. Doesn't seem likely, but maybe.
Donald Trump vs Justin Trudeau: The political handshake
I! Love!! This!!! I cannot tell you how elated I feel! I guess that reveals how I will grasp at any little scrap of hope in the miserable slag-heap of the Trump administration. But I have never been more proud to be a Canadian. Justin Trudeau may look like a pretty boy, but he is actually very tough, a trained boxer and athlete who has a sort of martial-arts-style grace. So when it came time to meet his adversary, Trump soon became prey. Justin had obviously sized up his opponent and realized he had to jump in with ferocious confidence. He literally grabbed the man by the arm while squeezing his hand, disabling that infamous arrogant jerk-you-around "handshake". He had him in his grip, from both sides! I keep watching and watching this video because for some absurd, insane reason, it gives me hope.
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
We all go a little mad sometimes
A strange animation. This was put together from a half-dozen still pictures gleaned from Psycho, the famous parlour scene in which Norman eerily proclaims, "We all go a little mad sometimes." As you can see, there is a frame or two missing here and there.
This was an unusual project. I tried to get as many facial expressions out of six frames as possible. Norman's kind of a strange character anyway, so watching him twitch around and go from ranty to sweet in a nanosecond is nothing new.
But it was also an eerie feeling. These are just still pictures taken from a movie from more than 50 years ago. Yet there are moments - seconds - when something seems to be happening. Some kind of movement, an integrity between the frames that creates - something. Animation fools the eye. Film itself is an illusion, a lot of still pictures that the eye or the brain kindly blurs together and interprets as motion. It's also kind of strange that the background is so similar, though the fact that it kind of seethes in and out adds a special weirdness. The pictures aren't all framed exactly the same, though they're closer than most groups of movie stills even approach. Only one of them is way out of proportion, but the expression was so good that I had to use it. It gives the whole thing a weird lurching quality that I like.
Norman seems to be yelling "stop!" - or is it "stab"?
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