Here is a short animation test I made yesterday of three cars emitting exhaust in different ways. This is for the current animation project (still untitled). I think that car one will the one used. Car two, with slightly more prominent exhaust, will also probably appear in closeup (the main role of the cars is to pollute the city, but they’ll also appear as set dressing, and I wanted a slightly less conspicuous version). Car three was my first attempt, even though I didn’t really think that would be the version finally used I wanted to play around with particle emitters a bit and figure out how to operate them, so used the opportunity to learn. I may have another attempt but using particles with a more stylised texture to fit better with the drawn style of the other elements of the animation. However all is subject to Laura’s agreement (she’s in Italy for a bit so I have temporarily free artistic reign).

Yesterday I went to a gig at Sala Galileo, a bar and well-known venue for live music. Playing were The Wave Pictures, a British group that are one of my favourites at the moment. They were awesome, and very well received by a packed house. This was the penultimate date in their current (and I believe second) Spanish tour. Musically they are a pretty traditional indie-rock three piece, the kind of music that doesn’t actually do much for me. But what’s special about them are the lyrics – witty and deft, full of self depreciation, odd-ball love songs and bizarre metaphors. Lyrically they have much in common with the likes of Hefner, a great British indie band with whom they are intimately connected – being friends and collaborators with Darren Hayman, the former Hefner frontman (whose recent solo album, Pram Town, which I thoroughly recommend, played in its entirety before the gig).

I went to the gig on my own, as I seem unable to pursuade anyone else of the merits of the group, but nevertheless enjoyed myself immensly, as you can here in this video where I, along with the rest of the crowd, can be heard shouting along to what I believe to be the best pop lyric ever:

I have tried explaining to various different people in two different languages the magic of the lyric, but mostly they just look at me as if I’m odd. This I find weird, because nobody will look at you odd if you say you like Magritte, and this I find more marvellous.

Anyway, the gig was cool, the venue small and intimate, the crowd friendly, with plenty of banter between them and the band, despite the language gap.

Actually though, probably the nicest surprise of the gig was the support act, Bristolian SJ Esau. I’d not heard of him and so listened to a couple of tracks before going without being overawed, but live he was something else. A one man band with an array of gadgets in front of him, a looping pedal and rack of effects at his feet, a guitar and a single cymbal. You’ve pretty much won me over if you play a guitar with one hand, a synth with the other, while using the headstock of the guitar to beat a cymbal (miked up, if my eyes didn’t deceive me, with a BugBrand contact mike).
The process of performing by looping various bits and pieces over each other to create your own band and then playing along is one which, if not exactly mainstream, is fairly common these days (hello KT Tunstall) and is not without its pitfalls, fairly easily becoming repetitive, or noisy and murky, but Esau was none of that, and added to which his lyrics were original and witty.

A good night, all in all.

This evening I’ve decided to do nothing more than vegetate, after wandering like a zombie through my days (schedules which have roughly gone like this – up early, half hour editing/animating, to work (~1hr journey), work, lunch (1hr small group class, 40min editing, 20min eat), work, private class (1-2hrs), to home, photoshop mash / animate, bed (4hrs), up early, repeat) and, having wandered through a few days’ RSS feeds (never made it home last night), decided to post this half-sketched thought process that I’d been writing about our current project without fleshing it out. Picture:

Just random thoughts really, stuff I’d like to think more about really, but don’t have the time, nor the academic prompting.

One thing we’re doing in our current animation is manipulating children’s drawings and voices to construct an alternative vision of place, in particular of Madrid. Above is a work-in-progress street plan for this city, as yet unpopulated by buildings, people, animals, cars, etc. It’s a fairly intricate photoshop construction from a couple of road fragments drawn by children as a part of their own, different, imagining of the city. To be animatable we need something larger, and more structured, so I bashed that out. Below is a skyline, a much simpler cut-and-paste construction from a number of drawings of buildings. It’s just a temp picture at the moment, and may not make it into the final thing.

I’m quite interested anyway in cities, the way they’re constructed both in reality (if we believe in reality, which, as an aside, I’m not sure that I do), in the intentions of designers, and in the imagination. And this is quite a ripe field for exploration, I think. It seems that we might have a chance of touching on something quite profound with this process… but I’ll have to think a bit more before I can put some more intelligent ideas down.

Last night I asked my co-conspirator if we had any ethical concerns about the extent to which we edit the childrens’ pictures (I’d just finished inventing a dinning table out of a Parchís board) and she said, well – it’s better than slavedriving them into drawing picture after picture after picture.
This is probably the kind of thing that only I worry about, and to be honest it’s a fruit of mindless photoshopping that does let the mind wander, but I think that when we’ve finished it will be interesting to consider to what extent what we’ve made belongs to the children and to what extent it what belongs to us. More on this later (or not, you know how these things go).

[Comments appreciated, by the way. I feel like the internet is a bit empty at the moment]

This is what happens when you get distracted at midnight and someone tells you they’ve been struggling to get perspective right.

Obviously, I’m no interior designer, nor do I have more than the rudiments of 3D modelling abilities (and if I think about the time invested in acquiring those vestiges of skill and their almost complete inutility I shudder) but sometimes that’s all that’s needed. This is, I’m told, a self-cleaning bathroom.

Modelled and rendered in Blender.

More creatures in the school, this time a little more exotic:

We found this today in the toilets, a wee salamander. Opinion was completely split amongst the teachers as to whether it was gross or cute. I took it outside to release it and showed it to some kids on the way – they all thought it was cool.
Hope it survives the cold weather (which is, apparently, on its way out).

On Saturday, after working hard with Laura all afternoon on the aforementioned project, I made cocktails under the instruction of Elisa. Watch below:

It has been a joyful weekend of plumberliness in the flat. After a particularly destructive party on Thursday night (I was not directly involved) we found a bathtub full of what we thought was vomit. It turned out to actually be a blocked drain which we spent a good part of 2 hours trying to unblock, before finally realising that the culprit was actually a blocked drain elsewhere in the flat. By the end of Friday though we had functioning plumbing again. Then on Saturday the problem was a recalcitrant boiler. We spent nearly two days without hot water before our resident engineer worked out a way of keeping the boiler alight, but only if hot water was kept flowing. So we had a four-person shower relay – comical in the extreme – which worked fine until the shower (which has always been a little slow to drain) threatened to overflow. We solved this problem by having a standby waiting in the kitchen ready to turn the hot tap on in the sink every time the shower had to be switched off. What fun.
A plumber is supposed to come tomorrow, which, judging by experience, means in a week or two. Oh joy.

Here is a video of our adventures with the plumbing. It’s mostly in Spanish, but I’m sure that won’t stop you watching:

This is a screenshot of the project I’m currently working on with my friend Laura (we also did the kids faces). It’s still gestating really, but we have to work fast.

Yesterday we spent several hours doing donkey work and nailing down a rough continuity. Today I tightened up the edit on the first scene and started animation. Tomorrow and Tuesday I’m going to start preliminary storyboards while she does the same and we both crank out some more donkey work (image editing). Next project meeting: Wednesday – where we hope to block out a good portion of the whole think and get seriously underway. The next few weeks will be very busy indeed.

Incidentally, the “Tit” is the first three letters of “Titulo” – Spanish for Title, one of which we do not yet have.

I invented a cocktail today. It was an accident. I was supposed to be making Jarabe de Goma. Let’s back up a little, shall we.
Jarabe de Goma is essentially water with sugar dissolved in it (plus a few secret ingredients), it is a vital ingredient in many Peruvian cocktails, most notably Pisco Sour, as experienced by my dear sisters on their recent visit to Madrid:

foto by Hannah

You can’t buy Jarabe de Goma on this side of the ocean (or equator) and Elisa and I had brought quite a bit back with us from Peru in the summer (luggage accidents notwithstanding) But those sours above finished our supply off. Nevertheless, it can be manufactured pretty easily and today I thought I’d have a crack, and it did indeed prove to be surprisingly quick and easy. But after I’d filled up my bottle I still had some left in the pan – and what to do with it? Well, why not make a drink? I didn’t have much in the way of supplies around the house, but I knocked this up:

It’s 1 part whiskey, (nearly) 1 part concentrated lemon juice, 2 parts (hot) jarabe de goma and a dash of anisé.

Actually, it’s not too far removed from a whiskey sour. Using the hot jarabe makes it very wintery… I can feel how it would warm my bones if I were huddled snow-bound in a shack.

So here we go. During Easter it’s my aim to learn myself lots of pure data, a graphical programming language designed predominantly for processing audio. I’ve had my tinkerings before – but this time I’m serious. I don’t get on very well with programming, not that I’ve ever really thrown myself into it, but I like the visuality of pure data more than anything else… having little sliders and things really help me, as a person who thinks mainly visually, to work out what the heck’s going on.

So this is the current state of my experiments – not very exciting musically I’m sure you’ll agree – but it contains lots of useful bits and pieces which I’m going to develop more. It is basically a seven (odd number, I know) step sequencer that as time goes on ramps up the frequency of each note it plays at a different rate. The noise-maker itself is ten sine wave oscillators tuned to produce a bunch of harmonics (can you tell I’m only tentatively aware of what I’m talking about). Then there are two other auditory bits going on – every two seconds a one second sample of the sequencer’s output is made and then two consecutive samples are being played back at different rates, these then trigger some other oscillators. So building the sequencer and the samplers and a delay (which comes in last) and so forth have taught me quite a bit I think.

I have grand plans for this eventually (and can hear the sounds it should produce in my head – whether or not we arrive there remains to be seen) so here’s t0 messing around with noise!

Tardigrades have a body with four segments (not counting the head), four pairs of legs without joints, and feet with claws or toes. The cuticle contains chitin and is moulted. They have a ventral nervous system with one ganglion per segment, and a multilobed brain. Their pigment-cup eyes are rhabdomeric. Instead of a coelom they have a haemocoel. The only place where a true coelom can be found is around the gonad (coelomic pouch). The pharynx is of a triradiate, muscular, sucking kind, armed with stylets. Although some species are parthenogenetic, males and females are usually present, each with a single gonad. Tardigrades are eutelic (all adult tardigrades of the same species are believed to have the same number of cells) and oviparous. Some tardigrade species have as many as about 40,000 cells in each adult’s body, others have far fewer.

Inevitably the holidays turn my thoughts to redesigning snailsnail, why? As a distraction from other, more important activities. Here’s a mock-up I made – It’s a little flat and boring at the moment, and I can’t really think about colour until I have a proper monitor again, but anyway, this is what I’m thinking about in between cutting up children’s voices.

Words cannot describe how ridiculously tired I’ve found myself recently, and mainly without real reason. Yesterday I shortened my private class from two hours to one because I was practically dropping off while teaching it; and then in the metro I went out like a light and missed my station, waking up two stops later as the train entered sunlight and my body freaked out.

The culprit that particular day was that I went on a school trip with my year 3 and year 4 pupils to a safari park nearby. It was a lot of fun, but exhausting. Here are some animals:

foto by Montse

It’s probably decades since I’ve been to a Safari park, so it was nice to dredge up some old memories. And fun to lark around with the kids like a responsible teacher. Actually I spent most of the day being followed around by one of my little girls who definitly has a crush on me (I can tell because she’s always insulting me – “You see that hippo – that’s you”) and dual wielding (I’m such a geek) a video camera and my SLR.

Here is another bonus photo:

foto also by Montse

As part of my art class animation project we made flipbooks a couple of weeks ago, obviously there ain’t no lightboxes in the school, but who needs fancy kit when you’ve got a window?
Today in art I blathered on about proportion of human bodies – something about which I know next to nothing.
Tomorrow is the last day of school before the Easter holidays. I’m going to rest so much this coming week – so much I might not even move.