Hypercompendia

It’s been nearly impossible for me to force myself back into the creative groove, and this, based on what I’m trying to learn, adds about a hundred cargo cars to the engine car of a train heading uphill.  Uphill without directions.  And like with an aerial map instead of street turns and a big red star.

I thought I knew what I wanted to do and what I needed to learn in software.  After watching many, many short film clips, there’s now a kettleful of ideas that go nowhere.  The different forms of animation, the different methods of presentation, the simplicity and the intricacy all appeal in some way until I view something entirely different and want to go that way for a while.  Excitement builds even as doubts about ability grow.  Even the end goal is just a case of self-satisfaction rather than a career since age is most definitely not on my side. 

Mass confusion is what I am.  Wonder how that would look in video.

With the clouds thinning out to wispy threads streaming south in the sky of my mind, I’ve once again clicked open the Alice software and diddled around in it just reacquainting myself with its format. There’s Socrates standing in the middle of the garden, hailing a rather odd character that’s unsure of his surroundings as he enters and approaches the other man.  In another scenario, there are a man and woman with their arms at odd angles standing hip-high in a maze. 

What was I thinking?

Slowly it all comes back to me and it turns from a spectator sport to movie director.  Now I need the key grip, the cameraman, lighting and more to bring it back to life.

A quick flip through the Learning to Program with Alice book is inspiring with its simple-looking directions and wonderful full color images that are meant not to intimidate but to welcome an attitude of learning. 

A sky?  Maybe better: an ocean of mind, where the flotsam and jetsom of shipwrecks bounce away on the waves of time.  Crystal blue waters that beg exploration, flashes of bright colored fish darting around, and a promise of treasure below.

Working with Alice, gathering and molding ideas that are glimmers of thought that could be even a small part of the big picture of a project, I find myself learning from nature too, just watching movement, motion, credibility we take for granted in a real world that can be mimicked or manipulated in a created one.

The Cardinal births seem to be two boys and a girl this year, though I can’t be quite sure until I see two of the same sex together in their feather-color-changing adolescence.  Even without the obvious I can still tell the young from their parents in their behavior.  One young male took a long time to get over that creepy, funny sensation of standing on birdseed at the feeder and preferred the sorting through the empty and the fallen seeds on the ground below.  One male just couldn’t get the hang of landing.  He’d swoop down from the spruce tree or in from the peaches, overshoot the mark and I’d watch as the bush swayed and ruffled against his rough flight as he’d spit out the other end and finally land in the next shrub over.  Yes, I laughed.  Quietly, to myself so as not to embarrass him.  But I also learned the flight of a something that was just an egg a few weeks ago and learning to maneuver in his world.  Motion.  Movement.  Not always smooth and flowing.

While I’m dabbling in the Alice software and learning little by little how to maneuver within it, I seem to have lost all interest in anything other than the learning of the program. 

My Muse has left the building.

Ideas for using animation as well as any other form of graphics and audio come in sparks of oh, that’d be neat and just as quickly fizzle and blacken into useless bits of ash that blow away before they are collected in the urn of the mind.  I was afeared of this; the telling tale of the last few months reveals a lack of any output in even simple text. 

The silver lining though, I suppose, would be that if the creative spirit ever does come back to dwell within to brighten up the mind, the rest of me, the practicality, will be ready.

Going off in thirty different directions as if playing all the players of a game for lack of friends.  Looking to the board to see the paths, they often run in parallel flight separated but by a hedge too high as in a maze.

In working with Alice, it dawned on me that part of its fascination is the movement, the ability for motion, not just in characters but in viewpoint expressed by camera angle.  This reaches out a tentacle to other projects, such as The Paths or Recycling, both of which I’ve pretty much abandoned for the time.  Recycling is, I think, a decent bit of prose and while I was proud of adding, drawing, taking pictures for the graphics and overcoming my timidity to speak into a mic, the audio, it’s nothing I’m particularly proud of as a piece of work beyond the accomplishment; the learning of the way to make a static text come alive through software.

Now something’s just occurred to me: to learn Adobe Premiere by reworking Recycling may be a good idea, but if I want to really make the piece sing, I must admit I "settled" for rather static objects and images and merely played with Photoshop and Illustrator for effects (while learning that software too, of course).  The images I made up just match the words, but not the story.  Is Jesus Christ supposed to be there or be a metaphor?  Is Earth a place, or Mars?  The only one I think I came real close to, using imagery to match the meaning is the final tunnel turned birth canal and even that’s not quite right.  The poem is about a desire, a conflict and a release.  None of these images truly display that; Earth as Earth impedes, I’m thinking now, rather than follows the flow.

So even as I learn to work with motion, I see its value in other creative areas.  This is something extra Alice teaches.