THE ARRIVAL.002

When I was 11 years old I read Starlog magazine religiously. The first issue that I bought had a story on the matte painter for Star Wars. I was completely blown away. That was the first time I’d seen how any kind of special effect was done. Soon I was breaking apart all the model cars and airplanes that I’d built so that I could fashion my own miniature spaceships for my science fiction epic. At some point I remember thinking it would probably be easier and certainly cheaper to make an animated sci-fi film. Then you wouldn’t need giant sound stages or elaborate alien costumes. You could just do anything that you could dream up. But once I broke out the calculator and realized how many drawings I’d need to make a movie (129,600 for 90 minutes!!) I totally gave up on that and went back to flipbooks.

Now, 28 years later, I have Second LifeFinal Cut Studio and I’m beside myself with how much fucking fun it is to create my “robot movies.” I wrote the script for this episode last week and I was going to wait until my MacBook Pro came back from being repaired (one of the fans stopped working) but looking at the storyboard it looked simple enough for my old computer to handle. So I dove in and stared working. Once I got started I couldn’t stop and ended up pulling an all-nighter. I’m so excited about how this came out. I love all my visual and sound effects and for once I think the story I wrote is good. I’ve probably watched this video 10 times since I posted it.

And that brings me back to videoblogging and art in general and how satisfying it is to do something just for the love of doing it. I know this video (or any video on this site for that matter) is not for everyone but that’s not the motivation. This goes way back for me.

BTW, Aren and Lifal have there own videoblog –> When We Were Robots