CmdrTaco's Journal: Bab 5, Animation, Penguicon

I was sick all weekend. Some sort of cold/sinus thing that kept me pretty well on my ass. The upside is that I had some cool stuff to watch on ye old boob tube... lately I've been watching Bab 5 on DVD. I'm shamed to admit that I've never watched this show before. I've been netflixing the discs, and thought the show wholey mediocre. Then like around episode 7 they had a really good episode. Kathleen has seen the whole series years ago and was really pimping the show to me... and since the first half dozen episodes were mediocre or bad, well she was pleased that we finally hit "Good" stuff. Now I'm looking forward to seeing there the show goes. Of course, with 102 more episodes, I imagine it will be a year before I get through them all!

Last week I animated a short commercial. You'll be able to see it soon enough. But this has really got my animation bug on again. Last fall Big Rob & I wrote a screenplay for shits and giggles... we tried to shoot it ourselves with friends. Unfortunately there were several problems- like the fact that we have one camera, and the sound was awful, oh and we can't act worth shit. I cut together one and a half scenes and it was pretty clear that it wasn't going to work out how we wanted.

Now I'm thinking more about trying to animate that script, or at least use it as a launching point for something based on the same characters. I have some stylistic ideas about how to do it. The original script was really funny: It was originally staged as a sort of pseudo reality TV thing, we were watching a lot of Trailer Park Boys at the time, and thought that the format could work well with our characters and setting.

If animated, the whole thing needs to be changed up a bit... for starters, since the animation quality will be pretty shitty, some of the physical gags need to be rewritten or removed. We'll need to focus more on the dialog and less on the actions of the characters in order for me to reasonably be able to animate the whole thing more or less alone. Practically speaking the original script was set in reality. Animation gives us a lot more flexibility about how we define "reality" in the show.

It'll likely be months before I have anything to show for it since we'll be operating at the speed of hobby unless some Slashdot reader is actually the president of CBS or something. No? Didn't think so. You bastards.

Penguicon is coming up again, and I'm looking forward. This will be my third year attending the show. I'm supposedly going to do a panel or speech or something, but I don't exactly know for sure what will be expected of me. What I do know is that I shall drink beer. Hang out with nice people. And maybe catch a few panels. If you're in eastern michigan, you might really enjoy it. Kathleen claims she's going to wear her halloween costume at least once during the show. My wife is hot.