The Chatsworth Studio

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I was unexpectedly evicted back at the end of March of this year. On April Fools Day I moved into the Chatsworth Studio. The place has 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and plenty of open floor space up front for the Disney Desk and bookshelves.

Honestly the place is bigger than I need but it is a fine place to sit back and reconsider steps moving forward.  I like the Chatsworth Studio, but the sound of airplanes with their air brakes engaged and wind hissing around their landing gear roar overhead all day long.

Neighbors who spoke to me as I was moving in all said the same thing, “This is such a quiet neighborhood.” They must be deaf. I am awakened every morning about 6am by the first airplanes landing into the Orlando Airport. I kind of preferred the sound of ambulances screaming past my apartment in NYC. That sound I eventually learned to tune out.

Each day I scroll through Zillow and consider the possibility of finding a home to buy. One option was a nice log cabin up on the blue Ridge Parkway with an amazing view of the mountains from the back porch. It sold as I was daydreaming. Other times I look at amazing abandoned Victorian houses with turrets and opulent front porches, that would need tons of work. One had garbage stacked everywhere inside and a a drug addict was collapsed in the bed in the promo photos. The building was gorgeous, but would need about $500,000 worth of restoration work. I don’t think I am that ambitious.

Places that are appealing to me the most are small cabins and bungalows. Since I am a tumbleweed now, I look everywhere. I found a sweet little place in Grand Island Nebraska where my first Thorspecken relative settled back in the 1860s. I warned against Grand Island however since they might not have much art and culture. Then I found places in Appalachia and I am even considering places in the colder north. I figure global warming might make those places ideal in a few years. I look around Brooklyn where much of my family lived back in the 1800s but the prices are insane. Who knows where I will end up. For now, Chatworth is where I dream and scheme.

Royal Pets

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This was a portrait done for a friend who always wanted a royal portrait with her dogs.The black dog in particular looks very regal. The other pup is disinterested.

I have been told such royal portraits are quite sought after so I gave it a try. The crown is from another painting I did for the Orlando Shakespeare Theater. This is one advantage of digital painting in that you can recycle props.

Of course part of me wanted to add a COVID virus hidden somewhere in the picture but I resisted.

This morning as I tried to log onto this website to write an article I got a message that said: “Error establishing a database connection.” Who knows what that means but it is the equivalent of the Blue Screen of death. In panic mode I started researching all the myriad of steps I might have to take to get access to my creative content once again.

I texted my friend as well and she got on the case. She knows I have a tendency to scramble down the rabbit hole imaging the worst possible scenarios. My credit card info for the domain was out of date so I updated that information. But what if this was some sort of scam malware that forced me to enter financial information?

My friend got on a message board or chat with the site hosting company and managed to find out that the glitch was on their side having to do with server encryption communication protocols or something, or the other. It is all Greek to me.

Bottom line my friend got the site back on line by asking the right people the right questions.

COVID Dystopia: Jesus Dropped a Cluster Bomb

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In this shot from COVID Dystopia of a stillborn Jesus, there is no animation, just a depth map and camera pan downward towards the child. It is interesting that a new born is the first to experience zip ties.

I am about to wrap up a series of theater posters for the Shakes and when that is done I will dig back into several scenes to add more animation.

Yesterday was the notification date for the Tampa Film Festival, but they bumped the notification date out to June 30. I always have 20 film festival submissions in the works. This keeps me from spending an insane amount on submission fees for rejections.

I do a small amount of research every day on which film festivals might screen COVID Dystopia. It is a difficult process since the film will easily annoy any COVID minimizer. Any film festival jury will likely have COVID minimizers judging what should be seen.

COVID Dystopia is fast paced, has curses in the lyrics and expects a lot of an audience to keep up with the carnage.

If there is one thing the ongoing pandemic has taught me is that people are slow to react and quick to deflect and deny what is happening.

One audience member at the Cleveland Film Festival asked if I could expand on COVID Dystopia and flesh out a longer story line. It is a fine idea but it means another year of animation at least. I also am aware that everyone but a few are over COVID. The virus is however not done with us. The next story I might animate will be slower paced and hopefully tug at heart strings. That for now is just in the daydreaming stages.

COVID Dystopia: The Rally

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In this shot from COVID Dystopia, the former president tosses a skull out to the crowd at a rally. He was hosting packed rallies at the height of the pandemic. Each rally was its own unique superspreader event.

People still love the guy even after he was impeached twice and now is convicted on 34 counts in a New York court.

It is impossible to separate politics and the ongoing pandemic. Joe Biden won the election in part because he promised to follow the science in handling COVID. One in office however he proclaimed freedom from the virus on July 4th and accomplished what the former president wanted to do which was make the virus seem to disappear by dismantling all testing. More Americans have died under Biden’s presidency from COVID that during the former presidents reign.

Inn this shot people will know to look at the skull since it is the fastest thing moving. Also the previous shot of Sturgis had a bike rider with a skull and that skull is in the same location on the screen as this skull. Which keeps the audience from having to look around to find the action.

COVID Dystopia: Space X Flames

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I added animated flames to this scene from COVID Dystopia and I am glad that I did. I see a couple of gaps so i will add a few more flames today. I will also add masks to calm down the motion at the base of each fire. I also slowed down the burst of exhaust flame that transected the scene from right to left. I may refine the timing of that a bit more today.

Was all the extra work worth it? I think it was, and that is what matters.

I might get to the other scene I have been wanting to animate, namely the Norway Superspreader scene. That should go fairly quickly once I separate out each demon. I will make them all seem like they are walking my moving them forward and bobbing them up and down. Since there are no legs visible things should progress quickly. The trick will be to keep them all from moving in sync. Each will be animated separately at different stages of the walk to start. What seems simple is still pretty complex when it comes to animation.

Today I will find out if COVID Dystopia is accepted or rejected by the Portland Film Festival. I liked Portland when I rode my bike trough when I bikes across the country. I know that people don’t want to see these images since they want to believe life has returned to “Normal.” It hasn’t. We might be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with us.

COVID Dystopia: Sturgis Bike Rally

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In COVID Dystopia this scene appears in an instrumental section of the soundtrack. The Sturgis Bike Rally takes place every year at the start of August and it never took a break at the height of the pandemic.

Research after the Rally in 2020 verified that the rally was a superspreader event that bikers becoming infected and the bringing the virus back to their home state.

The problem of course is that without widespread testing it is impossible to prove the virus was picked up at Sturgis. The bikers could have picked it up at a gas station of restaurant o the road. Plausible deniability makes it possible for business to tick along as if nothing is happening.

In this shot I particularly liked adding flames to the front tire. The flames being blown backwards were a real challenge and honestly they could be better. Sometimes however you just have to accept what is done and move on.

Today I will be animating flames again. Hopefully I have picked up some tricks along the way. It has been several months since I animated flames, so it might take me a while to get back up to speed.

COVID Dystopia: Face Blindness

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Face blindness can be caused by COVID. It happens in women more often that men. What results is an inability to recognize faces of acquaintances, friends and family.

In this shot from COVID Dystopia, here is no animation in this shot other than a camera move with a depth map applied. I did two versions of this painting, one without the smear effects and one with the effect. There is simply a lap dissolve between the two versions of the shot to have the smear appear.

As always seems to happen as I write about each shot I just realized that I could improve it. My thought now it to take the un-smeared shot into Procreate and then recreate the smears by incrementally moving he smear over each face. Procreate has an ability to play back every brush stroke as it is created, so I could animate the smear.

The shot is less than a second long so I have to wonder if people would even notice the extra effort that would go into the shot.

I think it is worth experimenting with the idea. I claimed the film was completed in 2023, but I am still adding animation today. It would be nice to work on something that had a definite clean cut end date. I keep improving it because it is so universally despised by most film festivals. The real problem is that the film lack a story that pulls at heart strings. It is instead a fast paced barrage of imagery. Well this film is what it is. I will hopefully tell a more universal story for the next film I create.

COVID Dystopia: Watch the Launch

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The danger is sharing each shot in turn is that I always realize that there is more animation that can be added. This shot shows a huge crowd gathered on a bridge in Florida to look at a rocket launch. There were very few masks and people packed themselves in like sardines.

The animation in this shot consists of the astronauts looking up and a blast of light shoots from screen right to screen let. I envy those fresh oxygen supplied helmets. My thought was that the rocket blast would distract from the fact that the much smaller flames rising from the crowd would be less noticeable.

Now I am thinking I should dig in and animate all those tiny flames. I know how to do it since I did it in dozens of other scenes. Will people notice the movement of the small flames? Probably not, but I need to know I did my best to make the scene as strange and dynamic as I could. This will be about a days worth of work.

The list of subtle improvements to the film keeps getting longer. Right now I am in crunch mode working on Shakes Theater posters for next season, but once I am done with that, animation will begin again.

I am pleased that some film festivals have started reaching out to me, but there is no mad rush of festivals willing to screen the film. The message that the virus is not done with us, does not jive with the desire to think life has returned to a pre-2019 “normal” that includes packing  mask less crowds into movie theaters.

Medical Checkup: Ho

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I went in for a check up so I can have prescriptions filled.The doctor I saw for years retired and the second doctor I was going to see left the practice. I got a letter say he was returning, but he would not take my medical insurance. So I had to get by with what is available and that is this small clinic on Mills Avenue near Wills pub. The exterior is run down but the waiting room was freshly furnished.

I rushed to get a sketch done. I always think there is time to sketch when in a waiting room. I was called in just before finishing the line work.

In the much smaller exam room I looked around for any sign of HEPA filtration. There was non. The assistant wore a baggy blue surgical mask which is better than nothing.

One procedure was done. Jelly was smeared on my ankles and an ultrasound was dome to check if blood flow was good to the extremities. A blood pressure inflatable collar was wrapped around the ankle and tightened while listening to my heart beat. I have heard baby’s heart beat with that slithering whaoa whapa sound but never my own. The collar was inflated until my heart bet was silenced. It is kind of unnerving to listen to your heart beat getting choked off. Anyway I seem to have a decent heart beat in my ankles.

I need to get blood work done and a box is being mailed to my place. I am supposed to poop in the box and send it off to a lab to check for colon cancer.

The mask less Doctor Ho asked what I do and so I showed her the sketch. She shared it with the receptionists who are hidden behind the large computer monitors.

COVID Dystopia: PPE

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This shot from COVID Dystopia has the nurses wings animating and a depth map effect for the rest of the shot. I made the wings partially transparent so the window could be seen through the delicate feathers.

Keeping the policeman stoic an still seems to make sense.

This morning I got locked out of the studio, so I am sneaking inn a quick write up between tasks.

Tonight begins a marathon of sketching Fringe shows. The show I will sketch tonight is Chronicles of an Uber Driver.

Several Fringe show produecrs have reached out and I will be sketching throughout the Press previews. This will be a crazy week.