Although completely unrelated to music, I learned something very useful today. And as I haven’t blogged since friday I would like to take this excuse to share:

When you accidentally rub your eyes with chilli on your fingers (and, as you surely know, pain ensues), wash your eye with milk!

I presume the same is true if you accidentally touch other things you shouldn’t have :/

Don’t forget this, it will be helpful one day.

That is all.

I thought I’d take a risk and upload this track, ‘Ubik,’ today. I finished reading the incredible Philip K. Dick novel yesterday and this track, though originally unrelated, seemed to resonate with the feeling it left me with.

And I say it’s a risk because this is about as far from center as I have ventured musically, and I don’t know how it will go down with the world.

But here it is nonetheless, in it’s appropriated glory (sorry Mr Dick).

^^ (In the members area player only for the time being)

Promised I would put some shots up here of the work in progress for the animation. Kind of worried about it all amounting to nothing now, but all the test shots i’ve done have been quite promising. Anyway it’s fun… even if there are better things I could be doing… *cough* writing *cough*

I was planning to make 16 robots originally, one for each frame in a nice fluid walking animation. But I thought it would be a ball ache when really only the legs need to move. So I’m making one body and the legs will detach.

We started with these frames for the legs. The wooden disks all have centres and a place for a 2p coin marked, and holes drilled:

 
 
Then the wire is shaped around the coin and both are glued to the wooden disc. The coins are to hold the legs to the body, which I’ll show you in a second:

Frames for the legs

Legs attached

 
 
The legs are actually hair curlers, so they have wire in them already which makes it easier to bend them into shape later.

Feet made of raisin boxes and more bits of bent wire:

 
 
And then I had to bend them all into the right shape to make it look like a walking animation… which took a while :/
But here they are:

 
 
There’s a video on my vimeo account of a quick test I did that night to see how they looked when stacked up as frames… And right now we’re papier-mache-ing them, which is a truly tedious task becuase they’re so f*cking fiddly.

More to come, though music is the priority til another track is ready and uploaded, and tomorrow is a write off as I have to get to London and back. Which only leaves friday… Groan.

Night then

that blog didn’t materialize last night :l

I was crazy busy trying to move everything to a new server, as godaddy is a piece of shit and some stupid redirect carry on at their end is stopping y site being indexed.

It’s really boring, but if anyone happens to stumble across this blog becuase they’re having 302>302>200 redirects, I feel for you…

Perhaps will do prodigal blog (blodigal prog?) this eve. Must get down to some musics now, friday looms!

So I have decided to make a stop frame animation featuring a robot, and emily and I spent most of Sunday making the robot :).

I have been a bit busy messing with the members area of this site, but I will do a proper blog tonight with pictures.

just a bit of fun.. a warm up for something much bigger next week :)

Had an overwhelming urge to film something, ideally in stop motion as i don’t have a working video camera.

hmm… ponder ponder scheme furrow etc

Took a little longer than expected to get into shape. I shouldn’ve known, it always does.

Here comes the obligatory disclaimer: It’s not a *great* mix… It’s been so long since I sat down to mix anything purposefully! Ho hum, sure I’ll get better as I do more. This isn’t eq’d very well, that’s too loud, etc etc.

Me and Jon played this live and flimed it (just added a bit of bass and 1 tiny BV) but I’m gutted because the video is corrupt and won’t play :/ Might work on it tomorrow

NIght x

…I got down to some today. Recording a live track for you to be more specific. It’s just guitar and mandolin with my mate, Jon. But I think it’s going to sound alright. Working on a mix tonight, but riddled with lyrical mistakes so we will probably re-record tomorrow (hopefully!)

Oh, and yes I know the old Sleep Song never materialised but I hope now that this week’s track is almost done I can spend the rest of the week focussing on last weeks and still be up to speed :)

yer