Apples

When it comes to big projects I can be the best procrastinator out there. 

Back in 2010 I started the "Apples" project. This was an animation I wanted to make, with fancy sounds and wicked animation. In the end it turned out just basic. But still, I got to finish it, which is pretty amazing for me.

It took me up until 2013 to actually finish it. Most of the basic work had already been done in 2010. Stuff like the storyboard, timing, and even a whole bunch of animation. But then I got to a speed bump where I stopped working on it for a while, but that "while" turned into a few years.

That speedbump was something stupid that I did to myself. I had chosen to put the outlines of the character in different colors. With that I mean that a grey hat would have a darker grey outline, while the purple hair would have a darker shade of purple for its outline.
This of course meant that I had a lot of colors to put down, not only the inside colors, but also the outlines. Let me tell you, putting ten different colors on the outlines for each of the 24 frames in a second adds up to a whole lot of painstakingly slow work.

Being a massive procrastinator, that speedbump made me lose interest in the project. Thus it was only in 2011 that I continued working on the project. However, it could not be helped, again it fell in my folder of projects that I'm still working on and it stayed there for a long time. Apparently I did make two extra frames in 2012.

The real finish was in the summer of 2013. You know that moment where you look at the kitchen sink and you see a pile of dirty dishes, and suddenly you get the feeling its moving, sort of breathing maybe? That moment where you realise you better clean that shit up before you end up calling a biologist with the good news you discovered a new creature.
Yeah, that's the moment I had with my animation as well, I just had to finish it. Most of the work had already been done so it was just a matter of finishing up the last frames of animation and doing some slow repetitive work. So in August I finally uploaded the finished animation on devianart.

Back then I had no idea how to convert .sfw files into video files for youtube. Thanks to my Dailywulfy project of last year I learned of a program on Newgrounds that allows you to transform any flash file into a moviefile. It was a revelation.

Anyways, here you go.

What a world we live in

Looks like I'm not procrastinating right now.

You know those blogs which have died a silent death, but then years later they make a new post and are all like "This is it, from now on I'll post every day and this'll become the best blog EVAR!"? Usually those blogs die off again after that one new post and you'll hear nothing of them again for the rest of eternity.

Yeah..

I'm pretty sure my blog belongs to that group, about 87% chance of it. Nonetheless, it is now time to start ranting. Enjoy.

A good point to start is the following question: "What the hell have I been doing in the past five years?". To awnser that question I could write a whole bunch of posts, explaning in excruciating detail what has happend. But to hell with that, here's the short version.

tl:dr:
Vacation to Canada, brother having a kid, changing work location, living on my own, grandparents died, became godfather of two lovely little buggers and I did a year of making animations every day.

Oh yeah, look at that, its even in chronological order. You can thank my journal for that. Yeah I said it, I have a journal. Not that I use it on a regular basis, far from it. Usually there's a month inbetween the moments I write someting in it. However, I have been using it for the past two decades. Because of that it has accumulated a lot of thoughts, lost mindsets, opinions and ideas. Most of them are as foolish as they are long.

An example: (translated from dutch for your comfort)

A minute ago I was sittinig at my window, looking at the moon. It occured to me that next year or the year after that people might be flying around the moon again, courtesy of SpaceX.  It would be the first time in my life that I could look at the moon and know that I'm not just looking at a dead rock, but also people who are actually there. Wtf.

After that I started looking at the stars and for the first time I realised that around each and every one of those stars there is probably a planet. In the past I only saw stars when I looked at the night sky. But tonight I gazed at the stars and I saw more, in my mind it was not just lonely stars, but stars with a planets floating around it, maybe even more then one planet, heck maybe even a  planet with actual life on it. Its fascinating to look at the sky with this in mind.

  

Its not that I didn't know this before, but with scientist discovering more and more exoplanets lately, the idea becomes more and more realistic. Kinda like a kangaroo, I have never seen a kangaroo in real life, yet science/photo's has shown me that they are real. Just like those planets, I have never seen them, but science has shown me that they are there, floating around those little bright lights in the sky.  

I like that idea, its comforting in a way.

In case that it isn't obvious, I like science. More specifically, I like spaceships, spacetravel and the fact that I live in an era where I might experience a new space revolution. The only sad part about it is that I do not have a degree in rocket sciene and thus I cannot participate in pushing the space science to the next level.

So I'll just sit around here and entertain whoever that reads this blog. I might need to bring some snacks and drinks if I want to keep people interested.