progress in work

used crayola markers for this. nice to relieve fear of using expensive or unfamiliar tools while keeping room for experimentation.

i arrived at last night’s desk appointment with every intention to continue working on the inaugural self-addressed online entry in what is my experimentation in documenting process. imagining there must be a simpler statement than that, but i need to continue working to get more familiar with what i need, and want, this space to be. this is for me and i will make it what i need and want it to be. i will make notes as it evolves, takes and changes shape. no rush to define or draw conclusions, this process is the work.

anyway… last night was also when this 10-year-old ride or die desktop announced its contribution to procrastination. it had, in fact, very little remaining storage space and could no longer execute the memory heavy tasks at hand. this is the point i’ve reached with most of my tech: balancing on the knife’s edge of obsolescence.

so, in an ongoing effort to keep the motor running, i faced months-old procrastination on another front and began revising the weather with clouds and sync settings. this unplanned computer snow day provided a getaway to escape the near crippling anxiety brought on by sitting down in front of the computer to do this right now.

but i stuck around and watched Normal People while i waited.

the series creeped completely under my radar earlier this year, and i had been reminded of it recently. four episodes into settling comfortable into my virtual waiting room i realized i’d been hooked. the troller was kind enough to bring me in 12 episodes later and i was able to come back to my desk this morning.

i rarely start a series with the intention of binging. sometimes i’ll watch a few episodes back-to-back, but not so much season-to-season. shorter half hour shows are a little harder to portion, especially when they’re good. this show is good. to prevent disrupting sam, who was working in the other room; i wore headphones. that made a huge difference i think. the sound design was top notch. and, because i watched it all in one go, i picked up on a few repeated elements: connell’s chain, hitched breathing, fringe, and marianne’s uncanny resemblance to anne hathaway and charlotte gainsbourg.

i like how this combo came out with the vector graphic sign board. used photoshop to put the GIFs together with different layers. hot tip: remember that files intended to be used for GIFs can be either 8-bit or 16-bit color, but not 32-bit in order to save/export as GIF.

among other things i also took notice of how often the term “struggle” was used. connell said it several times in the context of self critique, which is likely when i became aware of it. in part due to the frequency of use and also recognizing an internalization of that word. turning inward and thinking about what i struggle with, fear stands out most.

fear of failure stays right up there among the usual suspects. but this moment of fear was overwritten by excitement to make something for myself pure and simple. i wanted to start out making “under construction” type graphics between going “live” and actually writing something. maybe that’s because announcing something is “under construction” or a “work in progress” is a comfortable buffer between thinking and producing. however, it did provide an opportunity to test out some stuff with GIFs while tipping my hat to the OG internet days when i’d made geocities and anglefire websites that started out as a host for some “under construction” GIF. I kinda wanted to re-live the excitement of announcing, “just about, but not yet,” even if it was only to myself.

little bug model made from toothpicks, some card stock, and scotch tape. super helpful for visualizing tricky shadows.

the first GIF i tested out, the blinking sandwich board one, was made almost entirely in the computer except for figuring out the shadows. i had a hard time visualizing the shadows in photoshop alone, and i don’t have access to the 3D modeling software i used when i worked in architecture which would have made quicker work of it.

i started out in photoshop creating a silhouette for the sign the way i’d learned in architecture school when making shadows for entourage/scalies/people in renderings to give them dimension. but i was struggling with the sandwich board type legs and couldn’t visualize it when using a silhouette made from an outline of the image itself. sam passed by my desk and i asked him for help, not something i’m so used to doing. i don’t know why, pride maybe? pride probably… we talked about how he would approach it and tried this and that: distortion, perspective, warp, all that. we went around some quick sketches, but i didn’t really see it yet. i remembered we had toothpicks in our kitchen junk drawer and made a bug model which helped a lot.

i am pleased with the GIFs and the process making them. i am really, really happy i asked for help; and that i was patient with myself and sam when i had a hard time seeing things the way he did. this process helped me remember resources are in all shapes and that i’ll need to pick up more short-cuts in illustrator and photoshop in order to get faster at some of the digital stuff.

even with a bit of struggle, things turned out.