Blog: Putting The Hours In

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One of the MAJOR effects of doing the podcasts for Totally Acoustic has been to make me KEENLY AWARE of the fact I need to PRACTICE if I'm going to play some DIFFERENT songs. I have a whole BATCH of the above that I'm intending to do at tonight's gig, so last night had a PROPER practice of the LOT. TWICE!

I am nothing if not the consumate professional, and this was further demonstrated by me doing a metric TONNE of further work on the Christmas single over the course of the rest of the evening. Possibly due to the over-enthusiastic use of a MEGA WATTAGE light source there was the occasional bit of GLARE in the video, so I spent an hour or so going through it FRAME BY FRAME to remove the ones with flashes in, and stretch the ones either side slightly to cover the gap.

It made me go a bit BOGGLY EYED, and made me realise that maybe that's why Aardman Animation characters LOOK that way. Nick Parks always seems to me to be one of those artists who look like they were DRAWN by themselves (an excellent example of this is Chris Weston of 2000AD/The Twelve, but there are many MANY others). Have you ever seen him and Wallace together? Oh, well, yes... yes, I suppose you have (A LOT) but still: whenever I see Wallace And Gromit I always think of pictures of Nick Parks looking excited and a bit boggly eyed, and now I realise that he's probably BECOME that way due to STARING at frame by frame animations for too long.

ANYWAY, that's how I felt, but it didn't stop me carrying on with some further retouching, finishing off with an end credits sequence that filled me with DELIGHT. I wanted to base it on old BBC credits from the 1970s/80s, so had a look at a bit of "Ivor The Engine". That's guaranteed to make ANYONE well up a bit, but I was still surprised to find my little heart SWELL to BURSTING when I saw how nice it looked having "(C) MJH&V MMVIIIII" at the bottom of the screen.

OLD PEOPLE: you know what I mean. PEDANTS: I know, but MMX looked far too diddy.

The key point here is that i think this video is going to be LOVELY when it's finally finally finished. There's still some minor adjustments to make to the sound mix, and probably to the film itself, but we're very close. Release day will be Monday December 13th, i think, so mark it on your ADVENT CALENDARS now!!

posted 23/11/2010 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

re: spambot filter, if you hear "to-whit to-whoo" then it is not an owl, it is at least two owls, I heard that on QI. One owl says "twit" and another one responds with "twoo". I think that is right. See you tonight at the Lamb I hope!
posted 23/11/2010 by Pauly

Yes indeed, MMX sounds like a DJ or something. Occasionally (very occasionally) it's best to get things deliberately wrong for style reasons.
posted 23/11/2010 by Dan H

Oh yeah - hate to tell you this, but it's Nick *Park*. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Park
posted 24/11/2010 by Dan H

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SPAMBOT FILTER: an animal that says 'buzz' (3)
	(e.g. for an animal that says 'cluck' type 'hen')