Joe Bob Buys a Hat Production Diary

This stop ani­ma­tion stuff is fun. I’ve fin­ished two scenes of my next attempt and fid­dled around with it in Flash a bit. I’m try­ing to get the image qual­i­ty as high as pos­si­ble, and the max­i­mum res­o­lu­tion for a Flash frame is 2880 pix­els. The unfor­tu­nate side effect that I’ve come across is that when I try to export it as an .swf movie file, my com­put­er runs out of mem­o­ry. Now, I have 1GB of RAM, so were not talk­ing a pid­dly amount of mem­o­ry here. I think if my proces­sor were faster it would export just fine. So it looks like I’m going to have to knock down the res­o­lu­tion a bit more. I’ll prob­a­bly stick it some­where around 1000 pix­els wide.

I’m also search­ing for free gener­ic stock music for films, which is much hard­er. Oth­er dif­fi­cul­ties that I’ve run across would require me to shell out mon­ey for a new cam­era and tri­pod, and since I’m just doing this for shits and gig­gles, that ain’t gonna hap­pen. Some­times I bump the cam­era or the set pieces and have to realign them, and oth­er times the cam­era won’t focus on what I need it to focus on, despite using the spot focus func­tion. I think this is a side-effect of hav­ing it in macro mode. This next adven­ture with Joe Bob is only slight­ly more com­plex than the first screen test. There will be music hope­ful­ly, but no inter­ti­tles or dia­logue. I’ll save that for when I’m good. I’d real­ly like a huge, stur­dy and lev­el table to do all this on, but my kitchen table will do.