“The Depression of the Illegitimate Climate Scientist”

I wrote, recorded, and posted my latest writing exercise: "The Depression of the Illegitimate Climate Scientist".

Martha takes a break from making dinner to talk with her husband Sidney about their problems.

·         https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-depression-of-the-illegitimate-climate-scientist

I was a bit intimidated by the title, but I went ahead with it anyway. I felt it turned out OK. I plan to do a video based on it. I got stuck doing the video for the last one. Now I have two to do.

After I finished it, I came up with a very different approach to a story based on the same title. It might be interesting to try writing a series of short stories using the same title for each of them.

Other Projects

I plan to get back to work on my "Old Fogie Filmmakers" group idea. The staff at the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers are supportive of it. Just need to get past a little procrastination.

I bought a book on Blender. Blender is the 3D animation program I used for a few of my movies. I decided that I needed to gain a better idea about what it can do and how to do it. What I learned so far was mostly trial and error. The trouble with that approach is that you often don't learn a lot of the basics. Just need to get past a little procrastination.

Our script writer’s group is recruiting new members now. If you are interested, please get in touch with me.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

“The Sad Lady and the Hesitant Father-in-Law” Posted

What seems to be a chance encounter in a park turns out not to be random.

·         https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-sad-lady-and-the-hesitant-father-in-law

I didn’t think much about what I was going to write, until I sat down to write. I kept my writing down to 30 minutes. I did deviate in rewriting. I remove a line of dialogue that I didn’t like.

My initial worry was that it wouldn’t turn out very well, but when I was done, I felt quite good about it. It would be nice if other people liked it too, but that is for them to decide.

I posted the audio version of my writing exercise this week. This time I did the voice for the female character. I used Rovee in Audacity to try to make it sound like a woman. At least people should be able to distinguish it from the male voice I did.

I started work on the video of the story and made some progress. I talked to an actor about doing the woman’s voice and she was interested. I decided to wait for her rather than use my own voice before I finished the video.

Random Title Generator

I started to promote my random title generator for writing exercises. So far, I’ve had positive feedback on it.

https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/random-title-generator/

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

“The Hysteria of the Uppity Guru” Video

Last week I posted my recording of my writing exercise “The Hysteria of the Uppity Guru”. This week I turned that into a video using NAWMAL. This is part of my longer-term goal to remake my movie “The Barrier”.

I posted the finished video here:

·         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUQR1SYGDyA

My current goal is to practice with NAWMAL and other things to brush up on my skills, learn new techniques, and learn to work more efficiently. I want to get these exercises done faster, so as a result I kept track of the time I took.

The Time it Took

As with my other writing exercises, I limited my writing time to a half hour. I also did not do any rewriting. It took me about 2 hours to record, edit, and post the audio version.

I used portions of the audio recording for the video. It took me about an hour and 15 minutes to re-edit the audio into a form I could use in the movie.

Creating the video in NAWMAL took up the bulk of my time. Scene 1 took me 1 hour and 30 minutes. Scene 2 took me 1 hour and 35 minutes. Scene 3 took me 1 hour and 20 minutes. Scene 4 took me only 45 minutes, which was long since it was a very short scene. Altogether the total was just over 5 hours.

Editing the scenes together and adding sound effects took me about 2 hours. In total I spent a bit more than 10 hours on the project. That was longer than I expected.

One reason was that I haven’t used NAWMAL much in recent years and I'm quite rusty. I always find it harder to do when I have the characters move around during the video. Setting up the cameras can be finicky. I was also using pre-recorded dialogue, which I hadn’t done much of before. That was a learning experience.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog