Steven Den Beste has marvelous post on the Galileo spacecraft which ended its mission at Jupiter last Sunday. He also has some nice things to say about NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which built and operated Galileo. I’m a JPLer myself, and I’d like to add my applause to his. It takes a huge team with diverse to make something like the Galileo happen mission happen, and all the folks involved need to be topnotch. My hat’s off to them.

It has been my custom to try to learn something new every fall. One year I
took a drawing class. Another year I learned to spin wool. This year for no
particular reason except curiosity I decided to read Homer. I went out and
got copies of the Robert Fagles translation of The Iliad and
The Odyssey
and just for good measure tossed a copy of the Richard Lattimore edition of
The Odyssey and a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the pile. I
faintly remember reading excerpt of the last one in a college Classical
Mythology course many, many years ago. My battered copy of Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology has a nice little plot precis of both of Homer’s stories so I
read that first as a way of prepping myself. And then I started in.

First, I have to say, I don’t usually read poetry. I like action and plot
and characters in my reading and while poetry can be fascinating, it doesn’t
normally fulfill my desires for reading. However, if you completely forget
that Homer or whoever the storyteller was that put together this story was
doing it in meter and feet, it reads pretty much like an action novel.
Actually, it reads like a really bloody action novel. There’s a lot of hack
and slash in this book. Eyes falling out, blood dripping down, brains
splashing out the back of helmets etc etc. Not for the faint hearted. I
skipped my way thru the long lists of guys being cut down in battle when one
of the hero’s went on a rampage after figuring out that most of those named
don’t play much of a part in the action except to die in some gruesome
manner involving spears or swords.

What intrigued me were the similes included. Homer describes something that’s
happening on the battle field or over the campfire, and then, for the
audience’s visual sense, gives them a homey picture that looks something
like it. So the Achaeans leaving the ships are likened to bees swarming out
of hives and a hero slashing his way thru a line of men are likened to the
reaper scything a field of grain only in much more detail and vivid
language. He does this over and over in the text and the only reason I could
come up with was to create a visual for his audience who may not have seen
anything like it.

The second thing that intrigued me are the Homeric epithets. Not so much
which ones but how they were used. This I got from reading Bernard Fox intro
to this edition. There are usually several epithets assigned to each
character or place. The ships of Troy are black, hollow, beaked etc. Hector
is the breaker of horses, the great runner etc. And apparently this is so
the storyteller has several choices of descriptive words that will scan into
the line depending on where they are placed. And entire sections are
repeated word for word, especially if a message is sent and given to
someone. Apparently that was to give the storyteller mental time to think
about what comes next. Fascinating.

I found I didn’t much like Achilles. He was much too full of himself sitting
there pouting because Agamemnon took away his girl. I thought Hector was
the real hero of the story especially since he’s out there sweating away in
battle while Paris the wimp who started this all is hanging around inside
the walls of Troy. And the parting scene between Andromache and Hector where
he is going off and she stands there holding her infant son knowing Hector
will never come back was incredibly moving. I did come away from it a little
confused about the role of divine intervention vs. free will in the fate of
men. It seemed like men had free will and then something would happen and
the gods would come down and intervene, changing the course of events. I
have to think about that a little more. I am curious to see if it comes thru
again in The Odyssey.

Here’s yet another delightful period piece from Ngaio Marsh.
It’s the height of the social season, and all London is awhirl with
debutantes and their chaperones, Inspector Alleyn’s niece among them.
But all is not well under the surface: society matrons are being
blackmailed, and “Bunchy” Gospell a well-beloved man-about-town and a
personal friend of Alleyn’s, has been making inquiries for him. Gospell is murdered.
If Alleyn can find his murderer, he’ll also find the blackmailer–if only
he can persuade the society matrons to help him.

It’s rare to read a mystery novel and genuinely feel sad when the victim
is murdered, but in this case I’m really very sorry that “Bunchy” Gospell
won’t be showing up in the later books. He’s a finely drawn character,
and has that rare quality (rare both in books and real life) of being
not only intelligent and observant but also thoroughly amiable, decent,
and sympathetic. It’s a pity.

I find it useful to take an occasional peek into the books my kids are
reading. I gave up trying to keep up one-for-one with them, especially
during the summer months when they are knocking off 5 and 6 books a week.
However, books make good lead-ins to chats in the car or over dinner and
it’s amazing how much you can pry out of a normally reticent teenager, or
worse, preteenager, by asking them about what they are reading.

So, in the interests of good parenting and mutual discussion, I read this
one. My daughter is on a Spinelli kick lately and he gets a fair amount of
good press from those “in the know” about what kids are reading. However, so
do the Lemony Snicket books and I have yet to come up with any meaningful
dialogue based on them. I read one and it bored me to tears. The nice thing
about Spinelli books is that with adequate reading skills, you can read and
digest one in about 2 hours. And this one, at least, gave me some fodder for
discussion.

First of all, Maniac, the main character, is a homeless kid. His parents are
dead and he’s run away from his horrid Aunt and Uncle. Second, the themes in
the book like bullying, racism, homelessness and the meaning of community
are treated lightly enough to be manageable for children and completely
enough to raise some thought provoking questions. I mentally made a list of
all the ways things in the book are divided into pairs or separated and that
alone could keep me chatting for quite awhile.

Is it deathless prose? No. But it is a pretty good read and it has a happy
ending. That’s always nice.

Scott Chaffin most courteously expressed an interest in seeing some of the bad footage I took of Yellow, my boy’s stuffed snake–and he repeated it, so I know he’s not just being polite. (You can go look, if you don’t believe me.) “Me? Polite?” I can hear him say.

So I’ve exported a quick Quicktime movie of two of the bad scenes–the first one, where everything went wrong, and the one where the shadow is perceptibly moving. The quality is lousy, because it’s compressed out the wazoo, but I think the problems are pretty obvious. You can even see the cars going by in the background. The file is about 350K in size.

So here ya go, Scott. Eat some brisket for me, will ya?

Ian Hamet added some interesting comments on my movie-making post; I started to respond in another comment, and then realized I had another post.

Ian says (among other things–go read his comments in their entirety):

30 seconds’ footage for an hour and a half’s work is actually pretty good for stop motion (although getting a full fifth of a second for each setup is cheating — it ought to be no more than a tenth of a second to look really good).

He’s definitely correct about the frame rate–a fifth of a second is too long. In fact, it’s rather shocking how long a fifth of a second really is. When watching the playback I can clearly see each individual setup.

I remember my brother and his friend doing stop-motion animation with a Super-8 camera when I was a kid. As I recall, they usually took two frames of each shot, which would be 1/12th of a second. In “Frame Rec” mode, the Sony TRV-22 always takes six frames, 1/5th of a second, so I’m stuck there…but I can fix that in “post-production” by speeding the footage up two or three times. (iMovie is still too cool for words.)

I did a short animation last week as well, and noticed the problem then, and I seriously thought about trying to do it that way for this movie. The trouble there is, it means I need to make even smaller changes between each setup than I have been, and each scene will take considerably longer to shoot. And as this is a cooperative venture with my six-year-old, boredom is a real danger.

As is back pain. I knew I wasn’t in shape, but after an hour and a half of bending over and adjusting a snake every ten seconds, my back muscles are so stiff I can hardly move this morning.

But that’s by the way. I’m still figuring out how much movement I can get away with between shots, and how that will correlate with apparent speed of movement in playback. On top of that, I’m still making horrible mistakes. Had I tried to go for real smooth motion, the footage would have taken twice as long to shoot–and after that first horrible scene I probably would have lost heart. That’s a lot of work to do for nothing.

Also, I’d be completely unable to move this morning.

So, I’ll try doing really smooth motion next time. Probably with something I animate on my desk, instead of out in the yard.

Ian also says,

It’s rather fun to vicariously (re)learn filmmaking through these posts. Sounds like you’re having a blast. 🙂

I’m definitely watching TV with new eyes, I can tell you that. I’m paying a lot more attention to the camera work, I can tell you that.

Chapter 36 and Chapter 37 of my novel Through Darkest Zymurgia! are now available for your delectation at Once-Told Tales.

In today’s issue, our heroes reach the Holy City of Basenis Basor!

David and I spent an hour or so this afternoon shooting footage for a short movie featuring James’ stuffed python, Yellow. Yellow is about four feet long, and about two inches thick, and is covered with mottled orange and yellow plush.

Ostensibly, we were preparing to make a music video (a music video? Why not?) of the Aquabat’s wonderful song, “Attacked by Snakes.” In practice, we spent a long time learning What Not To Do.

The first seven shots turned out just fine: four and five second-long clips of Yellow in a variety of odd places; one-second clips of these will be inserted into the video at strategic points to underscore the music.

After that, things got hairy. See, stuffed yellow snakes don’t move by themselves. And that means stop-motion animation, which is a long and tedious process. Fortunately, the Sony TRV-22 camera supports animation adequately well–it has what’s called “frame rec” mode. Each time you push the Record button, it records six frames (1/5th of a second) and then stops. And fortunately, the Sony TRV-22 comes with a cordless remote, so that you don’t jiggle the camera each time you record a few frames.

For our first animated scene, I set up the camera on a tripod looking down a long pathway, so that I could animate the snake coming up the path. It was a good idea, in principle, and I might redo the scene later. But there were many problems in practice.

The first, predictably, was the lighting. Most of the path was in bright sunlight, but the end nearest the camera was in shade. I’m still using the auto-exposure setting, and the camera took its cue from the shady part. So during the first half of the scene, the snake is completely washed out. But wait! There’s more!

The snake started out about thirty feet from the camera. I did each individual shot in this way: I’d move the snake about five inches, then walk back up towards the camera and step off to one side, and then click the remote. Dave was sitting behind the camera the whole time watching on the viewfinder, and he was supposed to tell me whether I was in the picture or not. Alas, he didn’t, most of the time, and a sizeable fraction of my person is in most of the shots. But we’re still not through!

I had apparently not impressed upon David how important it is not to touch the camera, because over the course of the scene the view moves slowly but significantly to the right. It’s just enough to look really bad, and not enough to get my belly out of the picture on the left. And not only that!

The long walkway looks down a driveway to a major street. And in the back ground of a few of the shots, we’ve got a car zooming by. 1/5th of a second is a remarkably long time.

So, four lessons for doing video animation:

1. Check the exposure!
2. Get behind the camera between shots!
3. Damn the battery, if your little boy is watching the camera for you fold out the LCD screen so he doesn’t have to touch it!
4. Mind the background!

I didn’t make those mistakes again…but I did find some new ones.

The next scene had the snake slithering down some stone steps. This bit actually worked out very well, after a false start. It develops that the TRV-22 automatically turns off “Frame Rec” mode if you turn off the camera. So I shot about a minute’s worth of footage of me positioning the snake and climbing out of the way again. This was not a good thing, as I’m not entirely a lovely object in shorts and a T-shirt, and particularly not while bending over.

I discovered yet another nuisance during this scene–the IR pickup for the remote control is on the front of the camera. It’s hard to follow rule 2, above, and still use the remote.

The third scene had the snake going around the corner at the bottom of the stairs. I purposely had the snake slither through a patch of sunlight for effect. The scene actually came out fairly well, except for one thing: do you have any idea how fast the sun moves? Neither did I, until I watched that patch of sunlight slide along the ground on playback. It’s really quite striking, and would be a neat effect if it didn’t completely ruin the illusion that the snake is moving by itself.

The fourth scene has the snake moving through a shady area covered with flagstones. It’s not too bad, except for the little bits of debris moving from placed to place in the background.

The fifth scene has the snake going down some more steps and around a corner. I positioned the camera carefully so that I wouldn’t have problems with the sunlight–and damn that sun moves quickly. In just the few minutes I was shooting, a triangular patch of sunshine slid onto the piece of ground I was using just far enough to catch the shadow of my hand operating the remote. Sigh.

And when all’s said and done I’ve got about thirty seconds of usable video to show for an hour-and-a-half of work.

But then, I’ve already admitted that I’m mad to have bought the camcorder to begin with.

A little while ago, while reviewing The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen I mentioned that one of the very few other
comic books I was familiar with was Cerebus the Aardvark. Man,
are you in for a treat.

I first heard tell of Cerebus when I was college, back in the early
’80s. I worked on campus one summer, and one day happened to
visit the college library. Honnold Library had a long lobby which was
used for exhibitions of various kinds, and this time it happened to
contain an exhibition on Cerebus the Aardvark. To this day, I
have no idea why it was there, or what, at that early date,
Cerebus was considered worthy of any kind of exhibition. But
there were a number of pages on display, and I enjoyed them thoroughly.

Some background: Cerebus the Aardvark is a swords-and-sorcery
themed comic book which started out as a spoof of
Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian”–all of which I had
read by that time. The book also spoofed Michael Moorcock’s
Elric of Melniboné, albino, last king of a dying race, possessor
of the evil black sword Stormbringer, as Elrod the Albino. Elrod’s a bit
of a blithering idiot, he’s got a black rune sword of his own called
Seersucker, and he talks just like Foghorn Leghorn. Elrod was also
represented in this exhibition, and as I was reading a lot of Moorcock
just then, I was enchanted. After all, what’s not to like?

The possibility of my ever getting my hands on any of the Cerebus
comic books seemed fairly slim, though–I wouldn’t have known where to
look, back then–and I moved along.

Some years later I was visiting a friend at Stanford University, and in
nearby downtown Palo Alto I found a comic book shop. Good ol’ Cerebus
popped into my head, and there I found five intriguing books entitled
Swords of Cerebus, volumes 2 through 6 (they didn’t have volume
1). Each one collected four or five of the original comic books. I
immediately bought volumes 2 and 3, and went back for 4, 5, and 6 before
I went home. It was all lovely stuff, genuinely funny, with outstanding
dialog, impeccable comic timing, and increasingly good artwork.

One of the highlights of these early books is that Dave Sim was learning how to
write and draw a comic book in his own style–and each original issue is
preceded by a lengthy introduction in which he talks about that. He
explains his influences, and what he thinks did and didn’t work; it’s a
fascinating introduction to comic book art.

So I read ’em, and then they sat on my shelf. Eventually, a friend of
mine found me a copy of the first volume, and I read that, and re-read
the others, and then they sat on my shelf. And, having mentioned them
recently in this space they were on my mind and I happened to notice them
on the shelf, and one evening when I was tired and wired and restless and
needed something lighthearted and fun to read, I pulled Swords of
Cerebus, Vol. 1 off of said shelf and sat down to read.

Rapture! Over the next week and a half, I went through the other five
volumes, which I enjoyed (if possible) even more than the first time.
They’ve only improved with age.

Now, when I bought these, Volume 6 was the most recent; there were no
others. I had the notion that the comic book had continued publication
after that; but I’d never seen any reason to think that more collections
were available. (Granted, I hadn’t been looking.) So I fired up Google,
and went looking.

There are now approximately fifteen Cerebus the Aardvark
collections in print–and the six Swords of Cerebus books I’ve got
are equivalent to just the first of the fifteen. Clearly, ol’ Cerebus
has been successful beyond my wildest dreams–and I’ve got a lot of
reading to do.

I picked up the second of the fifteen collections last night; it’s called
High Society. The first episode in the book was so funny I had to
re-read it aloud to Jane. As for the rest, I’ll keep you posted.

I was cleaning out a knitting basket the other day and rediscovered this
little book at the bottom under the debris of the last couple of projects I
had used it for. And of course, the first reaction to finding a lost
treasure is to sit down and read it again, happily something that in this
case didn’t really take all that much time.

It’s a short book that wonderfully illustrates a construction technique
using bias knit squares of knitting to build a garment. Essentially you knit
a square from corner to corner increasing to the desired width and then
decreasing off to the other corner. Then you pick up the stitches from one
side and do the same with some more simple increase and decreases. Then add
one onto it on the other side and keep going sort of like putting together a
patchwork quilt. There are no seams since all stitches are picked up and
decreased off to points so there is no tedious sewing at the end. There are
some limits to the design variations since it uses the square as the basis
for all the designs with half squares to make a straight edge when wanted
but when combined with color, the possibilities become amazing. And,
whatever you make can be designed to use up the odd balls in your stash.

One word about stash—all knitters who are true knitters have one. It’s a
room, closet, boxes under the bed, whatever, where you keep all that
incredibly luscious yarn and fiber you have bought over the years. That you
have no project exactly in mind for it has no bearing on whether you
purchase it. And “Stash Reduction” is a serious topic. Some knitters I know,
and I am not making this up, have agreements with friends to clean out
their stash and find it a good home in the event of their untimely demise.
Honest. It takes years to develop a good stash.

Anyway, because I tend to prefer what a friend calls “dirt colors” to knit
with, I have a box full of all sorts of single balls in shades of cream,
gray, and brown to almost black that are just crying to be made into
something using this method. Maybe a reading shawl. With a pocket on it. And
there is that half skein of lapis blue left over from The Husband’s
Christmas vest a couple years ago that I could toss in to pick out a little
color once in a while. Hmmm……