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……

A couple of years ago a correspondent suggested that I try some of
Robert Barnard’s mystery novels. I managed to find a couple
at a local used bookstore, and indeed I enjoyed them, but I had little
luck finding any more after that. That changed during my recent trip to
Ann Arbor; at a used bookstore there, I found nine of his paperbacks at
$2.50 each, and I nabbed them.

This is the first of the set, and it’s a treat. It takes place in the
Yorkshire town of Hexton-on-Weir. The ladies of Hexton are set in their
ways, and when it comes to Divine Services their tastes are decidely
low-church. Nothing Romish or papistical for them. But the long-time
Anglican vicar has passed away, and the Bishop’s appointee for the
position is not only high-church (Heavens! He lights candles and wears a
cassock!) but also celibate. This cannot be borne, for the ladies of
Hexton are accustomed to running the town behind the scenes, and an
unmarried vicar simply Will Not Do. How would they control him?

This is the kind of mystery in which the murder comes about halfway
through, thus giving you two mysteries in one–first, who’s going to die,
and second, whodunnit. The details of village politics are delightfully
petty without becoming farcical, and the ending is satisfyingly
unpredictable. All in all, I give it two thumbs up, and I’m looking
forward to the next one.

Here’s another kids’ book I read to myself rather than to David. It had
been a tiring day, and I wanted a comfort book. This one filled the bill
admirably. I don’t intend to say much about it; I expect that most of my
readers have already made up their minds about the Narnia books one way or
another.

However, this book does illustrate one of the points I made in my recent
post on The Two Churches: it shows how Christ (in the
person of Aslan) meets us where we are–and then takes us further than we
could have imagined, and often not in a direction we’d have been willing to go without his prompting.

What this book made abundantly clear to me is that I am almost totally
ignorant of French history. That is something I intend to remedy before
continuing the series. It would be nice to be able to at least place
Richelieu in the correct century without looking him up.

This is a romance, a spy novel, a tale of male friendship and a character
study of different temperaments. Actually, it reminded me more of a
superhero tale than anything else. There’s dashing about and derring do,
really cool fight scenes, a little romance, a lovely queen to protect and a
couple of merciless and totally evil bad folks. The heroes are courageous
and clever and there’s even loyal sidekicks to step in and help out them
out.

Dumas occasionally gets a bit wordy, but then I have never had a problem
skipping or breezing thru something if it bored me. I can always go back and
reread if I miss something. I definitely plan on continuing the series,
after brushing up on the actual history behind it.

If you’re just here for the book reviews and the cute kid stories,
feel free to skip this.

Some little while ago, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church met
and confirmed a gay man, Gene Robinson, as Bishop; the Convention also
determined that it should be up to individual bishops to allow or forbid
the blessing of same-sex unions within their dioceses. These decisions
were in all the newspapers, and have been widely commented on in the
blogosphere.

What’s largely been lost in most of the commentary I’ve read is how
deeply split the Episcopal Church is on this issue–and how little, at base,
the division has to do with sexual morality. Instead, it’s the result of
a disagreement about the basic meaning of the Christian faith. It is not
an exaggeration to say that for many years now the Episcopal Church has
in fact been two churches: one preaching the Gospel of Repentance, and
one preaching the Gospel of Inclusion.

Katherine Kersten, writing in the Wall Street
Journal, said this about General Convention:

Speakers who urged approval of homosexual unions did not use the
vocabulary or categories of thought of the Bible or the Book of Common
Prayer. Instead, they appeared to embrace a new gospel, heavily
influenced by America’s secular, therapeutic culture. This gospel has two
watchwords: inclusion and affirmation. Its message? Jesus came to make us
feel good about ourselves.

While I doubt the speakers in question would agree with quite that
formulation of their views, Kersten is more-or-less correct. She goes on,

Adherents of the gospel of inclusion offered arguments like
this: “The church should bless same-sex partnerships so everyone feels
included.” “People will want to join this church if they see others being
welcomed.” “God is love. He doesn’t care about the gender of the people
we love.”

This week’s events in Minneapolis suggest that, in 2003, the
three historic bulwarks of Episcopal Church doctrine–Scripture,
tradition and reason–are crumbling in the face of the gospel of
inclusion and affirmation.

To be sure, the new gospel’s disciples do not generally
jettison Scripture outright. Instead, they radically reinterpret it,
using techniques imported from America’s postmodern universities. Walter
Brueggemann, a theologian quoted in a pro-same-sex-union Episcopal
publication, put it like this: Scripture is “the chief authority when
imaginatively construed in a certain interpretive trajectory.” Approached
this way, inconvenient passages can be dismissed as inconsistent with
“Jesus’ self-giving love.”

Tradition fares no better at the hands of the gospel of
inclusion. The Episcopal Church has always regarded marriage as the
sacrament that sanctifies the “one flesh” union of man and woman. But the
new gospel expands the notion of sacrament to include anything that
“mediates” the grace or blessing of God and causes us to give thanks. As
a result, the Rev. Gene Robinson can describe his relationship with his
male partner as sacramental, because “in his unfailing and unquestioning
love of me, I experience just a little bit of the kind of never-ending,
never-failing love that God has for me.”

In short, the Gospel of Inclusion says that God accepts us where ever and
whoever we are, and loves us as we are, and that because he loves us we
are OK as we are. The Gospel of Inclusion thus has little use for
forgiveness of sins–achieving personal wholeness, instead, is the key. As
Kersten points out, though, this view requires
explaining away inconvenient Biblical passages. Now, the Good Lord knows
there are many inconvenient Biblical passages I’d just as soon
ignore–and that’s generally a danger signal that I’d better
pay close attention to them instead.

The Gospel of Repentance is the traditional view of Christianity. It
says that yes, indeed, God loves us where ever and whoever we are, and
that he calls each of us into a close relationship with Him. But He does
not call us to remain as we are–He calls us to repent of everything in
us that is incompatible with Heaven and to be transformed by His love.

The Gospel of Inclusion says that we are Holy because God loves us; the
Gospel of Repentance says that because God loves us, He will endeavour to
make us Holy. The central fact of Christianity, Christ’s crucifixion and
resurrection, is the prime act by which God so endeavours to make us
Holy; thanks to Christ’s sacrifice, we can be forgiven of our sins. But
the Gospel of Inclusion, which says that we are Holy as we are, has
little use for the crucifixion:

The gospel of inclusion has little place for repentance or
transformation. Thus, it has little place for the central feature of
Christianity: Christ’s Cross, which brings redemption through suffering.
This new gospel may be appealing, for it permits its adherents to
“divinize” their own, largely secular agenda. But in a Christian church,
it cannot easily coexist with the Gospel of Christ.

And, in fact, it does not. And this is why many conservative Episcopalians
are so distressed and dismayed by the General Convention’s recent
actions: they are yet another sign that the Gospel of Christ is being
jettisoned in favor of the Gospel of Inclusion. The Gospel that has the
power to transform is being abandoned in favor of the Gospel that says,
“There, there.” I believe that the followers of the Gospel of Inclusion
are genuinely motivated by a desire to share Christ’s love with all
people–but thanks to their theology, the people who come to the Episcopal
Church thanks to their inclusiveness are being sold a sham–a “faith” that
affirms them in their broken-ness and tells them that they are, thereby,
whole, rather than a faith that can bring them to true wholeness. In the
end, the inclusivists are short-changing the very people they hope to
help.

Please note: during this essay I’ve said nothing one way or the other
about homosexuality–following C.S. Lewis, I find it unwise to shoot my
mouth off over temptations to which I’m not personally subject. More to
the point, I’m not claiming that gays are any more broken than the
population as a whole, nor that homosexuality is the chief sign of
broken-ness in a gay person’s life. In my experience, there’s plenty of
sin to go around and although Lust gets all the press the other six
Deadly Sins–Pride, Envy, Sloth, and the rest–are generally more serious
problems for most people.

So it’s not the moral question that gets me riled; it’s the attempt to
make the teachings of Christianity conform to the spirit of the age, and
the consequent rejection of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

So why do I bring this up? As I say, many conservative Episcopalians are
distressed by these recent events, and are wondering what they should do.
Some have proclaimed that the Episcopal Church is dead. Many–whole
parishes, in some cases–are seriously planning to leave the Episcopal
Church altogether. I think there’s another way–but that’s another post.

Coraline and her mother and father move into an old house that’s been
subdivided into flats. It’s an intriguing place, with an overgrown old
garden in back, two ladies who were once in the theater living downstairs, and
an old man who claims to be training mice to perform on stage living
upstairs. There’s a lot to explore, which suits Coraline down to the
ground. The most interesting thing is a door in the corner of the
drawingroom, a door that used to lead to the other half of the floor but
now goes nowhere because it’s been bricked up on the other side.

And then one day it rains, and Coraline has to explore indoors. And
though the old black door is locked, Coraline knows where the key is
kept….

Coraline is supposedly a children’s book, written for (I’d
guess) intermediate readers; it’s also a truly creepy little horror
story. As always, Gaiman does a wonderful job of creating a tiny little
world with its own surreal laws–what I think of as a pocket universe.
The only author I can think of who has done it better is
Sheri Tepper, and even she’s done so only in her “Marianne”
series, which is blessedly free of the heavy-handed Significance of her
later books.

Being a Gaiman fan I bought it for myself, and while I might read
it to Dave, I think I’ll wait for a couple of years–too scary.