Monday, November 07, 2005

Procrastination

Today I was looking at stuff for the second set featured in chapter 8: the interior for Lord Tycho’s manor. It’s actually two sets, one for an exterior shot and another main one for the interior. As originally envisioned, it will have a gothic feel, so lots of stone, etc. I plan to use Stonemason’s Gothic Construction Kit featured on Daz3d for the interior, with some additional furniture that I hope to scrap up from wherever I can find it.

Over the weekend I finished pages 8 and 9, although I think I could’ve done more if I hadn’t procrastinated as much. For the sake of full disclosure, I’ve been playing the City of Villains online game a lot since it was launched last week (and I was playing it in beta testing as well). It doesn’t really impact my work on the comic too much, but whenever I feel stuck, I end up playing the game instead of working on the comic. At the same time, I’ve been procrastinating on the role-playing game for many weeks as well. I have plenty of notes, but I can’t seem to get myself to type any of it up formally. In some ways it’s writer’s block, but in other ways I’m just afraid that it’s all for nothing and nobody would buy the game once it’s done anyway (thus wasting all that time and effort). The fear of failure (or perhaps even the fear of success) is generally my worst enemy when it comes to procrastination.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:20 AM

    A suggestion for a cure for procrastination : cheating ;o) I call it "inverse cinematics" - pun intended! It just might make your life easier, so you might want to give it a try. It works like this : instead of building the set and moving the camera around for a good shot, leave the camera fixed, and move the SET around. Start by setting the camera's rotation and dolly parms - it's only necessary to set xrot (and sometimes zrot for tilt shots), and dollyY (for simulating "photographing" from foot height, navel height, eye height, whatever, use a figure and the horizon line for reference). Having done that, place the figures to a satisfying composition, and build ONLY that part of the set that is actually visible. All you need is a "virtual blueprint" of the set and the figures' movements, so that you can guesstimate what will be in the camera. Remember, your viewers don't have the blueprint, so you really only need your backgrounds to look PLAUSIBLE rather than perfect ;o)

    It's a method that's saved me a lot of time, and Heaven knows I know how procrastination at boring tasks (such as set-building) can slow one down - and I am already VERY impatient for the next installment of Alexander's adventures!!!

    Cheers,

    Thip

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  2. Thanks for the comments, Thip. I've been using the so-called Face camera a lot in Poser which allows me to do shots fairly quickly (since that camera is always looking at the target, in this case whichever character I'm focusing on).

    I should point out that I wasn't bored by making sets, just procrastinating in general. Actually, making sets is kinda fun for me since it takes me back to highschool when I worked creating "real" sets for school plays, etc.

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