What does this all mean?

I recently got my first professional movie light, it is a used Mole-Richardson 200 watt Solarspot. While the light has seen better days the only problems with it are cosmetic and I got it on Ebay for about 1/3 of the retail price so I was happy.



After I got the light I made an order with B&H which included a spare bulb along with a four leaf barn door for the light, I check the number of the light and got the correct barn door but when my order arrived I realized that the gel holders on my light had been changed, and much to by dismay the barn door could not be attached.

In order to make it work I added on three little aluminum corners to the existing gel holder, now the barn door fits well and you wouldn't even know it was modded unless you looked close.

A month or so ago Robert and I entered a comic over at Scary-Go-Round. Our comic was one of 14 finalists, and has been featured on the main page.

If you are from SGR, welcome! Please check out the movies I've made. John Allison described 'The Haiku Menace' as "...a short film specially designed to delight"* Be sure to check out Robert's micro-fiction blog here. I also have the entry Robert and I submitted for the 2006 Scary Go Round contest here.



If anyone wonders how the comic came from this humble start to its current glory, I made a behind the scenes page which goes over all the gory details.

* On his Dec 9th, 2006 blog

So I get everything set up, I built a new set of hands for Sophie Swanson, made her a shoe (yes, just one), and did some touch ups on the cat and the lighting. After that I built an outrageous new frame grabbing rig as my new Digital Rebel does not have a live video feed.

Once those tasks were complete I started shooting and after about seven frames in the battery died. Stuff like that really kicks the wind out of you, yesterday I had something similar happen. I was setting up AnimatorDV for my frame grabber and after it had been running for about 10 minuets it would crash my computer (not my main one, an older box for frame grabbing), yesterday I didn't make it past that, I just gave up. But today was a new day and I was going to animate a shot, or two. So I downloaded Monkey Jam (which seems to run nice and stable) and was ready to go, ran through a focus check, nice clean image, and BAM no battery.

Anybody that knows anything about stop-motion knows that you shouldn't be running ANYTHING off a battery, however when I got my new camera I did not realize that it didn't ship with a wall adapter, so I had to order one, and it's in the mail. According to the manual you should be able to shoot 145 high quality photos, or 245 medium shots. For some reason the battery notice on the computer software always shows full, unless you run out, so I guess I'll need to keep track of the shots, I think I'll be shooting this episode at medium quality as 2496x1664 is more then enough resolution.

While I was setting the computer up I found myself wondering how I lived with just one monitor in the past. My frame grabbing computer needs to be portable, but doesn't need much speed so I'm running it on an old box from 2003 with a 15” LCD. But one screen at 1024x768 just doesn't cut it these days. Look how crammed the screen is, way to much information on a screen that is way to small.

An epic battle to the death!