Animator's Diary

Dear oh dear

2008-11-09T11:22:00.002Z

Many many months since my last entry - I've diverted my attention mainly to my sketchblog at www.sisterson.co.uk/sketchblog, which is more of a showcase for my work.
Must rant less about the computer! Having said that, it's been driving me nuts for months with its periodic screeching noises. Dell have replaced both the sound card and the motherboard, while both their hardware and software tech support services have suggested changing this and altering that and disconnecting the other till we're all blue in the face. The fact is no-one seems to have a clue, though the problem pops up on forums, along with many other complaints about Creative X-FI cards in machines with similar specs, so I'm going to dump this sound card and get an Asus I think - they have one which comes with music software which is worth the price on its own.
Work-wise, at the moment I'm doing some stuff for Triffic films' incarnation of Horrible histories - simple work, but the artwork I'm working with is really nice.

2008-02-13T10:17:00.003Z

Thursday 9am: Received phone call from technician. Says he will be here to replace hard drive between 2.30 and 3.30.
2.45: Technician phones again. Says he is at the door but no-one is answering. Turns out he has gone to my old address in Devon.
2.50: Phone Dell who say they will send another technician; I will receive a call to make an appointment.
3.45: No call received; phone Dell again. Support advises me that a technician will phone in the morning to make an appointment, which could be any time from now till Monday. I explain that I am not happy. Having mistakenly sent a technician to the wrong address, they are now simply putting my request to the back of the queue again rather than making an effort to correct it. Support asks me to wait on hold while she consults her supervisor. Supervisor comes on a few minutes later and says he will arrange for a technician to call tomorrow.
FRIDAY
9.00am: Technician phones, says he will be here in half an hour.
9.30: Technician arrives, replaces hard drive, re-installs operating system.
10.30: Technician leaves; I pick up where he left off and begin re-installing programs.
3.00pm: Icons have disappeared from quick-start bar. Windows Media Player is missing. Thunderbird stops working.
4.00: Re-install operating system. Start loading programs again.
7.45pm: System is failing to read disc drives. Had this problem in October and had to re-install operating system to clear it. Hardware support closes in 15 mins. Phone hardware support and wait on hold for 10 mins.
7.55: Support answers and talks me through hardware check, which is fine, then advises me to call software support. I say I would like a new computer. He is sympathetic but says they can't do that unless there is a hardware issue.
8.00: Phone Presto software support, with the intention of calling hardware again if they can't conclusively solve the problem.
8.15: Presto technician advises me to restart. Problem is gone. Technician suggest that drivers needed a reboot to finish loading.
8.30: Continue loading programs.
11.00: Dare to start loading Adobe production suite.
12.00: Production suite has loaded. In Japanese.
12.30: Reinstall. Still in Japanese.

SATURDAY:
10.00am: Uninstall production suite completely and start again, very carefully. Find an option box labelled 'language', three screens into the installation guide (and past the box labelled 'installation language') which defaults to Japanese, and says so in Japanese.
10.30: Production suite is installed correctly, except for Encore which has its trial button greyed out.
MONDAY:
Everything's still working, touch wood - I'm taking care not to hit the keys too hard, though.
Happy with the software so far - does everything the cheap alternatives don't and more, and all the programs are nicely integrated to boot. Already wondering how I got along without it. I've bitten the bullet and paid for the full version, which means that's £1360 I can't pay off the credit cards this week, but I think it'll be a good investment.
TUESDAY: After all the stress, I've got all the backgrounds off the the client and can now concentrate on finishing off the characters, which is taking WAY longer than it should... but at least now I can do the whole thing in Illustrator without hopping between cheap alternatives and trial versions. The whole thing should go a bit more smoothly now. I hope....

2008-02-06T22:38:00.000Z

The nice lady I spoke to at Dell the other day told me my error message of imminent doom was a simple driver problem, quickly and easily solved. Definitely, I asked? Yes, she replied warmly, 24 hours before the PC crashed spectacularly and erased all my freshly-backed-up documents.
Now I have to wait until tomorrow for a technician to come round and replace the hard drive - maybe that will sort it out, but I'm not too hopeful. At the best of times, I can't download anything from certain websites (Adobe and Orange webmail) without them disappearing without trace as if my desktop was made of quicksand.
All especially frustrating since my trial version of Adobe CS3 Production Premium arrived today (by courier, 36 hours after placing the order - thank you Adobe!) and I can't load it up and play with it. I was hoping it would take a lot of the stress out of the current job - it's not cheap, but hopefully better than scrabbling about for cheap substitutes. now I'm not so sure... I think it's more likely that my allegedly high-end machine will wilt under the strain as soon as I tax it in the slightest... but we'll see.
All this has highlighted to me the wisdom of having a hand-drawn element in the production... while all this is going on, I can work with hardware that doesn't crash.

Your call is important to us.

2008-02-03T21:22:00.000Z

This weekend I thought I'd start in earnest on the backgrounds for the dogs-and-moors film I'm making. This meant a rest from the PC screen, which was just as well - since I got the most dreaded error message of all yesterday afternoon - "A drive in a RAID 0 volume is failing. Try to back up data immediately."
I've had this PC for six months, during which time I've spent probably two full days talking to technical support about one thing or another. I thought I was out of the woods when I did a total restore in December - no such luck.
Since Dell's hardware support service is closed at weekends, I called Presto, the software support service based in Ireland, who I also have a well-used subscription with. It's clearly a hardware problem, but they were happy to help anyway, which was cathartic at least. If only their phone system was as dependable - it cut off on me three times as I was waiting for them to pick up, and once at a delicate moment when they were telling me what to do.
They advised running a disk check, which turned out to be a bad idea as it froze in the middle of the process then refused to restart without trying to run the check again. This morning, the Presto techie more or less gave up on it and offered his condolences, but afterwards I got it started on my own by finding a trick he'd missed... so I came away with mixed feelings -to be fair, though, it was a hardware issue so not really their problem. My main issue is with Dell's own hardware support service. After innumerable calls I've found that the technicians are usually very good, but not always... on one occasion, I was asked to run a check then told politely but flatly that everything was working perfectly and to call back if I had any further problems and they would be delighted to help. I hung up in utter bewilderment. Calling again, I got a very helpful lady who confidently talked me through taking the cover off the machine and performing a delicate operation, which did in fact fix the problem. Often, though, I find that communication is somewhat impeded by bad lines, thick accents and a time lag.
But my main grumble about Dell hardware support is that the subscription service for *HOME* users.... is only open during office hours... whose bright idea was that?

2008-01-25T15:47:00.000Z

Well, apologies for leaving it so long between posts. To make up for it, I thought I'd give you a cathartic grumble.
I'm working on a short film at the moment for an organisation called Moors for the Future, a Lottery-funded body responsible for educating the public on the care of Britain's moorland. The film is roughly in the style of 70s public information films, with a bunch of dogs as central characters. We're trying to make it fun to watch as well as educational, of course, since they won't be allowed to tie visitors to their seats in the vistor centres.
This has been a good opportuntity for me to handle all aspects of a short film from start to finish, so I'm making the film in CelAction, the same software used by most London 2D TV animation studios who like to keep the production in-house where they can work closely with the animators.
Yesterday I sat in on the voice recording session at world Wide Pictures, who are producing the film, and fulfilled a long-standing ambition to listen to Rob Rackstraw do his stuff. Rob did a lot of characters on The Secret Show and Bob the Builder, and adds a dimension of his own to everything he does with sparkling performances and witty ad-libs. We were really lucky to get him for this film.
But to get back to my grumble: CelAction uses Adobe Illustrator image files as the building blocks for the characters, but I'm more familiar with Flash, so I've been drawing the character parts in Flash with the idea of exporting them as AI (Illustrator) files. Unfortunately, there's a compatibility issue between AI files put out by Flash and those put out by Illustrator, so to sort this out I've been trying to load a trial version of Illustrator to convert the files. (I know it's a bit naughty to use a trial version of a program for professional purposes, but £600 to convert a few files-? There are limits.)
Now, whenever I download a program from Adobe, my PC swallows it up without trace. I watch the download coming in for half an hour, then when it says 'download complete', it simply isn't there - though, when I try to do it again, I get a message saying it is... it's as if it's downloaded the program in the form of Dark Matter. This is what happened today. so I downloaded it again, this time to my laptop, which worked fine.
Sadly the laptop isn't up to running Illustrator, so I then had a pleasant half-hour or so installing it on the PC, only to find an error message saying there was a problem with the trial version, and suggesting that I restart, reinstall, or enter a valid paid-through-the-nose-for serial number, as if this experience might somehow have given me the faith to try that option.
Adobe, bless them, do have a phone number for support queries on their website but it doesn't seem to work too well. It sent me to a nice lady who, judging by the line quality and the time delay, was on the moon. She gave me a link to the download support page on their website... which wasn't working.
It's now 4pm, so I'm about to follow the alternative suggestion of the ever-helpful Andy Blazdell at CelAction and try using Inkscape instead... though it seems I have to download other things, which in turn require the download of other things, before Inkscape will import AI files- so we could be in for a long night.....

Busy few weeks

2007-07-14T17:59:00.000+01:00

Soon after the last post, Steam Trek peaked at around 10,000 hits and was listed somewhere as the 4th most-linked-to film on the net that day. I had a few requests to show the film at conventions, and one chap asked to interview me for a documentary. There are now 26,000 listings for the film on Google (and about 700 for me - up from 260 the week before.)
No connection as far as I know, but offers of work have improved. I'm now animating some cartoons for a design agency in Seattle, which tech kids with cystic fibrosis how to deal with it... being American, it's all very upbeat but a bit tragic too - big problem for a kid to deal with.
I'm also working on the new series on 'Modern Toss' fro channel 4... in the meantime, I've had a quick holiday in Switzerland, then on to the Annecy animation festival, followed by a long and glorious weekend walking in Skye and climbing Ben Nevis (my pal Sam's stag weekend), then Sam's wedding last weekend... Also, only two weeks now till I move back to London.
The Seattle job strained the tired old chips in my PC to such a degree that I decided that I could no longer put off buying a new one if I wanted to be sure of coping with every animation job that comes along, so I gave Dell a call.... all I have to do now is get my nose back to the grindstone and pay for all this-!!

2007-06-07T15:40:00.000+01:00

It keeps on going up! Yesterday morning the hit count for Steam Trek was around 6000 - now it's just short 40 000. Google finds 557 mentions, and BlogPulse's chart of most-linked-to video placed in a no. 21 on Sunday, climbing to no. 4 yesterday. Someone in the US has asked to interview me for a documentary; another chap has asked for a copy to screen at a convention. Meanwhile hits on my own website have gone from around 10 a day to 400. Not many of those from potential clients or employers as yet, though-!

2007-06-05T20:51:00.000+01:00

To make the most of the spiralling hit count of Steam Trek on YouTube - currently around 2000 hits per day - I've added a blog page with a few pictures of the cast and crew and a piece about the making of the film. Krzysztof Janicz, the chap in Warsaw who seems to have been first to spot the film and pass the word around the Steampunk community, has already added a number of links back to it on his own very swish website (which is in Polish, so I can't comment on the content-!).
He emailed me the link to his site - I wrote back to congratulate him on being so on the ball, as the blog had only been up a few hours. He replied - "A few hours? Shit, I've overslept!"  Puts me to shame for taking 13 years to reedit the film-!
http://steampunk.republika.pl/main.html

2007-06-04T19:26:00.000+01:00

About a month ago I posted 'Steam Trek' on YouTube. Steam Trek is a spoof silent movie I made with some friends in 1994 - Star Trek as Melies would have done it.
It was getting about a view a day until someone spatted it and passed the word around, then the hit rate soared - it climbed exponentially last week and got 2000 hits over the weekend, some of whom wrote some ego-inflating comments on the site. The hits are still coming in, currently standing at 3,235..... I've written to everyone in the crew whose email I have to tell then of their new-found celebrity and asked them to pass it on to others if they can.

2007-06-04T19:16:00.000+01:00

On Friday I gave a talk at an animation event for kids in Banbury, organised by that town's 'Animation Station' , a council initiative run by the enthusiastic Clinton Osbourne. After leaving late I drove up there from Axminster in a little too much of a hurry and after three hours on the road arrived ten minutes before I was due to speak. Tim Searle from Triffic Films was still speaking when I arrived, running well over schedule and gamely answering questions from eager kids. I got my breath back while Steve Walsh talked, but he'd had his laptop stolen and had to muddle through verbally. It was lunchtime by the time he was done, and the kids had just about reached the end of their attention spans. When I came on I was left with two teenagers and their mum. Clinton apologised, but it actually made my speaking debut a lot easier- my talk was about my experience of the animation business and how I got into it, and consisted mainly of grumpy anecdotes about how long it took me to get there and why and whose fault it was, most of which I'd expected to have to miss out rather than grumble at lot of bright-eyed kids who had come to hear about cartoons. It's much easier to grumble at teenagers. The mum seemed to enjoy it.

2007-05-18T21:31:00.000+01:00

To broaden out my website a bit I've started on a little project I've wanted to do for years, which is an animated map of the exploration of the Canadian Arctic. Whoo-de-doo, I hear you cry. Here's the twist: We start off with a map which is largely blank - only the bits of coast that were known around 1500... and as each voyage of discovery traces its way across the map, the map gets filled in as they go, pretty much as the real maps did.
Technically there's a bit of a trick to it too - I don't want to have to draw the map as I go along, so I'm starting with a complete map and animating it in reverse - beginning with the later explorers, figuring out which particular blanks in the map they filled in, then erasing those parts of the coast frame by frame, as I erase the line showing the explorer's route through it. At the end of the day (week, month) I should have an almost-blank map of Northern North America. Then I simply reverse the frames and, hey presto, the map draws itself out as the years tick by. I'm hoping it will reveal insights into why each successive explorer chose the route he did in way a that a static printed map can't do.
Any excuse not to bend my brain round an ActionScript manual for a day or two...

2007-05-17T17:26:00.000+01:00

I'm reading up on ActionScript... the manual goes something like this:

ActionScript for Non-Technically Minded Beginners :

ActionScript is a non-inflected, dual paradox inverse-ion-propulsion scripting language that will help you make web pages, funny cartoons and other cool things with buttons to press.
Data in ActionScript is composed of splurts, squirts, droons, floons and baboons. Splurts are used to manipulate droons and floons by means of defining them within the parameters of baboons.
Droons and floons can also be endorsed, remorsed and goosed by flirts and berts providing the berts have not been either goosed or juiced in turn by either splurts or baboons. It is possible for a baboon to juice a flirt but not to goose a bert unless the baboon is wearing a shirt.
A splurt or a squirt can juice a flirt without a shirt without the need for a baboon, providing it's June and the baboon is on the moon.
Once the bert has been goosed or juiced by the baboon, you'll find that you need to glean a spleen from the queen in order to mangle the droon. Either a clean spleen or green spleen will do, though a green spleen will only mangle the droon if the bert has been goosed. If the bert has been juiced you will need a clean spleen otherwise you will dangle a goon instead of mangling a droon- this will have the knock-on effect of causing the baboon to dangle the clean spleen from the moon in June, in which case you will have to start all over again.

I just want to make cartoons........

2007-05-17T16:04:00.000+01:00

Hello. My name is Dennis Sisterson. I'm an animator. You can see some of my work at www.sisterson.co.uk.