An excellent day of productivity. I woke early and pulled my wardrobe drawer to cause it to collapse into a pile of wood with a 'Weetabix' texture. My ancient, and very cheap, wardrobe has been repaired so may times that it's more glue than the paper-like material it was made from.
I have plans for a new one, practical plans. Some artists make beautiful artworks as furniture, I err towards the practical. Still, this new piece of furniture is a year or more away for now for reasons of time and funds, so my first job of the day was to fix this drawer. It had fallen apart completely, the back was held in by nails (my nails, is was originally not held at all apart from the by plastic veneer which folded around it). I glued each joint and the base and clamped it all with my two brilliant Bessey Band Clamps.
Then, I needed to make a new drawer runner. The ultimate cause of the collapse was the lack of a runner, so I made some measurements, and glues two pieces of wood together to make a piece 10x15x300mm.
These glued, so I charged into work on the 'All Controlled By Someone' video. I'd assembled video clips up to and including the first verse. Yesterday, Deb filmed me singing those. One clips had string dangling from fingers. I thought that these needed to be in the sky, heaven, so I decided to set some parameters for the mix of video and animation; limits are always good for inspiration. The 'Cat Covid!' video had lots of layers, too many, so I decided on two; a video with mask, and global 'additive' layer of animation. I used the latter to add some sky to the strings, so went through the video to establish the edit points, and set some 'sky' in Argus to appear there. I animated some clouds too; this was actually a photo of the summer sky taken in Chester - I simply made the clouds gently move and gyre.
So, the video was now black areas, mostly actual film footage, and some blue sky when 'strings' were present.
I went back to the video. I added more edits of existing footage for the chorus, and went back and forth to check it all, then added the next verse, and final chorus, but things were too repetitive. I thought I needed more of a link with the words and hit upon the idea of myself, the protagonist, now becoming a string puller for a lower being, another puppet below; this is the main message of the song, so I filmed a lone hand pulling and matched it with earlier footage of Kasperle being pulled. Thus, the circle of the story was complete.
Then, some masking effects. The video alone was a bit too simple, so I had the idea of adding a clown/makeup mirror with lights, so photographed Deborah's 'Clown Face' performance mirror, and used this as a frame for my puppet-self. I kept thinking that there was something of a 1930s Charlie Chaplin link, perhaps because of my makeup, so added a silent-film style iris effect for the opening and piano playing parts.
Then, the wardrobe gluing was dry enough. Titebond states to wait 24-hours to set. It actually sets about twice as fast as PVA, and can clue cardboard well in 20 minutes. I temporarily fitted my new runner to the wardrobe, choosing hole locations that might be moveable, should disaster strike and the need to move the whole thing. The runner was in the right place, but too deep. I removed it, and planed off 2mm. This worked fine, so I fitted it, and fitted the drawer. All complete.
Then back to the video.
The final step was editing the video so that it could fit the album version (which is about a minute longer, and includes the much better intro) and the single version, which is identical after the intro, which makes thing a lot easier.
So, draft 1 is complete, but there now there's the final stages of proofing, small changes, things to consider.
