25

This is the Dr. Zork. I am in the house of your computer screen. I am here because I have been entangled in the duty to report on the animation practices of my fictional character, John Akre, who is working on a year project that involves creating an animated feature film all by his fictional self.

Last night, home from his job, he set to work again. He animated page 24 of his script so now he is at the top of page 25. There was no great grandstanding animation to be done here. It was two dialogue scenes. He had to make many keyframes to move the mouths of two of his characters.

The character Boom Coverall talked. His mouth was merely a hinge. Akre moved Boom's mouth by setting rotation keyframes.

The character Botulism has a parallellellogram mouth. In order to animate this, the fictional Akre has to set Scale keyframes. He basically squishes and stretches that mouth to move it in time to the audio waveform of the words that Akre himself recorded.

He also drew some quick animations on some notecards, then colored them in with the Photoshop program and set them in the background of his dialogue scene, almost as if these animations were projections. In his office building location image (the background for all these scenes), tumors come out of the side of the building representing the various rooms and offices. These are boxes with solid color interiors and can easily be made into screens in which the thoughts of the characters can be presented like in all the movies.

There is much more animation to be done and future episodes in which to report upon it. Now the Pome.

the air is now
in my veins
i breathe out and
i leave more stains

i walk atop
the careful crust
and when i sneeze
there goes the dust

i am not careful
when i yell
my words can make
worlds into hell

and there you see
my fingers go
drawing my ugly
row by row

Written, as always, in sincerity and with fingers,
Dr. Hubert Zork