Timelapse of production work in November and December of 2024 (mostly December), leading to the New Years 2025 release of the whole episode for Patreon subscribers. This was prompted by the need to switch over to monthly subscriptions at Patreon, so I wanted to have finished an episode. A public release will occur in April.

Mainly, this completes work on the "Train" sequence at the beginning of the episode, then polishes some existing shots through the rest.

The music is the entire album "The Pride and the Fall" by Luminous Flesh Giants, Jamendo #92241 / CC By-SA 3.0.

No commentary (except for on-screen intertitles).

Making of the Raven Rap music video.

Over 7 days in October 2024, I created my very first stop-motion project, based on a rap version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", recorded by my son, Nicholas Hancock, as part of a high-school English class, some years ago. We've been wanting to make a video with it for sometime, and the inspiration came last year when we got a collection of seasonal winter squash and a decorative black bird model. With my decision to do more experimental projects and Halloween coming up, this seemed like a good choice for a small project!

Although this video includes digital work in 60X timelapse, it also includes some still photos and live video:

00:00 Titlecard

(This is a $10 LED spotlight I purchased on Amazon).

03:25 Original stop motion camera images (straight-ahead animation).

(Some of the original timing of the animation was not logged).

03:46 Added on-screen text.

The music for this video is the isolated backing-track used in the "Raven Rap" video.

The artist didn't really name the tracks on this album -- the name field has "0000000001", but this is the 10th track on "The First Chaos" album by the artist "Alone in the Chaos". Jamendo #18561 / Creative Commons Attribution-Only, v2.5/BE.

Making of Impossible Voyage Techno/FX Edition.

Over about 5 days in October 2024, I created a soundtrack with music and effects to go with Georges Méliès' "Impossible Voyage" 1904 silent film. This is a 60X timelapse of most of that work, set to music (from the same Graveyard Child Escape album, "New and UnNew" that I used for the soundtrack).

00:00 Titlecard

(You might notice that I screen-capture the webpages to be sure of licensing and attribution -- something I've learned from a volatile web)

06:02 Aligning sound effects to events in the film.

Music tracks:

from

Although much of the Spring and Summer of 2024 was dedicated to technical work, I did manage to do some production too. This timelapse gathers work from July to October of 2024, by topic (although this is also approximately chronological):

00:00 Titlecard

The music is from JMF's album #10 "Passable", Jamendo #20776, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, v3:

00:00 Purplecord

This was mostly a month for reports and documentation, with only a tiny bit of production and other activities.

HIGHLIGHTS:

The rest are summaries and reports:

05:06 New Years 2024 Posts

As you can see, this included some catch-up projects for past logs that never got written. I had been converting my old Patreon posts to summaries on the Production Log, but hadn't got to 2017 & 2016 yet. So now I have. This pretty much closes the gap, since I kept Patreon Newsletters from 2014 to 2016, and before that are Kickstarter posts and posts directly to the Production Log.

This is a timelapse I assembled from video I took in 2017, while attempting to build a Render Cluster based on a homebuilt Ikea "Helmer" based case.

This ultimately did not pan out as I intended, due to problems with the power supply, and the project got put on hold (I'm still trying to get back to it in 2024!). It'll have to be reworked quite a bit.

However, I need this video to embed in my 2017 summaries, which I'm revising on my Production Log, so I'm uploading the unfinished project as it was in May, 2017 (the video this is derived from was taken from December 2016 to May 2017).

One day, perhaps there will be a Part 2 where I finish it with a more-conventional power-supply solution. And if I ever do get it to work, there will probably be a more-detail video with explanations of what I'm doing. Until then, "Timelapse go BRRRR!" at 150X. Unlike my usual screencasts, you get to see me in this one.

At some point in the video series, a bandage appears on my thumb, due to a sheet-metal drilling accident during the process that sent me to the ER. Fortunately for all of us, the accident itself was not recorded!

The Music is a selection of tracks from "The First Chaos" by "Alone in the Chaos" (Jamendo #18561 / CC By 2.0/BE). That album has no track names -- just numbers.

Summary of project progress from 2022. This would've been a post for the end of 2022, but I never made it, so I decided to make it now, after finishing the post for 2023. 2022 was dominated by the work on YunoHost as a new basis for our "Virtual Studio", implemented on our existing Digital Ocean VPS.

This was also the year that Elon Musk purchased Twitter, triggering a huge migration of users onto other platforms, which quickly made the Fediverse in general and Mastodon in particular, much more viable as social media. So I also "moved my flag" to the Fediverse this year, consolidating my presence there (I had actually set up a Mastodon account in Fall of 2021, after some earlier failed attempts).

AI art became a big deal, and I did some experiments using MidJourney during Summer of 2022.

HIGHLIGHTS:

Music:

Sound F/X from FreeSound.org users:

Opening Animation by Keneisha Perry (Demo)

Please be aware that many people contributed to the assets you see here, prior to my working on them, check the credits on https://lunatics.tv

Activities for November & December 2023, as a 60X Timelapse (1 min = 1 hour),

Highlights:

(December)

Music:

Technological Sun -

from album "Technological Sun"

A look back at Lunatics Project work over the year of 2023:

Did not quite get our pilot episode finished, but I think I'm actually close now. Hope to finish that in the first quarter of 2024 now (i.e. by April).

Lunatics is a team project, despite having dwindled down to me for now, so please check the credits at lunatics.tv for contributors.

Project-related activities from October 2019 (edited in November 2023).

This month, I worked on assets for the Lunatics pilot, most notably the set-dressing for the open-air market set in the "Touring Baikonur" sequence. This month also almost the entire production of "The Devastation of the Xmas", a short film that I produced for a production by the Southwest Reprise Theatre in Fort Worth, TX. This was part of an extremely silly community-theater holiday play, which my daughter acted in.

I was also at the experimental phase of developing what has come to be the "Ink/Paint Compositing" feature in our "Anansi Blender Extensions" (ABX) add-on for Blender.

I began recording daily screencast worklogs in January 2019, but it took me quite awhile to work out a system for what to do with them. I did not create any "topical summaries" or "monthly timelapse" videos from them at the time. This month, I decided to start doing the 2019 logs after completing the current ones, as I find the monthly timelapses are much better for documentation.

And then I decided to create the slightly-redacted "timelapse" version to put here.

Highlights

Lunatics Production:

Other Production:

Development:

Music for this Month:

B2B - Short and Sharp FMA Microsongs / CC0 v1.0 (Public Domain)

Bruce McCosar

Bruce McCosar

from "The Next Age of Aventure 2" Jamendo #65552 / CC BY-SA 3.0