Busy

I am busy like a beaver, like a bee, like a beluga whale - those guys are the busiest. And I have not been getting much sleep. I have been making mistakes - mostly small ones, but I got the time wrong for indoor soccer last night and we had to forfeit. I feel pretty bad about that, with all the guys missing their game. Apart from anything else its going to cost me $48.

I am doing a large freelance design job in my spare time, which has kept me up at nights. The Founders and Survivors convict history thing we are doing at my day job is getting more intense and I was there until midnight last night working on a video promo for it. We are spending nearly as much time making slick promo packages for it as we are actually making it - but they are essential because without them no-one will cough up money for us to finish it.

Some snippets of a my "digital story" are here. As well as building the whole thing (with a progammer and another designer) I am one of the 16 or so people who has been given an original song to make a clip for. I am doing it with very laborious hand-drawn animation, at the clunk-clunk-clunk low rate of 6 frames per second. Sadly I really do not like the song I've been given, and sadder still it runs to over 5 minutes. So that's about 2000 frames, and I can't afford to be too repetitive because the song got in first with that tactic.

In any case the animation is a fun job, but I am not being paid to do it over and above salary - it's just got to happen somehow while everything else still gets done. If I want it to be any good I am going to have to put my own time into it ... and I don't know if I'm prepared to do that when I don't like the song. Sigh.

The other new thing I am doing suddenly is Proper Soccer. I am now training on Thursday night, playing indoor soccer on Friday night (stuff-ups permitting) and playing outdoors on Saturday. I had my first proper Saturday game today and felt like I did quite well. I have lost a bit of weight since I've been training and am actually catching opponents when I chase them now. I am rediscovering my love for defending - I actually love the negativity. Getting in front of your opponent and getting a head or a toe or anything to the ball to stop him getting it - I dig it. We lost 2-1 though.

So - apologies for the long gaps in blogging. Sometimes real life intervenes.