Well, I recently found out that Zombie Fairy got accepted into the Northwest Animation Festival! It is one of 174 films selected for the festival out of 826 entries, so it feels pretty awesome to be a part of a selected project. To help promote the festival, our entry in particular, we decided to do a teaser trailer to post online. The teaser includes music and sound from the finished project, edited to fit the shorter format. At one point I tried to make a second version of the trailer, one that seemed like the trailer for an epic summer blockbuster. Unfortunately, when it was finished it sounded a little too much like the music from a particular epic hero movie, the main hook at least, so we decided to not post that one, just in case.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Things that go squish, pt. 1
Woof! Well, fall of 2013 certainly got as busy as I thought it would, hence the lack of posting. It was the perfect storm of positive things happening all at once, so I'm definitely not complaining. My summer internship at a company that I've kind of had a nerdy technology crush on for the last few years turned into a full-time job in September, which feels so awesome that I can't even try to put it into words here...but I'll give it a shot anyways...
It's awesome!
I also started graduate school in September kind of impulsively. I was going to wait a year before going back to let the whole new career thing set in, but I saw that my adviser, whom I respect and admire greatly, was teaching a special topic course, so I just went for it. It ended up being a decent class, not quite as spectacular as I had hoped, but I definitely learned some things, the most important of which being that I now know I can handle my new-found full-time job while taking 4 credit hours of graduate level engineering courses. The last major thing I had on my plate, and the one I'm most excited to talk about here, is a project that I started 3 years ago that has been on the far back burner for much of that time.
During my first year back at school, I became friends with a fellow student named Matt, also returning to school as an older lad to pursue a new profession, mathematics in his case, and his wife Temris, an animator by trade. Matt and I became fast friends over our shared affinity for science, math, music, beer, food and cooking, beer, video games, childish and obscene humor, and beer. We had a calculus class together two evenings a week and would meet in the atrium outside our classroom hours before it started, sometimes to work on our understanding of how to test for the divergence of an infinite sum, but mostly just to bullshit.
It was one of these evenings spent bullshitting that Matt learned I had in the past dabbled in sound engineering. Live sound and recording musicians were things I had done with varying levels of enjoyment over the years, but what I really loved doing was composing/recording my own music and doing audio for video. This same evening I learned that Matt and Temris had been working on a short animated film as a pet project. The story, "Zombie Fairy", follows a flying zombie who visits people in the night while they sleep to retrieve their tired brains in return for spare change (imagine Lon Cheney as the tooth fairy and you're almost there). When by happenstance Zombie Fairy places one of these human brains into his own skull, he begins to see the world with a new perspective and experiences a reality full of terrible beauty. Temris and Matt eventually wanted to have original music composed and professional foley added to the animation once it was complete so they could submit it to film festivals. While being far from a professional in either the music composition or foley department, the project sounded right up my alley and I volunteered to do both just to be a part of the project.
At the point where I got involved in this film, Temris had put together an animatic that included all of the major physical events in the story. It included some very rough sound effects pulled from a stock library, as well as some music put in as a placeholder to capture the mood of each scene. It was just about the perfect place for me to start on the project, as everything I needed to start putting together sound effects and scoring was there. Over the next few months, I dabbled with different ideas for background music, some of which worked very well, and others not so much. In the summer of 2011, Matt and I spent the better part of a week in my kitchen surrounded by props and microphones, coming up with all sorts of ways to make convincing sounds effects for the things happening in the animatic. The following are a few of the noises we recorded:
Squishy-brain noise
Man struck on head/head hitting pavement
Disembodied arm crawling on pavement
2 zombies standing by water cooler, conversing
Zombie shoving child, curious zombie, scared zombie, aghast zombie, panicking zombie, shell shocked zombie, startled zombie, zombie in awe...you get the idea.
Our props included a large bowl of cooked oatmeal, seltzer tablets, a toilet brush, various pieces of cardboard, pillows, cinder blocks, beef soup bones, and large pieces of glass to hit with a hammer. After 3 full days of recording and some minor editing to the recorded sounds, we had nearly all of the sound effects that we thought we would need. All that was left to do was edit them together and sync them up with the animation, as well as finish composing the background music. I decided at this point to hold off on said editing/composing. Without finished animation, syncing up sound effects would be pointless, so even though we could get some idea of timing from the animatic, we only threw together a scene or two just to make sure that the sounds were as hilarious in practice as they were to make. They were. Holding of on the music was pure procrastination, however. Initially, I had tried to use mostly music that I had written years before and never used, and then just re-edit it for Zombie Fairy. It became apparent after the first couple of test listens with Temris that most of what I had put together at that point didn't fit the feel of the story, so it had to go. No problem, we both had other things going on and this was definitely a side project for all of us. All I had to do was work on things here and there and as long as I didn't fall too far behind the progress Temris was making with the animation, there was no big rush.
Fast forward 2 years. Amid the flurry of full time school, getting married, doing research, and finding ways to get paid to build things, not a lot got done on my end of the making of Zombie Fairy. And when I say not a lot got done, I mean I didn't doshit fuckall a-goddamn-thing squat in those 2 years. I knew Temris was making steady progress; I'd get updates every few months and new versions of the animatic combined with completed scenes. Each time I'd say to myself, "Wow, this is starting to look really good! I should probably start thinking about finishing the musiHEYLOOKAPENNY!!!" And so it went until the fall of 2013. That's when I got the email saying that the animation was complete, there was a deadline for a film festival a short 12 weeks away, and how was the music coming along? Now, 12 weeks seems like quite a bit of time, because it is, but this was the same 12 weeks mentioned at the beginning of this blog, so it was going to be tight. Thus, we began the mad dash of completing the sound for Zombie Fairy during the evenings and weekends.
It actually all went very smoothly, at least from my perspective (Temris and Matt may tell a different tale). Temris offered to start placing finished sound effects, which helped immensely. After a couple of weeks of fiddling around with my instruments, getting back into the habit of playing them regularly after so much time of neglect, I actually started to come up with ideas that I liked and thought might work and began recording some things. Every other week or so, I'd send Temris an updated version of the animation I had with newly recorded music, and within a day or two I'd get a reply with some detailed feedback. Likewise, when she had made progress on placing sound effects, she would send me what she had done, and I could either make suggestions or add things and send it back. It was an extremely productive dialogue that we had going. There were times when the music for a scene would get completely written, recorded, scrapped, re-written, and re-recorded all in on evening because of the rapid fire emails flying back and forth. What started as two interpretations of the same story eventually converged into a single narrative. By early December, the film was nearly complete. We had to do an additional day of sound effect recording to get some things we'd missed the first time around, which was great because we got to include the director in the mix for her cameo in true Hitchcock fashion. In the end, we had the final version done with a few days to spare.
"Cool story...where's the actual movie?" I hear the two people who will actually read this asking. Well, since Zombie Fairy is being submitted to various film festivals it's public release is still pending. By the that time I'm sure there will be news on whether it's been picked up for any of these festivals, so I'll be sure to add any updates along with the full film in a future post. Until then, feel free to check out Temris' teaser blog with some production stills.
It's awesome!
I also started graduate school in September kind of impulsively. I was going to wait a year before going back to let the whole new career thing set in, but I saw that my adviser, whom I respect and admire greatly, was teaching a special topic course, so I just went for it. It ended up being a decent class, not quite as spectacular as I had hoped, but I definitely learned some things, the most important of which being that I now know I can handle my new-found full-time job while taking 4 credit hours of graduate level engineering courses. The last major thing I had on my plate, and the one I'm most excited to talk about here, is a project that I started 3 years ago that has been on the far back burner for much of that time.
During my first year back at school, I became friends with a fellow student named Matt, also returning to school as an older lad to pursue a new profession, mathematics in his case, and his wife Temris, an animator by trade. Matt and I became fast friends over our shared affinity for science, math, music, beer, food and cooking, beer, video games, childish and obscene humor, and beer. We had a calculus class together two evenings a week and would meet in the atrium outside our classroom hours before it started, sometimes to work on our understanding of how to test for the divergence of an infinite sum, but mostly just to bullshit.
It was one of these evenings spent bullshitting that Matt learned I had in the past dabbled in sound engineering. Live sound and recording musicians were things I had done with varying levels of enjoyment over the years, but what I really loved doing was composing/recording my own music and doing audio for video. This same evening I learned that Matt and Temris had been working on a short animated film as a pet project. The story, "Zombie Fairy", follows a flying zombie who visits people in the night while they sleep to retrieve their tired brains in return for spare change (imagine Lon Cheney as the tooth fairy and you're almost there). When by happenstance Zombie Fairy places one of these human brains into his own skull, he begins to see the world with a new perspective and experiences a reality full of terrible beauty. Temris and Matt eventually wanted to have original music composed and professional foley added to the animation once it was complete so they could submit it to film festivals. While being far from a professional in either the music composition or foley department, the project sounded right up my alley and I volunteered to do both just to be a part of the project.
At the point where I got involved in this film, Temris had put together an animatic that included all of the major physical events in the story. It included some very rough sound effects pulled from a stock library, as well as some music put in as a placeholder to capture the mood of each scene. It was just about the perfect place for me to start on the project, as everything I needed to start putting together sound effects and scoring was there. Over the next few months, I dabbled with different ideas for background music, some of which worked very well, and others not so much. In the summer of 2011, Matt and I spent the better part of a week in my kitchen surrounded by props and microphones, coming up with all sorts of ways to make convincing sounds effects for the things happening in the animatic. The following are a few of the noises we recorded:
Squishy-brain noise
Man struck on head/head hitting pavement
Disembodied arm crawling on pavement
2 zombies standing by water cooler, conversing
Zombie shoving child, curious zombie, scared zombie, aghast zombie, panicking zombie, shell shocked zombie, startled zombie, zombie in awe...you get the idea.
Our props included a large bowl of cooked oatmeal, seltzer tablets, a toilet brush, various pieces of cardboard, pillows, cinder blocks, beef soup bones, and large pieces of glass to hit with a hammer. After 3 full days of recording and some minor editing to the recorded sounds, we had nearly all of the sound effects that we thought we would need. All that was left to do was edit them together and sync them up with the animation, as well as finish composing the background music. I decided at this point to hold off on said editing/composing. Without finished animation, syncing up sound effects would be pointless, so even though we could get some idea of timing from the animatic, we only threw together a scene or two just to make sure that the sounds were as hilarious in practice as they were to make. They were. Holding of on the music was pure procrastination, however. Initially, I had tried to use mostly music that I had written years before and never used, and then just re-edit it for Zombie Fairy. It became apparent after the first couple of test listens with Temris that most of what I had put together at that point didn't fit the feel of the story, so it had to go. No problem, we both had other things going on and this was definitely a side project for all of us. All I had to do was work on things here and there and as long as I didn't fall too far behind the progress Temris was making with the animation, there was no big rush.
Fast forward 2 years. Amid the flurry of full time school, getting married, doing research, and finding ways to get paid to build things, not a lot got done on my end of the making of Zombie Fairy. And when I say not a lot got done, I mean I didn't do
It actually all went very smoothly, at least from my perspective (Temris and Matt may tell a different tale). Temris offered to start placing finished sound effects, which helped immensely. After a couple of weeks of fiddling around with my instruments, getting back into the habit of playing them regularly after so much time of neglect, I actually started to come up with ideas that I liked and thought might work and began recording some things. Every other week or so, I'd send Temris an updated version of the animation I had with newly recorded music, and within a day or two I'd get a reply with some detailed feedback. Likewise, when she had made progress on placing sound effects, she would send me what she had done, and I could either make suggestions or add things and send it back. It was an extremely productive dialogue that we had going. There were times when the music for a scene would get completely written, recorded, scrapped, re-written, and re-recorded all in on evening because of the rapid fire emails flying back and forth. What started as two interpretations of the same story eventually converged into a single narrative. By early December, the film was nearly complete. We had to do an additional day of sound effect recording to get some things we'd missed the first time around, which was great because we got to include the director in the mix for her cameo in true Hitchcock fashion. In the end, we had the final version done with a few days to spare.
"Cool story...where's the actual movie?" I hear the two people who will actually read this asking. Well, since Zombie Fairy is being submitted to various film festivals it's public release is still pending. By the that time I'm sure there will be news on whether it's been picked up for any of these festivals, so I'll be sure to add any updates along with the full film in a future post. Until then, feel free to check out Temris' teaser blog with some production stills.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Dear Aunt Catherine
Does anybody else enjoy their nightmares? I actually do, at least as I've gotten older. As a child I often had extremely vivid dreams that I didn't enjoy at all. One that I had repetitively that actually scared me the most involved nothing more than me traveling through some infinite expanse of space, not floating or flying necessarily, but passing through this space that I knew would never end. It scared the shit out of me! Something about knowing that the space was boundless was just terrifying at the time. Looking back, I think it's kind of interesting, though. Maybe the concept of infinity was too much for my young mind to grasp. It was a very specific kind of fear, one that I have only felt and immediately recognized in a small number of situations. Once, while snorkeling I was swimming in an area where the sea floor was gradually dropping away from me the farther away from shore I swam. At one point, the floor dropped dramatically though, and I was suddenly suspended about 50 feet from the "ground". That familiar sense of panic set in, and my instinct was to turn right the hell around. I also feel a small tickle of that sensation sometimes on a clear day when I look up at the sky, and it's nothing but blue from horizon to horizon, no stars or moon shining through. If I stand there long enough, looking at the big blue boundary, realizing that there's no boundary at all, just an illusion of color created by scattered light, and that the only thing keeping me from hurtling through the stratified layers of gasses and out into the nothing is an extremely weak, relatively speaking, physical force, well, it's hard not to feel just the tiniest bit anxious.
Nowadays, I like that feeling, though. Whether it's because of the inherent nostalgia, or the fact that fear is just one wavelength in the broad spectrum of human emotions (all of which I think should be experienced occasionally to keep things in perspective), I'm not really sure. I do know that when I have terrifying dreams these days, I wake up excited, kind of like I've just gotten out of a movie. The instant I know that I'm not dreaming anymore, a switch is thrown and I know that I can go from being scared stupid to remembering all of the crazy, fucked up things that happened in the dream to scare me stupid in the first place. I'm not saying that all of my nightmares are enjoyable, as there are certainly some dreams I've had that tap into more emotional topics, leaving me feeling rather exhausted when I wake, and in need of a hug and a blanky. But the dreams I have that are just downright scary are awesome! Unfortunately, the details of these dreams usually fade fast, and while I've told myself that I need to start writing them down, I have neglected to do so up to this point. I'm hoping that having an avenue to write now will motivate me to start archiving them in the future. There is one, though, that I've managed to hold onto for a few years now without needing to write down.
I was visiting my aunt Catherine one day for an early dinner. Now granted, I don't have an aunt Catherine, but for some reason in this dream I did, though she did look a little bit like my grandmother Evelyn. It's funny how your subconscious fills in all kinds of holes when you're dreaming. Not only were there things happening in the dream in present time, but I had memories of this fictional person, as well as an entire family history to go along with them. I often wonder if things like that, memories in a dream, are created spontaneously in the moment when they're recalled, or if these dream "characters", some of which I'm often playing, are scripted at some other point during REM sleep.
The two of us were sitting in her kitchen nook, discussing family and recent events. It was a friendly conversation, not staggered and awkward like I remember of all my childhood interactions with her. Catherine had always struck me as bit of a stern woman, one who had perhaps grown up too fast and forgotten how to lighten up. I sometimes thought when I was younger that she looked like someone who hadn't cracked a real smile in years. But this supper chat was completely changing my perception of the woman. During the conversation we got onto the subject of Catherine's twin sister Janice. I didn't know much about Janice; she wasn't as close with me and the rest of the family as Catherine was. There had been some recent correspondence between the two of them, though; some sort of reconciliation of a falling out from years before. I was happy for her. My brother and I have stayed in close contact, for our family at least, over the years since I moved out of the house, and it's a relationship that I hold very high, so I was glad for Catherine to be able to have an open and friendly dialogue with her sibling again.
The conversation went on for what seemed like hours, at times turning serious and heavy, and occasionally inciting rounds of hysterical laughter from either or both sides. This was the first time I had felt really close to Catherine, like she was a true family member. It wasn't that I wasn't fond of her before, but we had just never spent enough time one-on-one like this to really open up and get to know each other. There were so many parts of her character that I had been oblivious to. I'd never heard her guffawing to the point of exhaustion, never heard the stories of how hard it was growing up for her, and I'd never noticed the distinct difference in the color of her eyes; brown on the left, and blue/green on the right.
We continued talking as it began to grow dark outside. I was seated with my back to a large window out into the back yard. She had a small garden with these giant sunflowers looming over it. She had scolded me once when I was about 5 for trying to chop the sunflowers down with a set of branch loppers I had found in her shed. Catherine began clearing off the table, and I got up to stretch my legs, turning around so I could peer out the window at the sunflowers, remembering how angry she had been and what a little shit I could be when I was that age. She turned the light on in the kitchen, and the her reflection became subtly visible on the glass surface. As she was walking back towards the table, her reflection was facing me, and I noticed something about it that was concerning. It wasn't an entirely clear image, but I could tell there was something different. She looked so serious all of a sudden. We had ended our conversation on a high note, her offering coffee before I headed for home, me mentioning that I'd like to meet Janice if she ever decided to visit. Maybe their reconciliation still had a ways to go. I hadn't meant to upset her, so I turned around to ask if she was okay. She stood before me, with two cups of coffee in her hands, holding one out towards me, with a large smile on her face.
She began to speak, but I wasn't really listening, just looking at the way the wrinkles formed around her mouth and eyes, unmistakable in their shape. I was confused and unsure why. Sipping my coffee, I turned back around to look out the window again. There was her reflection, standing behind me, still talking, no smile to be seen, not even a hint of a smile line with the corners of her mouth pointed slightly downward. It could have just been a trick of the reflection, that's what it had to be. I was probably just more tired than I thought, seeing things, or the glass was distorted somehow, subtly curved enough to distort the features of her face in a way to make is seem like she wasn't the jovial person I'd spent the entire evening talking to. The view from outside could also be altering what I saw in the reflection too, explaining why I saw someone with two dark brown eyes looking back at me, dour and sad.
"I guess we talked for too long, I was hoping you wouldn't see her," Catherine said to me, my back still to her. I didn't know what she was talking about, and didn't have time to reply, as she reached around with one hand and placed it over my mouth. I was frozen in place, and beginning to panic. The person in the reflection was there, one hand over my mouth talking to me from behind, but it wasn't Catherine's face, as I could see that her lips weren't moving anymore, even as I heard Catherine's words in my ear, spoken quietly from only inches away.
"It's an odd thing being a twin. There's a bond between my sister and I that seems as difficult to define as it is unbreakable." Her voice seemed so close I thought it might be coming from inside my head. "All those years we were apart, not speaking, separated by thousands of miles, I could still feel her misery. She had a family, a family that included her in their lives, and she still managed to be so serious and loathing of life. She was completely unable to let go of the past, and I could feel it every day. It made me sick how someone could have so much and feel so little."
"I came back to try and put her out of her misery. I've always wanted a family of my own, and I saw no reason why hers couldn't be mine." I could feel her moving around behind me with her one hand still over my mouth. In the reflection, I saw her free hand go up to her face. As the hand came back down, the face mouthed a single word. "We weren't identical, but it's easy enough for some simple magic to convince everyone I'm her, provided I have just the right thing of hers. It's just too bad I had to keep her body in the basement for this glamour to hold. Though I don't think I could have buried her far enough away to keep her from appearing and meddling with my new life."
It dawned on me just then, the word that the face in the window had said. "Sorry," the last word that went through my mind, just before Janice reached around my face and removed her hand from my mouth to slide Catherine's dark brown eyeball inside.
Nowadays, I like that feeling, though. Whether it's because of the inherent nostalgia, or the fact that fear is just one wavelength in the broad spectrum of human emotions (all of which I think should be experienced occasionally to keep things in perspective), I'm not really sure. I do know that when I have terrifying dreams these days, I wake up excited, kind of like I've just gotten out of a movie. The instant I know that I'm not dreaming anymore, a switch is thrown and I know that I can go from being scared stupid to remembering all of the crazy, fucked up things that happened in the dream to scare me stupid in the first place. I'm not saying that all of my nightmares are enjoyable, as there are certainly some dreams I've had that tap into more emotional topics, leaving me feeling rather exhausted when I wake, and in need of a hug and a blanky. But the dreams I have that are just downright scary are awesome! Unfortunately, the details of these dreams usually fade fast, and while I've told myself that I need to start writing them down, I have neglected to do so up to this point. I'm hoping that having an avenue to write now will motivate me to start archiving them in the future. There is one, though, that I've managed to hold onto for a few years now without needing to write down.
I was visiting my aunt Catherine one day for an early dinner. Now granted, I don't have an aunt Catherine, but for some reason in this dream I did, though she did look a little bit like my grandmother Evelyn. It's funny how your subconscious fills in all kinds of holes when you're dreaming. Not only were there things happening in the dream in present time, but I had memories of this fictional person, as well as an entire family history to go along with them. I often wonder if things like that, memories in a dream, are created spontaneously in the moment when they're recalled, or if these dream "characters", some of which I'm often playing, are scripted at some other point during REM sleep.
The two of us were sitting in her kitchen nook, discussing family and recent events. It was a friendly conversation, not staggered and awkward like I remember of all my childhood interactions with her. Catherine had always struck me as bit of a stern woman, one who had perhaps grown up too fast and forgotten how to lighten up. I sometimes thought when I was younger that she looked like someone who hadn't cracked a real smile in years. But this supper chat was completely changing my perception of the woman. During the conversation we got onto the subject of Catherine's twin sister Janice. I didn't know much about Janice; she wasn't as close with me and the rest of the family as Catherine was. There had been some recent correspondence between the two of them, though; some sort of reconciliation of a falling out from years before. I was happy for her. My brother and I have stayed in close contact, for our family at least, over the years since I moved out of the house, and it's a relationship that I hold very high, so I was glad for Catherine to be able to have an open and friendly dialogue with her sibling again.
The conversation went on for what seemed like hours, at times turning serious and heavy, and occasionally inciting rounds of hysterical laughter from either or both sides. This was the first time I had felt really close to Catherine, like she was a true family member. It wasn't that I wasn't fond of her before, but we had just never spent enough time one-on-one like this to really open up and get to know each other. There were so many parts of her character that I had been oblivious to. I'd never heard her guffawing to the point of exhaustion, never heard the stories of how hard it was growing up for her, and I'd never noticed the distinct difference in the color of her eyes; brown on the left, and blue/green on the right.
We continued talking as it began to grow dark outside. I was seated with my back to a large window out into the back yard. She had a small garden with these giant sunflowers looming over it. She had scolded me once when I was about 5 for trying to chop the sunflowers down with a set of branch loppers I had found in her shed. Catherine began clearing off the table, and I got up to stretch my legs, turning around so I could peer out the window at the sunflowers, remembering how angry she had been and what a little shit I could be when I was that age. She turned the light on in the kitchen, and the her reflection became subtly visible on the glass surface. As she was walking back towards the table, her reflection was facing me, and I noticed something about it that was concerning. It wasn't an entirely clear image, but I could tell there was something different. She looked so serious all of a sudden. We had ended our conversation on a high note, her offering coffee before I headed for home, me mentioning that I'd like to meet Janice if she ever decided to visit. Maybe their reconciliation still had a ways to go. I hadn't meant to upset her, so I turned around to ask if she was okay. She stood before me, with two cups of coffee in her hands, holding one out towards me, with a large smile on her face.
She began to speak, but I wasn't really listening, just looking at the way the wrinkles formed around her mouth and eyes, unmistakable in their shape. I was confused and unsure why. Sipping my coffee, I turned back around to look out the window again. There was her reflection, standing behind me, still talking, no smile to be seen, not even a hint of a smile line with the corners of her mouth pointed slightly downward. It could have just been a trick of the reflection, that's what it had to be. I was probably just more tired than I thought, seeing things, or the glass was distorted somehow, subtly curved enough to distort the features of her face in a way to make is seem like she wasn't the jovial person I'd spent the entire evening talking to. The view from outside could also be altering what I saw in the reflection too, explaining why I saw someone with two dark brown eyes looking back at me, dour and sad.
"I guess we talked for too long, I was hoping you wouldn't see her," Catherine said to me, my back still to her. I didn't know what she was talking about, and didn't have time to reply, as she reached around with one hand and placed it over my mouth. I was frozen in place, and beginning to panic. The person in the reflection was there, one hand over my mouth talking to me from behind, but it wasn't Catherine's face, as I could see that her lips weren't moving anymore, even as I heard Catherine's words in my ear, spoken quietly from only inches away.
"It's an odd thing being a twin. There's a bond between my sister and I that seems as difficult to define as it is unbreakable." Her voice seemed so close I thought it might be coming from inside my head. "All those years we were apart, not speaking, separated by thousands of miles, I could still feel her misery. She had a family, a family that included her in their lives, and she still managed to be so serious and loathing of life. She was completely unable to let go of the past, and I could feel it every day. It made me sick how someone could have so much and feel so little."
"I came back to try and put her out of her misery. I've always wanted a family of my own, and I saw no reason why hers couldn't be mine." I could feel her moving around behind me with her one hand still over my mouth. In the reflection, I saw her free hand go up to her face. As the hand came back down, the face mouthed a single word. "We weren't identical, but it's easy enough for some simple magic to convince everyone I'm her, provided I have just the right thing of hers. It's just too bad I had to keep her body in the basement for this glamour to hold. Though I don't think I could have buried her far enough away to keep her from appearing and meddling with my new life."
It dawned on me just then, the word that the face in the window had said. "Sorry," the last word that went through my mind, just before Janice reached around my face and removed her hand from my mouth to slide Catherine's dark brown eyeball inside.
Friday, September 13, 2013
Helmet Required: Self balancing unicycle, part 1
2nd post! I'm blogging like a real boy now, though hopefully this second go around is along the lines of an Empire Strikes Back/Godfather II, as opposed to a Two Towers/Boondock Saints II. It's pretty jargon heavy, though, just to warn anyone who's not intrigued by microcontrollers, serial communication interfaces, and feedback control systems.
A little less than a year ago I was killing my lunch hour at work by sifting through the various posts on Hackaday when I came across a project that I found very intriguing. A self-balancing unicycle is not a novel project anymore (a quick search on Hackaday yields about half-a-dozen similar projects), but I liked the look of this one; the handlebars would give it a motorcycle feel while zipping around on one wheel, cool! After reading about this project and a few similar ones, I decided that I wanted one. More importantly, I wanted to build one. I had started a project the year before that involved using a motor controller and a PID feedback loop to control a small robotic arm that never got finished for a lack of time and money. It wasn't my robotic arm, but one that belonged to the Robotics and Automation Society at Portland State, and has since been absorbed into another project. The unicycle will be highly reliant on a well-tuned feedback system, however, so I can still experiment with PID and build something that is potentially harmful to those who use it, namely me...perfect!
The project from Hackaday was built using an Arduino microcontroller, a pre-built inertial measurement unit (IMU) from SparkFun.com, and a SyRen 25A motor controller. In other words, the fundamental electronics alone are going to run about $170. This seems a little spendy, especially considering that some of the IMUs from SparkFun are just the gyro and accelerometer ICs on a small PCB with some minimal bypassing caps and pull-up resistors. By laying out all of the necessary ICs and passive components from the above three units on a single custom PCB, one could have all of the same features with a smaller overall footprint, less interconnect wires, and also some cool peripherals for probably 2/3 the price. Granted, this means a massive amount more time to look up the right component values, build parts and footprints in EagleCAD, and layout a board, but that's kind of part of the fun of doing a project like this myself. So I decided early on that I would design my own PCB that incorporates a microcontroller, 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope, appropriately sized motor controller, and terminals to wire up lighting, a display of some sort, safety interlocks, and maybe some shooting flames...intentional ones!
Now to choose some components. For the microcontroller, I had initially decided to go with the Atmega328P, mostly because I've done some projects with it before, both on Arduinos and as a stand-alone chip, so I'm fairly familiar with it's architecture, how to wire it up, and laying it out. It also has a relatively inexpensive programmer/deubugger in the AVR Dragon. I've also done some projects with some of the microprocessors from the LPC family of ARM devices from NXP, though I've never done any of the programming for these, so I may switch further down the road to get more familiar with an ARM device. I think at this point I want to stick with what I know, though, or the learning curves on too many fronts (PID, I2C, IMU, AVR/ARM...FML) may appeal to my intrinsic laziness and keep this project from ever happening.
The ICs that will make up the IMU are a L3G4200D 3-axis MEMS gyroscope by ST Micro and an ADXL345 accelerometer from Analog Devices. I have no knowledge of either of these types of devices to make much of an intelligent decision, but they will both operate on a 3.3V I2C bus, and they can output data at rates in excess of 100Hz, which is the read rate of a Segway. With a maximum gyro resolution of 2000 dps (5.56 revolutions per second) and an accelerometer with a tunable full scale range of 4g to 32g, bi-polar, I should have lots headroom for dialing in the PID loop. To assist in working with an IMU for the first time, I want to put in some kind of graphic display to view the output of the two ICs in realtime. Newhaven makes a 2x20 character LCD display that also operates over I2C for $10...done.
That takes care of the core components for the unicycle's 'brain'. The drive system is something that I haven't entirely pieced together yet, other than looking at some hefty H-bridge ICs. I think a conservative approach that will lend itself nicely to prototyping sans hematomas will be to use a scaled down battery and motor with a test jig that will allow me to work on getting all of the components to play nice-nice. Ideally, the jig will only allow the scaled down vehicle to tip in 1 dimension as well as translate in that same dimension, removing the need for a rider to make balance adjustments in the second horizontal dimension. Once I get something balancing in the jig, then it will be a matter of scaling to a system with more torque (bigger motor, bigger battery, more current) and a higher moment of inertia (me on a padded seat).
That's the game plan so far. A quick look at Digi-Key and OSH Park for the devices mentioned above and they're related necessary circuitry puts the price at about $72.00. For the next part of this series, I hope to have some electronics in hand and a better idea of how the jig is going to work. Grad school is starting soon, and work is getting a little crazy, so it's possible that this has to sit on the back burner for a while. On the other hand, fall is nearly upon us in Portland which means the amount of time spent inside due to inclement weather is going to be going up sharply soon.
A little less than a year ago I was killing my lunch hour at work by sifting through the various posts on Hackaday when I came across a project that I found very intriguing. A self-balancing unicycle is not a novel project anymore (a quick search on Hackaday yields about half-a-dozen similar projects), but I liked the look of this one; the handlebars would give it a motorcycle feel while zipping around on one wheel, cool! After reading about this project and a few similar ones, I decided that I wanted one. More importantly, I wanted to build one. I had started a project the year before that involved using a motor controller and a PID feedback loop to control a small robotic arm that never got finished for a lack of time and money. It wasn't my robotic arm, but one that belonged to the Robotics and Automation Society at Portland State, and has since been absorbed into another project. The unicycle will be highly reliant on a well-tuned feedback system, however, so I can still experiment with PID and build something that is potentially harmful to those who use it, namely me...perfect!
The project from Hackaday was built using an Arduino microcontroller, a pre-built inertial measurement unit (IMU) from SparkFun.com, and a SyRen 25A motor controller. In other words, the fundamental electronics alone are going to run about $170. This seems a little spendy, especially considering that some of the IMUs from SparkFun are just the gyro and accelerometer ICs on a small PCB with some minimal bypassing caps and pull-up resistors. By laying out all of the necessary ICs and passive components from the above three units on a single custom PCB, one could have all of the same features with a smaller overall footprint, less interconnect wires, and also some cool peripherals for probably 2/3 the price. Granted, this means a massive amount more time to look up the right component values, build parts and footprints in EagleCAD, and layout a board, but that's kind of part of the fun of doing a project like this myself. So I decided early on that I would design my own PCB that incorporates a microcontroller, 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope, appropriately sized motor controller, and terminals to wire up lighting, a display of some sort, safety interlocks, and maybe some shooting flames...intentional ones!
Now to choose some components. For the microcontroller, I had initially decided to go with the Atmega328P, mostly because I've done some projects with it before, both on Arduinos and as a stand-alone chip, so I'm fairly familiar with it's architecture, how to wire it up, and laying it out. It also has a relatively inexpensive programmer/deubugger in the AVR Dragon. I've also done some projects with some of the microprocessors from the LPC family of ARM devices from NXP, though I've never done any of the programming for these, so I may switch further down the road to get more familiar with an ARM device. I think at this point I want to stick with what I know, though, or the learning curves on too many fronts (PID, I2C, IMU, AVR/ARM...FML) may appeal to my intrinsic laziness and keep this project from ever happening.
The ICs that will make up the IMU are a L3G4200D 3-axis MEMS gyroscope by ST Micro and an ADXL345 accelerometer from Analog Devices. I have no knowledge of either of these types of devices to make much of an intelligent decision, but they will both operate on a 3.3V I2C bus, and they can output data at rates in excess of 100Hz, which is the read rate of a Segway. With a maximum gyro resolution of 2000 dps (5.56 revolutions per second) and an accelerometer with a tunable full scale range of 4g to 32g, bi-polar, I should have lots headroom for dialing in the PID loop. To assist in working with an IMU for the first time, I want to put in some kind of graphic display to view the output of the two ICs in realtime. Newhaven makes a 2x20 character LCD display that also operates over I2C for $10...done.
That takes care of the core components for the unicycle's 'brain'. The drive system is something that I haven't entirely pieced together yet, other than looking at some hefty H-bridge ICs. I think a conservative approach that will lend itself nicely to prototyping sans hematomas will be to use a scaled down battery and motor with a test jig that will allow me to work on getting all of the components to play nice-nice. Ideally, the jig will only allow the scaled down vehicle to tip in 1 dimension as well as translate in that same dimension, removing the need for a rider to make balance adjustments in the second horizontal dimension. Once I get something balancing in the jig, then it will be a matter of scaling to a system with more torque (bigger motor, bigger battery, more current) and a higher moment of inertia (me on a padded seat).
That's the game plan so far. A quick look at Digi-Key and OSH Park for the devices mentioned above and they're related necessary circuitry puts the price at about $72.00. For the next part of this series, I hope to have some electronics in hand and a better idea of how the jig is going to work. Grad school is starting soon, and work is getting a little crazy, so it's possible that this has to sit on the back burner for a while. On the other hand, fall is nearly upon us in Portland which means the amount of time spent inside due to inclement weather is going to be going up sharply soon.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Take the what now?
I used to write. I used to do quite a bit of it actually, but that was a long, long time ago. In elementary school, I always loved the creative writing assignments. In junior high and high school, I remember writing letters to family and friends, and I think there's even a journal floating around somewhere from that time where I would jot down stories, bad self-absorbed poetry and whatever else a hormone fueled teenage boy with insecurity issues felt needed to be archived. For a few years in high school I would make a yearly trip to Mexico to build houses with my friend's church youth group. At the end of each trip, I would write a short summary of my experiences there to send to all of the relatives who had helped sponsor me. Each episode was full of just enough humorous exaggeration and heartfelt introspection to entertain the fam and give them an incentive to send me money for the next year's trip.
Over the years I've picked up other creative outlets, but recently I've felt like I would like to start writing again. There's something about putting thoughts into words that scratches an itch not quite satiated by playing music, spending time in the kitchen, or working on electronics. The only things I've managed to write over the last couple of years, though, have been essays for scholarships and project summary reports for school; not quite the outlet I was thinking of. "But hey, blogs are a thing, why not do one of those?", I asked myself. It seemed like a good option, but did I really want to put the things I was writing out there for the world to see? After all, I follow a few blogs, mostly ones by friends and acquaintances, some by strangers with interests similar to mine. They're all well written, coherent and articulate, and I enjoy them...in other words, the bar has been set fairly high in my eyes. If I can't make a blog that's as interesting or informative, then what's the point? Why even do one at all? As it turns out, insecurity is not as easily shaken as the rest of the teenage baggage.
I watched a very interesting TED talk recently. The talk highlighted some research being done in behavioral psychology having to do with confidence and how it's perceived. It was moderately interesting hearing about how people who did things like practicing "assertive postures" several minutes before a job interview performed better than people who adopted "passive postures". The theory is that if a person's confidence can dictate their body language, then maybe the converse can be true and by forcing themselves to adopt a confident posture, they will in turn act more confident, whether they're aware of it or not. But the part of the talk that really interested me was the speaker's anecdote of being a top student who, after being accepted to an ivy league school, was in a car accident that left her partly brain damaged. After rehabilitation, she still went off to school, but had to work twice as hard to overcome her new learning disability, often having to repeat courses. When she finally got to graduate school after spending nearly twice as much time on her undergraduate degree than the average student, she felt like a fake; out of her depth among top students who all deserved to be there. To overcome her insecurities she decided she would "fake it until she made it", making it her mantra. By acting the part for long enough, she realized that she eventually didn't have to fake it anymore. She actually was the confident, intelligent academic she had wanted to be. She summed up her talk by changing her motto from "fake it until you make it" to "fake it until you become it."
Fake it until you become it. I like it! I can act like I'm comfortable with putting my thoughts out into the world wide interwebs by just doing it, and maybe someday I will be comfortable with it. But in the meantime, I get to write, I get to share some stuff, and maybe I'll get lucky and some people will read this and find it somewhat interesting. So this is me faking it. I haven't really decided what all I'm going to write about yet, but I can say that I had meant for this "introduction" to be a few short lines explaining the blog's title (getting to it, I swear!) and it's kind of exploded, so I think that's promising. There have been a lot of major life changes for me in the last several years (marriage, purchasing a home, graduating from college, and on and on), so there will probably be some perspective shared on these. I have lots of work anecdotes from my various career choices that ought to get some laughs, and in some cases will probably incite some queasiness. I'm sure I'll put some of my other creative endeavors on here at some point, so eventually there will be a nice collection of documented electronics builds, beer and food recipes, and home repair adventures.
So, what's with this title...
In my early twenties I had a job as a baker/pastry cook at a somewhat upscale delicatessen in NW Portland. We would listen to NPR on the weekends pretty much all morning long, and there was one episode of Car Talk that has stuck with me for the last decade. They were reading car related Haikus that their listeners had sent in. My favorite one by far was
"My best friend's last words,
while driving he said to me,
'Take the wheel, watch this...'"
It cracked me up at the time, and it still brings a smile to my face to recite it, even if just in my head. It's the story of someone doing something self-indulgent to impress his friend which ends up being the last thing he ever does. But it seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe that's how this blog will end up. Sure, it seems like a good idea now, and it's certainly self-indulgent, but maybe this is as far as it goes. Maybe I get bored with this, maybe I just don't muster up the motivation or courage to make another entry. Meh, no big deal really, only my loss. But maybe it ends up turning out like how I hope; something cathartic for me and entertaining for others. Maybe it will be fun...
Over the years I've picked up other creative outlets, but recently I've felt like I would like to start writing again. There's something about putting thoughts into words that scratches an itch not quite satiated by playing music, spending time in the kitchen, or working on electronics. The only things I've managed to write over the last couple of years, though, have been essays for scholarships and project summary reports for school; not quite the outlet I was thinking of. "But hey, blogs are a thing, why not do one of those?", I asked myself. It seemed like a good option, but did I really want to put the things I was writing out there for the world to see? After all, I follow a few blogs, mostly ones by friends and acquaintances, some by strangers with interests similar to mine. They're all well written, coherent and articulate, and I enjoy them...in other words, the bar has been set fairly high in my eyes. If I can't make a blog that's as interesting or informative, then what's the point? Why even do one at all? As it turns out, insecurity is not as easily shaken as the rest of the teenage baggage.
I watched a very interesting TED talk recently. The talk highlighted some research being done in behavioral psychology having to do with confidence and how it's perceived. It was moderately interesting hearing about how people who did things like practicing "assertive postures" several minutes before a job interview performed better than people who adopted "passive postures". The theory is that if a person's confidence can dictate their body language, then maybe the converse can be true and by forcing themselves to adopt a confident posture, they will in turn act more confident, whether they're aware of it or not. But the part of the talk that really interested me was the speaker's anecdote of being a top student who, after being accepted to an ivy league school, was in a car accident that left her partly brain damaged. After rehabilitation, she still went off to school, but had to work twice as hard to overcome her new learning disability, often having to repeat courses. When she finally got to graduate school after spending nearly twice as much time on her undergraduate degree than the average student, she felt like a fake; out of her depth among top students who all deserved to be there. To overcome her insecurities she decided she would "fake it until she made it", making it her mantra. By acting the part for long enough, she realized that she eventually didn't have to fake it anymore. She actually was the confident, intelligent academic she had wanted to be. She summed up her talk by changing her motto from "fake it until you make it" to "fake it until you become it."
Fake it until you become it. I like it! I can act like I'm comfortable with putting my thoughts out into the world wide interwebs by just doing it, and maybe someday I will be comfortable with it. But in the meantime, I get to write, I get to share some stuff, and maybe I'll get lucky and some people will read this and find it somewhat interesting. So this is me faking it. I haven't really decided what all I'm going to write about yet, but I can say that I had meant for this "introduction" to be a few short lines explaining the blog's title (getting to it, I swear!) and it's kind of exploded, so I think that's promising. There have been a lot of major life changes for me in the last several years (marriage, purchasing a home, graduating from college, and on and on), so there will probably be some perspective shared on these. I have lots of work anecdotes from my various career choices that ought to get some laughs, and in some cases will probably incite some queasiness. I'm sure I'll put some of my other creative endeavors on here at some point, so eventually there will be a nice collection of documented electronics builds, beer and food recipes, and home repair adventures.
So, what's with this title...
In my early twenties I had a job as a baker/pastry cook at a somewhat upscale delicatessen in NW Portland. We would listen to NPR on the weekends pretty much all morning long, and there was one episode of Car Talk that has stuck with me for the last decade. They were reading car related Haikus that their listeners had sent in. My favorite one by far was
"My best friend's last words,
while driving he said to me,
'Take the wheel, watch this...'"
It cracked me up at the time, and it still brings a smile to my face to recite it, even if just in my head. It's the story of someone doing something self-indulgent to impress his friend which ends up being the last thing he ever does. But it seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe that's how this blog will end up. Sure, it seems like a good idea now, and it's certainly self-indulgent, but maybe this is as far as it goes. Maybe I get bored with this, maybe I just don't muster up the motivation or courage to make another entry. Meh, no big deal really, only my loss. But maybe it ends up turning out like how I hope; something cathartic for me and entertaining for others. Maybe it will be fun...
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