The good stuff: The efforts on lighting have definitely moved forward and, I think, complement the character nicely. Also feel that I'm learning more about how to (and how not to) do the make up effectively - both in how to achieve the look and how to make it durable enough for several hours sweating under hot lights. It was quite gruelling spending a long time on the make up and then holding sequences of hundreds of poses frame by frame. The lip-synching (mostly) worked and the character looks odd and inhuman animated frame by frame - loads of room for improvement, but lots more learnt in how to do this since earlier tests.
The downside: the biggest hitch was keeping track of the frames and reference material for the lip synching of the dialogue. With a cloudy contact lens on one eye and no glasses, I wasn't able to read the frame numbers on my monitor a lot of the time and so had to keep my glasses hidden and 'break pose' to check this on many occasions. I think rigging the monitor up (ideally a bigger monitor) close to the camera where my eye is and a 'real' contact lens for my 'good eye' will help with this.
Worse than this, although my setup with a bluetooth keypad controlling the computer to trigger each shot works really well on the whole (sometimes hidden in part-folded arms, at other times on the floor and triggered with my trusty big toe), Dragon Stop Motion has an absolutely infuriating habit whereby from time to time it puts up the option to trigger multiple frames - the only way to pass this is to physically go over to the computer and respond to the dialogue pop up.
This is something I badly need to get to the bottom of so I can avoid it happening in future. For all that's great about Dragon, it has it's share of eccentricities and doesn't integrate with Windows in a lot of ways that can be safely taken for granted with other software (common button functions, drag and drop, etc).
Of course, having a friend present to assist when I'm filming Lance squeeze in future would address a lot of these problems, and I intend to do this as the process approaches being polished enough for the actual real-deal production of Ties. I'm just stubbornly self-sufficient and, as it's a pretty long and slow process, I've felt inclined not to 'use up' favours until the process is further along the testing phase.
Anyway - I'll update with some of the current edited footage when that's done in the next couple of days. In the meantime, a still frame to show the look, which I'm pleased with and I hope reflects some of the work that's gone into it so far:
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