Some time Monday the landlord is dropping by to look at the radiators. We’ve had glorious heat all weekend. Turns out that the heat was supposed to be on all last week but the person sent to check out the boiler’s health and turn it all on didn’t cut it on, they just checked its health and cut it back off. So Friday the heat was cut on and I walked back inside from talking to the landlord about not much of anything and there was, as he promised, heat wafting down from the ceiling. “You’ll need to remember to empty out the buckets,” he said to me. Small buckets hang down from our radiators in two of the rooms, to catch the drips. I told him the buckets were dry all last year. “They might be clogged,” he replied. And so he is going to drop by and check and see if they are clogged. Funny when a working radiator means it drips.
So, I promised myself I would clean clean since the landlord was stopping in. I would clean out the refrigerator as I planned to show him the door handle that simply snapped off one day. Didn’t come unscrewed, just snapped off this refrigerator which he dragged in last November to replace the old. We successfully superglued it back on and it stayed for a month or two and then snapped back off.
So I’d vowed I’d clean on Sunday. Really really clean. And I did clean some but instead I applied myself to reading up on stop motion animation, as I’d done all week. I spent Sunday evening exchanging remarks on the forum. Getting advice on what to do next with H.o.p. And I read and read while exchanging remarks, and watched stop motion animation shorts on people’s websites. I read up on this webcam and that webcam which are both suitable for stop motion animation. I had read up on stop motion animation all last week but at this forum I hit the motherlode of links and I read up on about ten more programs that are out there and my head swam. I read up on making armatures and was looking up things like electrical shrink tubing that you can put over armatures.
I was informed about tie-downs (securing puppets by screwing them into the stage area base) and I read about tie-downs and wondered how I can do tie-downs without having machine shop equipment, no saws for cutting metal. There must be a good way. I considered how we will need to be able to set up an area next to H.o.p.’s computer in which he can pursue this, tie-downs need some sort of table with no top, will have to see to that, will have to be able to move it out of the way of general living as well since this room is our “dining room” and computer room and homeschool room and now will be also the room for making stop motion animation.
$99 for a webcam for H.o.p. we can do, and it’s not meant to be professional, it’s a beginner thing, or a test camera, it’s not going to be great quality, which will in fact be just fine as it’s simple and his computer couldn’t handle a multitude of high resolution digital images dumped in to be made into a film. But I’ve still a lot of reading up on this to do, to make sure we’re getting the right thing. And then will come doing free trial downloads of the different stop motion animation software programs and testing them out and finding what is most suitable for a child.
I thought about how odd it can be sometimes always seeing to the technical end of things and nothing else. Like H.o.p.’s stop motion animation now. I’m reading up on all this, spending my time scouting out websites for him and I read all the material and then I tell him about how things are done and I show him all the little test movies on the web, the short instructional movies, lots of pictures of puppets and he eagerly drinks it all in and bookmarks them all so he can find them all later. I will be the one cutting and twisting the wire for the armatures and helping H.o.p. learn to mold super sculpey over them and paint them. But…that’s where I must step back. I can show him but I can’t make them for him. I can do the hard part that he couldn’t physically do, and can assist him, but these must be his creations. The faces and shapes he molds onto the armatures must be his. I’ll help bake them to make sure it’s done correctly. And then he must paint them as he chooses, however he chooses. I’ll look over what he’s doing, I can give him tips, I can help, but these must be his if he’s going to learn how to make them. Though I can experiment with making a few and he can watch how I use sculpting tools and learn from watching. I can drill holes in the plywood base for the stage and plot where he can do tiedowns, I can help him put together materials for backgrounds, but they must be his vision, what he sees. And when we buy the webcam and cut it on I can help him technically but what is done must be all his. That’s the only way he’s going to learn. Just like with his drawing and all his sculpting. The only way he’s going to learn is to do all his little projects his own way. His little movies are going to look awful and clumsy at first. It’s a lot of work going in to helping him to make something that is going to look awful and clumsy. I can give him tips. Buy him books. Watch movies with him and point out how the camera is used in them and how story lines are built and how emotions are communicated but other than that I’ve got to step back and let the rest of it be his. I’m hoping, if he proves to be as interested in it as he has been crazy about drawing and sculpting, that he’ll make hundreds of little movies and three years from now he’ll be building all his own armatures and doing all his own reading up on techniques and devising his own methods of making things work and coming up to me and saying too that he just can’t work with what he’s got any more, that he’s been reading up on this and that and he needs this and that, that they would be a great help for him, that he needs more processing speed, a better camera, lights, better video card.
For two years H.o.p. has had two dreams. And for a seven-year-old that’s a good portion of one’s lifetime. He’s had two consistent dreams. “I’m an artist, I’m going to be an artist,” was one of his dreams. His other dream was kind of confusing to me, I didn’t quite get it. “I’m going to build robots. I have to learn how to build robots.” I talked to him about this every so often, trying to understand what he was getting at. Real robots? I showed him the kinds of robots people currently make. No, he wanted to build real robots, he’d tell me. Robots that walked and talked and felt. Real robots. And yet whenever we bought him a robot he would pull pull out its batteries and hide its remote control. He has never wanted a robot running around on its own. And we have bought him several child-type robots over the years and never once as he permitted any of them to have batteries and has hidden the remote controls for all of them. He would instead manually move the robots, and take other toys and make “robots” out of them, moving them around, and last year began photographing them, moving them, photographing them, moving them, photographing them. Still, when he kept saying, “I want to be an artist and I want to make robots,” I kept thinking real robots and couldn’t understand why he had no desire to let his purchased robots run around (he says it creeps him out when they move on their own) and had no desire to learn about electronics (I know people who have been teaching their kids with electronic kits since they were five).
I’m so dim-witted it took me until this week to put two-and-two together. When he means robots he means the walking, talking, feeling type of characters and creatures you get in stop motion animation. Puppet robots. Like the “garbage” robot he plotted all night making. He says it must be made all out of recyclables. He wants to make a movie with the garbage robot. And of course, being seven, he wants to make a movie he says will be called “The Dangerous Forest” in which a knight in shining armor fights an evil villain that turns into a snake. And he drew a storyboard of how it will turn into a snake and I thought hmmm well we’re going to have to have a stop motion animation program that allows onionskinning with imported scans of drawings as well.
So, that’s a mystery solved. The robots he has always said he wanted to make. He sat this evening and watched over and over and over a stop motion animation of a short I’d found on the web called “Underground Robot”. I had earlier shown him some stills of it I’d found and he searched again also for the stills to examine how it was put together. And he pointed out armatures to me. “Look, that’s the armature they used!”
He acts out the scenes he wants to film and they are all ridiculous, silly, absurd. Hopping and jumping and running around. And I think how ridiculous but also think well if he does it that’s how he’s going to learn, isn’t it, making things look like they’re really leaping and flapping arms and jumping up and down.
Though he draws 18 hours a day, I wonder, when he sees how much work is involved, if he’ll want to really do it. I say, “Ok, let’s playact we’re making a film.” And I move things off the table and put two of his sculptures on it and I tell him OK one of them simply wants to get to the door, what do you think is involved? And he moves it a little bit and pretends to take a picture and moves it a little more and pretends to take a picture and moves it a little more and pretends to take a picture.
I was looking earlier tonight at the sculptures he made of the characters form Wallace and Grommit. I look at the dozens of Gumbys he made over the summer all with different facial expressions.
A big investment of energy and will be a share of money too. Maybe he’ll run with it, maybe he won’t. You never know. He could start and decide he hates it and wants to do something else.
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