I’m Back Baby!

Friday morning I had my exam for my Pop Culture exam.  I must admit I wasn’t confident going into the exam as I felt that my brain could not absorb any of the notes I had studied for the past week.  But I’m realizing that this is just the way I feel after studying for days on end.  Either way, the exam wasn’t TOO bad although I had to really think about what I wanted to say for the essay portion and I also blanked out completely on a few points comparing youth to pop culture.  I thought I had that one in the bag!

Friday night had Vero and I go to my work Christmas party over at Brooke’s place out in Aylmer.  I manged to pick up some good priced beer at the grocery store while driving there and we showed up when the party was in full force.  The appetizers were tasty and I especially enjoyed the cinammon rolls which reminded me of Mom.  The gift exchange was fun and Vero and I ended up with the Jack Ryan movie collection (four films!).  Bonus!

On Saturday I lazed around Vero’s place for awhile until realizing I should really get up and start working on my take-home exam for Multimedia.  I hadn’t even looked at the requirements yet but I knew that I had better get cracking at it sooner than later as there are a ton of Christmas parties coming up and I haven’t even finished my shopping yet!  No sooner than I arrive back home that I realize that Vero’s purse is in my car along with her wallet and keys.  I had to turn around and return them to her.

I didn’t get working on my exam until 5PM that night.  I sat myself down, put on some good tunes and started reading the requirements.  Animating a children’s book?  Oh lord.  This won’t be good.  But then I started to get on a roll and things started coming together.  Part of animating is trying to figure out the puzzle of how you’re going to make something work…for example I needed to make the dogs eyes blink when you rolled the mouse cursor over them.  Well, how does one animate an eye blinking?  Well, I’ll just put a circle of red coloured fur over his eye and that can be his eyelid.  That works fine but his eyelash stays on top of his head…that’s not right…ok, I’ll swap the position of the eyelash to the bottom of the coloured circle.  Voila!  It’s not pretty, but it works!

That’s the sort of thing that one has to think about when animating things.  The prep work is pretty incredible.  For an eight page storybook, each page took about 30 minutes of prep work…cutting out images, making the colours brigther, etc.  Then the next 30-60 minutes is spent on animating the images and making sure everything lines up.

I was definitely on a roll on Saturday night.  The moment was right.  At one point I grew hungry and I couldn’t find anything so I ordered a nice Jamaican Jerk burger from The Works and picked it up a half hour later.  Awww yeah!  This is high livin’!  I powered through the exam and ended up with three of the eight pages animated before heading to bed.  I planned to wake up early the next morning and attempt to complete the majority of the exam.

The next morning didn’t work out as planned.  No electricity!  I groaned and settled down with my laptop but it only had 30 minutes of battery power.  After the laptop died, I wrapped some gifts, shovelled the driveway and read some comics.  I sat wondering when the power would come back on so I could get cracking!  It did flicker on around 10:30 and I worked on the exam only to have the power go out after ten minutes!  Argh.  I sat around for awhile longer but then realized it was senseless to wait around so I packed up the car and headed to Vero’s place.

The rest of my day was a long, drawn-out, grueling ordeal of animating the project.  Each page was at least an hour’s work.  It was getting tiresome.  I would finish one page, then take a break and start another.  Around 9PM I finally finished all eight pages and was happy.  I would say 95% of the work is done and all I have to do is change some button designs.  I couldn’t get some butterflies to move around the screen but I realized that it’s not worth my time to spend hours trying to get a fly to move across a screen.  I do have until December 19 to hand it in so if I’m up for it, I will try and get the sucker to move around the screen.

Vero then gave me a much needed haircut that night and then I called home to ask Mike if the power had been back on.  He wasn’t home which I found odd so I phoned Eric and he told me the power still wasn’t on!  I decided to stay over at Vero’s for the night considering I had no idea when the power would be back on and it must be quite chilly back home.  Turns out that the power had come back on around 8PM by Mike’s estimates.  Broken transformers!  Bah!  That’s quite the long haul without power.

So now I’m hoping to finish up the exam tonight but I’ll take my time from this point out.  But at least the bulk of the work is finished and it’s now opened up the next few weeks which I assumed would have been spent working on a take-home exam.

So what’s on the agenda for the next few weeks?  Three Christmas parties, shopping and planning to head home for the holidays.  Not too shabby.