Building a mountain

I guess I haven't written much about the project I am working on for school.

My film is about a mountain and two mountaineers.

The past few weeks I have been building this mountain. I had a rough outline of what the mountain needed to be from my storyboards. What should be roughly where. I had enormous books, with gigantic pictures of Mount Everest and Mount Blanc borrowed out of the library for weeks. I had thought a lot about this mountain.

I sculpted a tiny version of the mountain and adjacent mountains in plasticine. I painted watercolours of the mountain.

And the last week I have been finally creating the mountain in 3d. For along time it felt really small in the computer, just like the model that I had sitting on my desk. But today, I started in on the details. I started adding parts where the characters would actually be up close and personal.

Finally I added little stand-ins for the characters, just to get the idea of the scale of things.

I put my virtual camera right next to these tiny little figures, and suddenly the massive scale of the thing I had created took shape.

It's a primal feeling that I get when I work in 3d, where I am no longer looking at a virtual set, but I feel like I am there.

I put myself at the top of the mountain, and I felt unease, vertigo, high above the glacier I had just created.

Right there, that feeling, is why I like 3d, why I like computers, why I use his medium and not any others.


Kyler

End of Fall Life Drawing


And that is all the life drawing for this semester.

Glow Strings

Many things probably

How am I doing?

I haven't been posting much here recently. Now why is that?

I think the simplest answer is that my life has been changing, and I haven't felt comfortable posting all of the information about how it has been changing. Thus I have fell into the trap of simple not posting, thus not needing to confront the issue of what to post online and what not too.

Many months have past since I made a post about Jackie on this blog. It wasn't really a big grand post, it didn't do a very good job of keeping the blog rolling. Relationships have never really been part of the scope of what I talk about on this blog. There are actually unpublished blog posts about relationships sitting in the background of the blog, waiting patiently, one day to made public... well perhaps.

But the summer's long story made shorter, Jackie and I fell in love during the summer. It is only finally starting to feel like real life again. Though the whole world was tipped on its side and everything is different but still fantastic.

We live in Montreal, snug in the same apartment I was living in last year. There is so much more life in the apartment now. The walls are covered with maps and drawings. There are arts and crafts everywhere. We go to music concerts and cook dinner together. I go to school, she goes to work. We struggle with ordinary life problems. It feels like we hold each other up.

Suddenly I feel like I've jumped a few years forward in life. I'm right on the edge of really having to be an "adult".

There was this feeling when I was little that my parents could just deal with anything. No matter what, they knew how to deal with it. There was this feeling that an adult could plan a trip, while a child could only really go along for the ride. I don't know any other way to describe it. And suddenly I can feel that same level of responsibility rising in myself.

I don't think of it has a burden of responsibility, there is a certain amount of strength in it. Finally getting to be in charge of all of the decisions.

How am I doing?
Really well. Though I can tell that time is just going to start sweeping by.
I need to make life more interesting to slow it down.

Kyler