drfoxdoeshistory

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This is the first week where I’ve almost felt like I knew what I was doing. I finally finished the fox model and have the reference pictures for the locations, so those are going to be the bulk of what I spend my time on. The rigging/ animation process is interesting; rigging is a very delicate process where you want to adjust the character to match the skeleton/ rig as much as possible. Putting that in looked simple but it took forever because everything had to be very precisely lined up in order for the body to move in the proper places. A really bizarre issue was that after syncing the material and the rig, I’d move the legs and the skeleton would be visible underneath. Now here’s where some stupid stuff happened: the visible skeleton prompted me to restart more than once, and come to find out it’s because I didn’t clear the metra rig. Now, what the heck is the meta rig? The best way I can describe it is to say that’s like when a snake sheds its skin; when the rig gets joined with the character materials, a hollow rig is left behind and needs to be deleted. So all of those times I cleared out the rig after seeing the ghost rig were for nothing.

Once the rig was in, I started experimenting with animation, and it’s fairly straightforward but time consuming. You can go frame by frame and move the figure around like stop motion, which is a great amount of freedom, but it requires a lot of delicacy and patience. I’ve got the head nods, tail movements and some waving down pretty well but the walking around will need practice. I also have my reference images to build the locations. I have two maps for background, a college library checkout, a picture of the fields in Assam and then a couple back up pictures. They won’t look perfect but people should at least be able to tell what they are. Grant has a snowy village type location he does a tutorial for that will be the fox home but whether it’s in the first iteration of this short will depend on time. I haven’t investigated how to do the voiceover so that’ll be the next thing I figure out. This MIGHT be possible. MIGHT.

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Annoying lesson: apparently Blender sucks on Mac air books now because of some sort of update. I’ve been building and rebuilding the fox on there and I noticed that everything will stop working and I’ll have to force quit blender and re open it again. I don’t know if this is because I’m going back and forth between blender and the fox tutorial video more than before but that’s my main theory. You see, at first what would happen was I’d see some instructions on the tutorial, go into blender and pull a me where I over think whatever the steps were and end up spending an eternity trying to get it all sorted out. Since I’m somewhat(emphasis on that) figuring blender out, I’m getting through the steps quicker and spending less time on Blender and more time going back and forth. It all really makes me see the value of a PC. It’s a shame I’m a poor college student.

I thought I made good fox progress last week but there was a speed bump: when I tested the paws to make sure they were flat on the surface they all merged together in this freaky way. Also, when I was doing the face, it was all messed up. Once again, I started over but this time I broke up the sessions a little for the sake of both my brain and my computer and I was getting less worn out so the legs and face are nice this time. I’m more or less done building the actual model minus some tweaks I’ll do. For this part I’m diverging away from the tutorial and providing my own interpretation because I really don’t want it to look exactly like what Grant did. What’s encouraging is that once I’m done with my adjustments, which is a fun process, all thats left is to color the fox, give it the skeleton(rigging) and test out the movements. I’m debating whether I want to add anymore animals since this took a while. Grant has a tutorial for a rabbit, and I wanted rabbits in my film, so if I add another animal, it’ll probably be that. I’ve more or less accepted that this is a first draft and the raccoon won’t be happening this time around. My hope is that the coloring and rigging will be done today. It seems like an easier/less finicky process than building the model, and I feel much more confident with the software. We’ll see.

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This week has been fairly frustrating. I’ve reverted back to blender so I’m neck deep in the learning process for that. Basically I’ll need to be able to create environments and characters to occupy them, and the good news is that it seems like the actual locations are easier to make than the characters. The problem is, the characters are pretty complicated. There’s a British guy on YouTube named Grant Abbitt who has a 2 part 4.5 hour video on how to make a fox and I’ve been watching that and following along to the best of my ability. There are a lot of steps: you trace vertices with a reference picture, bring it out into a three dimensional mesh shape, and start moving and cutting and adjusting the object until it looks like a fox. Then you shade it using red white and black, and rig it. Rigging basically allows you to give the character movable joints. There’s not a fox skeleton structure on Blender, so Grant says you can use a wolf. After you’ve done all these things you can animate the character, record the animations, and ideally have a movable character.

I am to the point in the process where I have the 3D model and I’ve started tweaking the face and the next thing im going to do is add the legs. It took a while to learn basic things and then there were a couple times where I forgot to save the file when I made significant progress because I’m used to things auto saving. Lesson learned though, because everytime I get through a significant step I save it. This means at least I won’t have to keep restarting more than I already have. A potential obstacle is time. Grant has a rabbit video so I may just create the rabbits and nix the raccoon, which I don’t like doing, but unless I find a really good raccoon tutorial, I don’t think I’m going to get the hang of blender in time to build a raccoon without help from a tutorial. Grant also has a snow village background so I will most likely use that as one location. Fortunately, that video is far shorter than the fox ones, so I’m hoping that’ll be easier to figure out. The progression has been taxing my willpower because progress for the most part isn’t working faster but making new mistakes. I know it’s part of the learning curve but it’s pretty hard not to feel like I’m running out of time. I don’t want to sacrifice the raccoon but if things start looking grim, that will likely be the first idea that gets jettisoned.

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Things on the movie have slightly improved; I have a better direction for the historical part of the script and I’m pretty sure that the previous approach was a bit muddled. The original plan was to share some statistics about the poor treatment of the tea workers in Assam, but considering the somewhat goofy nature of the script, it seemed like it was a too dark approach. Another thing that will be modified or snipped is the scene where Allister the Fox is drained and allows a beard to grow and there’s a scene where he gets shaved by the raccoon. The intent was for this to show the value of taking care of yourself when you’re busy. This may come off bleak or serious so I’m questioning it a bit. It is possible that I can do the same scene and change the body language or staging to make it less bleak. I’m not 100% on this but I think that if something is removed it will most likely be the beard thing. Since the plan is for allister to have a slightly droopy ear, I’m thinking maybe it perk up and then get pushed back down again. It’s funny and still proves the point.

A positive development also happened with the software. I had originally thrown in the towel on blender and assumed that I wouldn’t be able to do it, so I looked into a thing called Key soft. After some tinkering I realized that Key soft can’t build models from scratch so I’d be required to import a model from software like Blender. This freaked me out for a bit until I started digging around and found a 4.5 two part tutorial of a British guy showing the step by step process of model building on Blender for, of all things, a fox! While I shall take great pains to make my fox look distinct from his, it is still helpful to get thorough steps on building the characters. He goes through the design, shading, sculpting and rigging, which allows you to basically give the models joints for movement. It takes a long time to get through the video because he’s interacting with posts on the stream for the video, but you couldn’t ask for a better tutorial. The way it’s set up is so that even a novice can navigate the software with a reference picture, and he shows you how to do that too, so things should be progressing quickly over my four day weekend.

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This week has been rough and productive in equal measure. The good news is that I got a script done. It’s going to get bits and pieces rewritten but for the most part it’s already set in stone. The script mostly omits the historical stuff I plan on showing but it’s okay because I haven’t figured it all out yet anyways. I’m mostly happy with the way it plays out. The reasoning behind the fox choosing to search for tea has an emotional logic to it rather than an academic one, and that’s something I like. The dialogue is in frequent and for the most part the script relies on the voiceover, which is fine because it’s a lot like a children’s book where there’s a narrator, so that’s something that will be consistent with the original notion of adapting a children’s book. The script has a fair amount of location changes throughout the script are most likely not going to remain after I’ve started the animation process. If I think I have time, I’ll try to keep them in as much as possible, but if there’s a hitch in the animation process, I will streamline the plot and reduce the amount of locations that are used. I would like to provide a variety to make it feel more immersive and cinematic but since this is the first time I’m doing this, I have accepted the possibility that I will need to adjust. The first piece of software I looked into was free but it was causing me to lose tons of time, so I decided to look into a second one, and talked to an animation teacher at my school about a third one. My plan is to have the best looking thing that still manages to be possible with the amount of time constraints I have. My hope is that by next week I will have a software set in stone and be on my way to getting it done.

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The creative process is a nightmare. Since I more or less know how the middle is going to play out, I’m trying to figure out how to start my short, which is the opposite of the typical writer’s struggle. I know I have the tea loving fox, but how do I generate the spark that leads him to the history lesson? What gives him the idea and what inspires the decision to use tea beyond the fact that he likes it? Clearly there needs to be some sort of visual storytelling in place, so a cue like him looking at a teabag, a glass, or a tea container seemed organic. The other thing I wondered was: since I’m going to discuss what I’ve learned about Assam in India, could that be on the tea container, and get his investigation started? It seems organic enough but I worry that may be too convenient. Another possibility could be something like “a product of the British Empire”. This could be useful because a lot of the historical chunk is going to be examining what it means for something to be the product of the Empire, but then I’m also not giving away too much too soon.

Another issue I’m having is how best to introduce the raccoon friend that’s going to show up and motivate McFluffen in that final section before he gets all the research together and figures everything out. It occurred to me that McFluffen could be out on a walk and past a trash can and wave to the raccoon, Newt, as he walks by. It could be funny, but it could also risk undermining the idea of having a deaf character with dignity if I have him dumpster diving. Another possibility would be for them to be having breakfast or a tea, but that might be TOO eccentric. There’s also the chance that Newt left something valuable in McFluffen’s den and he needs to come get it, and while McFluffen is digging around for it, he could knock over the tea container in all the chaos and come back to it after Newt is gone. Since my plan is to get out a script by the end of tomorrow, I might just try this approach and see how I feel about it because it feels like it sets things up without making things too convenient. Either way, the first draft will be done tomorrow, I’ll get a second opinion, and hopefully be animating before too long.

The writing needs to be over so I can get to the editing. Yawn.

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I’m not quite in the thick of things with my fox film, but my confidence in the idea is growing and I’m seeing some directions I can take it in. The first big step is writing the story out, which I’ve been slowly doing while reading Empires Gardens. Empire’s Gardens is a good supplement for Rappaport’s Thirst for Empire, because Rappaport provides a broad history of the development of tea and the marketing campaigns that got the British to associate tea with “Britishness”, while Gardens focuses on Assam, a region in India. I haven’t gotten as far as I’d like to yet, but I am seeing a formation of a story; I’d like to explain the concept of a monopoly using visuals, the loss of the monopoly, and I want to simply explain the book’s argument that Assam was essentially Britain’s way of domesticating the tea industry. There will be a component that focuses on how and why the tea workers in Assam were racialized, first with Chinese workers, and later with the tea coolies who had racist assumptions made about them. I have faith in my ability to present complicated material in an approachable way that would not alienate a potential child audience, but when I am finalizing my script, that will likely be the thing that receives the most focus.

Now, to the script itself: it’s not too far past an outline at this point but I did spend a fair amount of time cultivating a list on Spotify of pieces of music that I want to have in mind for particular scenes. In a perfect world, I’d be able to navigate copyright laws and use 30 seconds without having any issues, but the research I’ve done for that so far has been inconsistent on the legality of that approach. I have picked out the 30 second bits of each chosen track in the event that I am able to use them, but if I can’t get clarification on that, then it’ll just be inspiration music during the writing process. This may be for the best anyways because as I was putting the list together and thinking about the scenes the songs would go with, it seemed like there could be moments that were potentially depressing. The music is exclusively composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, because the Fox’s mental state leans toward the melancholy and they’re good for that, but the specific tracks don’t go too far with it. Regardless of age, the Fox’s loneliness and uncertainty will likely shine through even without this music. My hope is that by the end of the weekend I will have a reliable first draft, and I expect to be making constant revisions.

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Getting my project set up was a bit dicey, especially with the motion capture people at my Uni’s library. I went up to the library(a 35 ish minute drive) on Sunday since they said they were open and the people there said there was only one mocap guy and he’s only there during the week. When I work. So that was cool, but we managed to video chat at the end of the day Tuesday so it wasn’t a total disaster. Talking didn’t prove to be very reassuring; the motion capture department is new and none of the people who’ve used them have shown the department the finished work, so I wasn’t able to look at any samples of what the studio is capable of. Very troubling indeed. They told me that shooting footage of myself as an animal wouldn’t be the end of the world since there are animation tricks to sync up the movements to where they flow with how an animal would move, so that was good news.

I did a search of cheap and easy animation software and the one I found that the library has is called blender, so I’ll most likely try that one out first and adjust later if it becomes necessary or the animation is garbage. The start of the project is going to be really strange because I’m going to be spread out in three different ways: animation training, research, and putting together the actual plot of the short film. I’d love for it to be a solid 30 minutes and throw some neat stuff in there, but it’s still far too early in the process to be able to guess that sort of thing. I don’t want it to be incredibly short because I’d like inject it with some actual storytelling and make a character who can connect with people and make them feel better, beyond just teaching them a new discipline. I’d also like to get his voice figured out pretty soon but I haven’t decided whether I want to go full cartoon, a wannabe British sounding voice, or something that is a simple distortion of my normal voice. My goal is for the people who see it to not notice it too much or think it’s me. It’s going to be an odd weekend, for sure.

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One of the big focuses of reading this week was on the big data driven Republic of Letters project. Large amounts of data involving letters sent back and forth by great thinkers like Voltaire and John Locke were used to visually illustrate the numerous details the metadata revealed. If my rough guess is correct, metadata is basically when every aspect of a document BESIDES its actual content is being tracked and displayed, such as where the documents may have traveled. The project used this to show things like which guy talked to who, or sent things to which country, or something along those lines. The project and others like it can use graphs and charts to visually communicate trends, patterns, and other information in a way that’s easy to digest. The data was massive, spanning a long period of time, and was judged by critics as “not supplying information all that different from traditional methods”. The big question here is: is that a bad thing that a wildly different methodology yields similar results? If anything, this would appear to be validation of these methods and confirmation of their relevance. Frankly metadata terrifies me, so as I learn more, I’ll report back. Right now the prognosis is grim.

Another thought: sometimes public school borne illnesses are a real wrench in your plans. Originally I was going to go and test out the abilities of my university’s studio in regard to filmmaking, but a sick weekend prevented what could’ve been a colossally useful trip. I’m in a bind because I want to use the studio to make a short film featuring a character I created years ago and essentially cinematically recreate a children’s book idea about history work. The bind? I don’t know how to write the thing before seeing what’s actually possible on the technology. I’m hoping that this weekend will allow for a proper appraisal of what can be done, whether or not I can get some metadata involved, and what all the movie will be.

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This week, the reading was a bit of a blender: spatial history, video game history and some examples of history podcasts. Video game history was familiar, since it’s almost common knowledge that the long running Civilization game was the one that started the trend of history based games that possibly peaked with Assassin’s Creed. Interesting stuff, but not what left the biggest impression. Edging out the spatial history(which I’m still not entirely clear on or overly fond of), is history podcasts! As someone who entered college years ago looking to be a filmmaker/actor, podcasts are a rather appealing historical method.

The main podcasts I listened to in the past were the Directors Guild and Roger Deakins podcasts, which were interview style shows that went into the processes of filmmaking. Due to my limited listening experience, I got to listen to a couple history podcasts and learn how they work, and it was pretty fun. Unlike the interviews, there is a script for these, mainly spoken by one person who serves as a narrator. Beyond that, there is typically some background music and use of oral histories with the subjects and/or people who knew them who are providing firsthand accounts. The oral histories will be edited in with the scripted narration working to fill in the blanks. Structurally, the process isn’t all that different from film, except for the fact that it’s all sound.

I had already been leaning toward the idea of making a podcast for a digital history project. It plays to my strengths and interests since I need sound experience and enjoy editing quite a bit. Also, I already know I suck at visual storytelling with charts because we had a digital humanities course in 2021 where the final project was such a project on Tableau Public presentation that had no luck getting published or presented at a conference. The creativity and potential of the podcasts we heard was inspiring enough to make me think that once I focus on a specific topic, I can do something pretty cool.

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History Disrupted, a fairly recent book about history, makes some great points about how historians face the classic “intrinsic vs extrinsic” tug of war. This reminded me of a couple weeks ago when my sophomore students started a unit that focused a lot on material wealth and they were stumped by these terms. The best explanation we got was that intrinsic= experience and extrinsic=material wealth. This is also true with history; historians value intrinsic knowledge while e-history, the internet’s version of history, goes for extrinsic.

Historians are intrinsic because they’re looking to the people who have spent time attending seminars and writing papers for conferences and getting neck deep in the previously published expertise for whatever they’re interested in. If I’m a grad student interested in the French Revolution who wants to make new discoveries and arguments about the French Revolution, I’ve got to know what the previous arguments are. Getting familiar with these previous works and finding the gaps in knowledge is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to get comfortable with a field, publish your discoveries, get peer reviewed, and then you’re able to make reliable historical arguments on the internet, from historians’ perspective.

The internet’s take on who’s qualified to do E history is fundamentally extrinsic; it values the people who are getting attention and making money on whatever site or app is being used to spread the information. The heads of internet companies aren’t worried about credentials or experiences, they want clickbait, buzzwords, provocation. It is history as commerce and the academics of it all is nobody’s concern. As someone who values history and aspires to be a respected historian, it’s not encouraging stuff. This is a culture that favors reactions over nuance and those two things almost never mix.

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I did some reading that alternated between exciting, depressing, and infuriating, and sometimes all at once.

Exciting: The wide possibilities of transnational history that have been unlocked by the increasingly digital landscape of archival practices are encouraging to Americans like myself, who are sick of getting the most ego centric and bland version of history. It’s quite encouraging to see how the digitization of many primary sources makes it possible to find sources that would be easily overlooked in the analog days. If I were to be in this biz 25 years ago, I could spend days shuffling through valuable(and dusty) materials, only to find some semi-useful source that helped a fraction of the amount as something that could be found online using a search database. In this regard, it’s fantastic, and it’s allowing us to sew the international stitches of history together.

Now for the depressing part: I’d personally love to use a grant to go prancing through Europe for weeks and have a clean conscience due to the knowledge that I was there for research, and digitization and search databases have rendered this practice, in some cases, obsolete and gaudy.

The reduction of onsite research leads to same issue films have with their efforts against on location filmmaking, a two dimensionality that belies a lack of first hand understanding.

A more relatable example of this would be New York City, and the difference between someone who adores the city through pictures and someone who adores it from the experience. This adoration, while genuine in both cases, is not the same: the person who knows it through pictures loves what they’re being sold, which is a glorious Mecca of Capitalism and Individuality. The person who’s been there would think of other things: the interconnected nature of the neighborhoods, the way the city is the organism and the people are the cells that make it up. The same can apply to hard won archival research. A Gettysburg paper written with search engine sources won’t be the same as a paper written by a historian who hunted the sources down and walked every inch of the battlefield.

Now on to the infuriating: Wikipedia and history. One of the readings says that around 2005, it was thought of as a reliable database for nerds, and this is how I see it. For history? No way. The communal nature and restrictions against bias kill its opportunity to be the kind of history that historians wish to write. Historians seek interpretations of history beyond the bone dry events; we look deeper, and this exploration is written off by the likes of Wikipedia as either offensive or biased. Wikipedia promotes a bland, bone dry history for fear of stepping on toes or breaking one of its rules. This is not to dispute the value of Wikipedia for general, surface level information, but it’s not a good place for genuine insights.

End thought: technology is a double edged sword, neither as dangerous or as useful as it is thought to be. In the end, we must rely on the imperfection of our minds and biases to produce the most human form of history.

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