I managed to book an appointment at the laser cutter (which isn’t easy this time of year)!  I’ve drawn up all the blueprints in Illustrator with 0.001 line strokes colored with 100% blue from the RBG color scale.  This way the laser will read it and know it has to cut through those places (if you use the wrong color it won’t set the laser’s power strong enough).  I went to my appointment and had a very easy time with everything.  I wish I had tried using this technology sooner.  It saves SO much time.  All of my pieces are cut and I will assemble them into coffins later.

coffin-1 coffin-2 coffin-3

These past couple of weeks I have made a sample coffin out of cardboard, drawn preliminary sketches of what each character would have looked like in life, molded and baked the limbs of each character, and ordered supplies to make the coffins.  The Friday before Thanksgiving I went to a laser cutter orientation so now I can use the machine to cut my coffins after I make the blueprints in Illustrator.  The supplies have been delivered to me and consist of small hooks to hang the skeletons, tiny hinges for the coffin to be able to open, and sheets of birch plywood.

I plan on making the Illustrator blueprints and cutting the coffin pieces out this week as well as finishing the obituaries for all the skeletons.

I went to one of the comic symposium talks on the 15th.  Angela Stempel did a talk about her work in experimental animation.  Most of the animations were rather confusing to me, to be honest, but I did enjoy the 2D animations she did for the music videos she was commissioned for.  One thing she showed that I was really excited about was a project she started for a fellowship she won, but she never completed it.  It was about spirituality and masks in southern and eastern Asia, which I am very interested in, so I was pretty disappointed she did not have any animation to show about it.  I will probably go to the upcoming comics symposium talk this Tuesday with Warren Bernard.