Day 6
New faces! Two of them! Our little shop grows with the addition of Shawna and Jonathan, who join us from Clunk! Puppet Labs.
I wish I’d been less tardy this morning. I hit snooze a couple of times and then went to David’s Tea for my free Earth Day tea, hopped on the C-train and made it in at about 10 after 10 to find everyone already settled around ready to start the weekly production meeting. Oops. We went through the script and storyboards (things are looking good! And now I know the story. Judd claims this to be the final version of the script, bu principal photography is a long way off, so I think there might be room for some small changes). The show is called The Invention of Christmas Presents and is a sort of origin story for the Clauses. That’s all I really want to tell you – to get the details, you’ll just have to watch it when it airs.
After dividing up the production list – or at least getting everyone started on general tasks, I set to work finishing my blocks. Yes. I am still working on those blocks. Remember when it was the project for an afternoon? Me neither. Anyway… Today I have to get through carving if I’m to preserve my self-respect. So I got out the hammer and chisel and started in on the last block and a half (for those of you who are good at math, yes, that means I only made it half way through carving on Saturday.) Predictably, it took me all day to finish them off, get them sanded and ready for painting.
Peter told me that he thought it was a bad idea to chisel them – he would’ve just used the dremel. I don’t think Judd was hazing me when he told me to chisel them. In fact – I don’t regret the hours I put into carving these blocks either. The chisel really gives you a sense of the wood in a way the power tools don’t. I had to really think through the grain and try to feel how the wood would react to the various tools, pressure, angles, etc. It makes me want to try a big carving project with a knife just to se how it works.
But since I was still getting a feel for things, I ended up cracking and splitting the wood pretty regularly. When that happens, we use something called epoxy sculpt – it’s a two-part polymer that you knead together and then let dry. Ideally, you don’t need to use it, but it’s almost inevitable that little carving mistakes happen, sp you throw on some epoxy sculpt to un-carve things as necessary. It takes about 12 hours to fully cure, so it was the last thing I did before leaving for the day.