Atomic-Robo.com

Work on the Atomic Robo: Last Stop short continues over at The Fictory. Their Friday blog laid out how they set up and animate a shot. I linked you to a page containing all the recent Robo posts, just in case you missed any of the very cool stuff The Fictory crew’s been up to. Check it out.

Also, the Master Digital Interview and Master Digital Color Challenge are up and done, respectively.

I spent the bulk of last week down on Staten Island putting Phase II of Operation Art Studio into effect. The Widget had no school last week, so she and I headed down on Wednesday and my brother and I busted our humps for three days straight. You may remember that last time we cleaned and organized all the stuff in the attic. Most of it was trash, a large chunk of it was donated to various organizations, and a small amount of it was kept.

The problem this left us with was that we now had a giant fucking pile of shit, three stories off the ground that we needed to get rid of.

So this time we rented a 20 yard dumpster. In theory a company from Brooklyn was going to bring us a debris shoot that would allow us to simply huck bags from the attic directly into the dumpster. But then NYC got hit by what some local idiot of a meteorologist dubbed a “snowicaine”. And so the chute never came. We searched the rest of the city for one, but mostly companies that rent this stuff out are looking to rent at least ten-stories worth at a time. So we had no luck.

Instead, Dave put in a bunch of calls to his many artist and musician friends, who sort of define the term “free time”, and we decided to pay this crew the money that we would have spent on a debris chute. We ended up with six guys and we just formed a bucket-brigade to move the bags from the attic to the living room, and from there out to the dumpster.

Then the real fun began. Ripping out the moldy drywall and rotten insulation. Yay! At several points since starting this job Dave has said to me, with great confidence, “well, that was the worst part. It’s all easy from here on.” And like an idiot I have believed him each time. Because I desperately want his claim to be true. But it’s not. Granted, no one could have predicted the debris shoot not showing up. But ripping out the walls up there has to have been one of the most horrific jobs I’ve done in a long, long time. Limited ventilation, poor light, dense clouds of atomized fiberglass filling the air, and suffocating masks that were quickly made worse by a thick layer of former wall insulation.

It was gross. But we powered through. There’s a minor roof leak to fix and a bit of electrical work that will be done before I go back down. The next phase will be installing new insulation and hanging drywall. Dave assures me that the worst is behind us . . .

Oh we also cleaned and mostly organizes my mom’s giant two car garage. Even 100 years ago home builders were building garages that rivaled the main house in terms of square footage. So I guess it’s not an SUV Nation thing. Like the attic, there was 30+ years worth of crap out there, as well as my brother’s stuff, friend’s stuff, and all the stuff that we’d kept after we sold my grandparent’s house fifteen years ago.

In addition to the main garage area there is a loft, AND an attic. Basically, this thing’s bigger than your average 2 bedroom NYC apartment.

I am a broken, battered old man.

Visiting Staten Island last week actually turned out to be a smart move, despite my deadline issues with Robo -because my house was without power for 2 of the 4 days I was gone. Not that NYC was much better. They got hit, (yet again), with a ridiculous amount of snow, as I mentioned. I spent almost as much time shoveling and snow blowing as I  did lugging refuse and hacking at rotten old walls. On the plus side, the neighbors showered us with gifts of booze for helping them dig out, so our Saturday night feast was well lubricated.

I am quite glad to be sitting at my drafting table again, hunched over a page of Atomic Robo, listening to the sighing whimper of a chubby white guy’s ass settled after hours perched on a stool.