Daughter of Godcast Season 4 Choice and this is Episode 171 Art School, all about how to bring artists together to establish a self educators art school disguised as a movie studio. I am your host Dan Kelly aka Shri Fugi Spilt.

The last two nights I've woken up just after 2:00 am. These are the secret, sacred hours. How wonderful to be awake and writing in the middle of the night, when others nearby are sleeping. There's a sense of possibility, wonder. Palpable mystery.

These wakings are a gift, to be out of the bed and feel all this room, a dark house and a glowing laptop, the mirror of my thoughts, a free space to create anything. To allow myself to take whatever shape and flavor I might like.

Black words dance on a creamy void, finger summoned and destroyed. The sweet and comforting darkness of the house, gently pushed back by the sluggish glow of lava lamps and the tiny leds of a few vigilant machines - green and red. We're approaching Christmas after all, and the big finish to an eventful year. December is a dark and wakeful month, perhaps a year is an arbitrary idea, whirling around our star, where is the end of a circle? Still soft ponderings of what we have been and feeling now, what we wish to be. The rhythms of tilt, spin and orbit inherent in our shared starship, geometry is a lovely idea, why not? We can choose to be disconnected from these rhythms or tuned into them, any life can be a lovely life.

What are we here to talk about? I have an outline left over from the most recent meeting of the She Box Artists, that's what I'm calling our little enclave of Melonie, Joe and Dan, at least for this podcast episode. I have distributed the draft edit and the script and now we all can begin to rough out visual ideas for her dialog. This Monday we'll meet again and show each other our sketches.

I intend to launch 5 podcast episodes before I sketch, this is the fifth. If I were to offer a wish list, I'd also like to rough assemble the Joe traveling shots and concrete sobbing scene I shot last week. That's the bridge from the People's Poetry Slam we shot in March of 2019 to Buffalo Joe and the Box from November, what we are working on now. How close am I to being able to shoot Laser Beam Shaving and loose most of this devolved facial hair?

Having all this rough assembled is going to be sweet.

Recent episodes have opened up the process, I'm feeding lots of birds with just one seed. Because seeds become forests and meadows. Watch out for rocks, they wake up when you glance away. In plain English, the episodes are ever more about inviting clarity with both poetry and blarney. Eventually, an executive summary, a clue at what's next for the She Box Artists to mull over.

I've been harping on open source, this is not how to make a movie, maybe. I don't know what this is, but a movie is being made. And this podcast thingy, it's helping somehow.

Learning rate(s)

• what?
  • compensated exploration of affinity domains including VFX (software) and new (RL) disciplines applicable to the project
• why?
  • Us - custom art school, what if we could dedicate more energy to our artistic research?
  • Ah - expand what's available to future projects. test specific ideas for this project.
• steps
  • AE intro / Blender 2D
  • video references
    • local - Story of Film, FXPHD
    • web - youtube links, Lynda
  • map of cinematic disciplines - grand overview
    • a sense of what might be worth learning and how that might fit into our own unique artistic pursuits
    • practical experience with project themes - deep dive into how AI works for computer vision in VFX (scary)
  • organize studio and enable access, cameras etc.
    • primary activities
      • photography
      • miniatures
      • time lapse
      • precision fabrication
      • storage of fragile (temperature changes)
    • steps
      • clear out clutter piano, lumber, bulk materials
      • kits with checklists
      • inventory
      • sort and simplify tools
  • prepare barn (clean and heat) starting after January 1, 2020
    • upstairs - sound stage and multi-purpose
    • downstairs - sets and fabrication shop - machines, kiln, Airstream (office, comfort)
• two rates?
  • a rate for soaking up reference material
  • a rate for tutorials and active experimentation

This is a restatement of the lightning overview I gave Joe and Melonie during our meeting on 12/04/19. You might observe this podcast becoming more and more a collaborative tool, trending towards the pragmatic. I really don't think there's going to be much audience left in the old school passive observer sense. If you're staying with this project, might as well come out of the closet and declare yourself a collaborator.

Dear audience, you are deleted. There is no more audience for this podcast, only helpers, makers... whoever is left after the 5 or 6 week hiatus, hold up your hands and look at them, perhaps for the first time. Say to yourself, these are the hands of an artist. My hands. Me.