Were you to ask me in November of 2024 what I would be posting about in June of 2026, I'd think I was at least posting.
Ideally I'd be posting about a new novel, long published and (my desk is still made of wood for this express purpose) doing okay. But we're here now, and it's still not done, and for every day to have elapsed since that general starting time of November 2024, the feeling has gotten worse.
It's not good to get like this, if that needs saying. It's just that, for me, the act of trying to write and being physically or whatever else-ally unable to is a new one. 2025 barely happened for me, to be as brief about that as possible. I love writing more than most things--still do. But I'm additionally guilty of evaluating my self-worth based on the number and frequency of things I create. Bad mantra if you're not creating anything other than Christmas cartoons.
And I also think about opportunity cost. The person I could be or the opportunities I could have were I not dead-set on being a novelist. That's the evil one, there. What if nothing works out? What else do I do?
Easy counter, try this one at home: what if everything works out? Neither one has happened yet.
I'll waste no more time on doom-rimming and get to the important thing: the next book is almost done. We're talking about single-digit things left to do, here, not double-digit. Text-wise I've only got line edits left to go--the writing the story part is complete and (desk) I think it's good. Ballpark range is 116K words, the longest book I've written and maybe the best thing I've done. But that doesn't mean anything until someone else can read it and agree with me.
The next book will be out in September of 2026. That's this year, if you're like me and forget the year.
The deadline has been spoken. Between then and now the book itself will be 100% finished, and I will be putting in more promotional effort here than any book previous. I think if any attraction in the past has failed for identifiable reasons, it was a lack of consistency. I'm doing different this time, albeit it my way (I'm not paying for reviews, sorry).
Genuinely looking forward to you, specifically, learning more about what's coming. I'll be sure to talk about it.
Feliz Navidad and big thank yous to everyone who watched The Long Christmas. I hope you had as much fun watching it as I occasionally did making it; if you didn't like it, stick around. Either way I'll be attempting to explain myself.
This post will serve as the digestif for those curious how or why this all came together. The whole thing's coming undone: modeling, animating, conceiving, deciding to do this at all. I'll also be covering issues I had with production, what I wish I did differently, and the advice I'd offer if I'm at all qualified to offer advice.
Chapter 01 - The Last Christmas Special
What you're looking at here are the two earliest renders which either resemble or directly represent elements seen in The Long Christmas. At this stage, some time in early September, there was no short film. Only the festive, simplistic splendor of an aesthetic I was only starting to approach. My first idea was just eerie Christmas Cards with blase greetings like, "Festive Salutations."
Ha-ha, get it, it's like a normal greeting card but it rejects any kind of vulnerability. You're so cool, dude, so demure. Hey did you know the time you have with the people you care about is limited.
I was momentarily happy with these but found the prospect of doing any more entirely unstimulating. From snowman to gingerbread man/house you can the ambition already growing. The snowman, who you'll notice changed not at all from concept to screen, is one basic mesh on top of another. I think the only thing I tweaked was the position of his stick arms, maybe brought out the eyes a little more, but aside from that he remained rocksolid (and he does not have a name, sad to say). While almost everything else would involve more polygons, I kept the sharp peaks on his snow body for whimsy's sake. I find it very charming to be looking at a thing and knowing exactly how it was put together. I think it's why kids are so captivated and inspired by stop-motion movies, or at least why I was.
In terms of actual inspiration for the thing I eventually made, I'll vaguely gesture at early CGI efforts and not pretend there was anything more specific. Years ago I'd pop in one of the Pixar movies on tape just to watch the shorts. Occasionally it'd be a positively ancient one like Luxo Jr. or Knick-Knack. More than anything I was drawn to the silence in these ones, paired with the broad sense of emptiness lying beyond what the camera was at liberty to show.
This here is the very very first animation I completed, ever, and while the real thing didn't look as cold, it did inform the mood of the whole short:
I'll tell you one thing I was not about to do: parody. My original title for a Christmas-themed animation, whatever that turned out to be, was "The Last Christmas Special." Inevitably this brought my mind to the Rankin/Bass specials, but here's the thing: I like those? It's true, when the idea of putting together a whole thing rather than a number of stills came to be, I floated and briefly experimented with emulating the stop-motion look. If nothing else maybe it would be easier to animate. Eventually I focused entirely on the obvious CG-ness. Still funny, but entirely uncynical. If I were to do it at all, I wanted to do it earnestly. Were I to treat the whole thing like a joke, yeah maybe it'd still be fun, but it'd be extra disposable. I didn't just want to make something, I wanted to care about whatever came out the other side.
Chapter 02 - Unstoryboarded
As a consequence of The Long Christmas' run-and-gun production, there was no storyboarding. At any time. I would simply think of a shot I wanted, or maybe just sort of liked compositionally, and I would animate it.
This is the earliest shot I thought up that also resembles anything in the final film. At this point I had the snowman model, the gingerbread man, and the gingerbread house. So this is something I drummed up using all those things. The rest of the short would come about naturally as a matter of what was available. You'll notice in the final short I completely redid this shot, which I'll talk about more in a later chapter.
Quick thing about the gingerbread house: not only was it aesthetically in lock with the snowman and making use of the same gingerbread material I'd already developed for the gingerbread man, but it also enabled me to very easily cover up any errors in my nascent modelmaking. Any harsh division point could be covered up with icing. I felt very smart, working well with what I had. Problem is when I had the house finished and in position for this very shot, I only then realized the door was purely aesthetic and I hadn't thought to cut one out. So there's another tool to learn (it was the knife tool).
From there I assembled shots as I thought of them. There was no story outline apart from what I kept in the mind palace, so these early shots only had composition in mind. That was my secret weapon, or my fallback; if the composition of the shot was compelling enough, that alone could make up for the lack of animation. Theoretically.
It got to a point where I had a number of shots at the beginning of the short, the middle, and the end (I also lost several shots at the end and had to remake them, more on that later). Only now was any thought paid to what could stitch them together into a real story. I lined them up in the timeline and filled in the dead space with blank text cards describing what kind of shot *could* be there:
Now if it sounds like I'm describing this process with pride, I'm not. This was absolutely the wrong way to do it and I cannot recommend enough doing something else. The spontaneity was fun, liberating in a way; it enabled me to imagine getting from one moment to another in any way I was feeling rather than what I'd planned at some earlier time. But that's not to say what you planned to do is what you have to do anyway. It's just that not having any idea of how you're gonna get where you're going runs the risk of getting there in confusing, unsatisfying ways. Film especially.
There's value to having a better idea of what the whole thing will look like before you begin. Editing is more than what goes in one scene and what goes in another; communicating a story is a job more microscopic than chapters. There is also how the story moves from shot to shot, and this is arguably more important. Too many confusing jumps in a row and there's no satisfaction in seeing the thing move; it's all just noise. I had to think about the short by more granular means. Like, okay, the snowman stomps out a gingerbread man, but how did he see the gingerbread man, how did he evaluate his advantage in the situation, how did the gingerbread man not know it was coming, what led the snowman to believe this was his best play, etc etc
Just answering these questions gives us a whole entertaining sequence in itself. That lattermost question, about what led the snowman to this point, birthed the whole montage of the snowman trying and failing to get in the normal way, and that's one of my favorite parts. My advice then is to think about these things as early as you can. It'll save you a crisis on the timeline.
This is all kindergarten baby shit for people who already animate, but remember I'm not one of those people. It was fun, but I was learning a lot of things for the first time, and in a lot of instances learning the hard way. In 3D, at least, I was able to solve some problems with tricks already acclimated to photography. Like...
Chapter 03: Camera Tricks
Blender's a little tricky, when you're learning it for the first time. Yes I did make the donut but, being very real, a lot of the lessons in baking I learned there were in one ear and out the other. It's like the schoolhouse dilemma: how do I retain lessons in something, even if it's something I wanna do? The answer is to do something I wanted to do. If you want to learn Blender and bounced off the donut tutorial, or any other Blender For Beginners thing you watched, I'd suggest identifying what you want to learn, exactly, and learn how to do that. You will inevitably pick up all the same tricks and hotkeys anyone else knows and it'll be in the name of something you're passionate about rather than tolerate.
The epiphany that Blender's camera can be manipulated like a real camera unlocked the whole short for me. What it's capturing as much as how. One of the earliest hurdles for me was the size of the scene and objects. It's too easy to think, when something needs to be bigger, you just scale it up. To be as brief as possible with that, don't. Pay close attention to the size of everything in the scene because it will get out of hand real fast.
If size was something I was looking for, the camera could get me most of the way there.
Here's the outdoor soundstage. Notice the many pizza boxes jutting into the many matte paintings of a night sky (yes, every side uses the same picture). I intersected a flat boxes, with random geometry sculpted on top, through the even flatter planes. In practice this looks like an expansive, far away mountain range. Problem there is it's not really expansive and it's not far away. So how do we sell it? Well for one thing, the camera is very static for any outside scene. Movements are relegated to lateral slides and zooms. Furthermore, the camera is either looking down from on high or positioned at eye level with the characters. There's little opportunity to get too close to the horizon and see the mountains are barely taller than the house.
This early shot, where a gingerbread man is granted entry to the house, employs a Dolly Zoom. In short, the focal length of the camera is adjusting at the same rate as the camera body moves away. It could be a little smoother, but the effect is a foreground object shrinking as the background remains the same relative size. There's another dolly zoom later in the short, though that's more subtle.
Back to that sequence with the gingerbread man approaching the house from behind. If that model is placed any closer to the mountain, it's gonna make the mountains look small. How do we evade that? You're ahead of me on this, Blender user: make the gingerbread man small:
There's a number of forced perspective tricks like this, where an object getting further away from the house is also physically shrinking. But my favorite example of this is inside the house, in this shot here:
Now this one of my very favorites. Felt like the first time I really captured the atmosphere I wanted for the house. I like it so much I'm only a little bothered by the gingerbread man downstage left who doesn't have both his feet on the ground.
Everything I like about this: the planes, the scale, the void, all of that is forced perspective:
Once I had a better grasp of how big anything in the short ought to be, animation became a lot easier. I'd say any work I was doing in the second half went a lot faster and smoother than the first, but that figures.
Chapter 04: Compositing
Big ups again to BGVC, whose VHS compositing effect features strongly throughout. That being said, I did turn down the settings quite significantly.
(note: during the production of this short, BGVC finished a new version of the VHS effect more compatible with the latest install of Blender. It's by my tinkering more versatile than the previous version and something I'd recommend using over the version I used - 3.0)
At full tilt, the effect is gonna give you a lot of things at once. All the analog horror fixings - chroma bleed, tape distortion, degradation, grain, boo, baa, hoo, haa, all that. I won't pass judgement unduly and say someone running the meter on this effect is doing it wrong, I just think BGVC has given the user many options and you have the option of not using some.
Cast your mind back to the greeting cards up top. There's a lot going on here, and maybe none of them are bad elements. For me, I quickly found it was too much. Overall I wanted to evoke what I remember CG on tape looking like when I was a kid, not some horror unearthed years into the future. I guess I'll mention here I don't think the short is very scary at all and would somewhat resent the designation of "analog horror." I just think it's funny, and the look of it all aids in that.
Here's a frame from the final look along with my composite settings. It will look a little different on the latest version of the effect package, but it's a start. Also note this frame comes from a version with color grading applied. Speaking of...
Chapter 05: Editing, or: Just Kidding We're Still Animating
Blender does have a built-in video editor, but apart from assembling the frame sequences, I never used it. Instead, all editing was done in DaVinci Resolve. It's free, it's versatile enough, it's a strong recommend for people trying to get out of the Adobe vortex.
Once I had every shot finished, or at least enough finished that the story had all its parts, it was all shuffled into a workprint. Here's where I could begin making decisions about which shots need to be redone, of which there were several. At this early a stage I was already running into issues of shots ending too soon, or not giving enough time at the start to fully digest what was happening. In some cases I could do some clever frame duping to get the timing I wanted (the bit with the snowman looking up at the mistletoe was originally too fast but I could pause the film on this frame as long as it needed), but some other instances needed a full makeover.
Yeah, for some clips I would paste a note over top so there was no chance of forgetting. Any notion I had that, once we were in DaVinci, we were done touching Blender? Dashed. Dashed away all, even. All editing showed me was how much there left to do in principal photography. And it's animation, right? There's no B-roll I can cut to, no alternate takes. If it doesn't work, I just gotta do it again.
There were a number of random shots I ended up remaking for one reason or another. The biggest thing was consistency. Some of those shots were from such an early point in production they predated creative decisions I made later. So they needed updating more than re-imagining. Off the top of my head:
>shots that had a little too much of the VHS effect
>shots where the falling snow cast a shadow on the ground and it just looked ugly
>outdoor shots that did not have the mountain backdrop
>indoor shots that didn't have icing where icing ought to be
>shots rendered in the incorrect aspect ratio
To answer the question about deleted scenes, there aren't any. This was done so bite-sized and so iteratively that any chance of wanting something at one point and not wanting it later was knocked out entirely in the brain. That said, there is one deleted shot. It was a transition piece of the snowman walking through the field towards the house. It wasn't very well animated, I didn't like the composition, it ended too abruptly, and it was lost in favor of something else.
I've been posting a lot of raw footage here, and it does look a bit different from what the real thing ended up being. That's mostly down to color grading, something DaVinci is known for if known for nothing else. Broadly speaking, the outdoor scenes were made a little colder, the indoor scenes a little warmer. This is a very basic color contrast of predominant blues and oranges, only the warmer colors are ironically less inviting.
Big change? I tended to overlight the raw footage just so I'd have some space in the edit. This does mean the shadows outside are way harsher than what they ought to be.
There's not 'but' to that. Admitting is the first step.
Chapter 06: I'm An Ordinary Guy; Burning Down the House
Famous last words: I settled on the ending at about the same time I settled on a story. There were some tweaks made, eventually, but one element remained constant: The house was going to burst into flames. I decided this at a time when I had no idea how I was going to animate the house burning. Didn't even know if it'd be within my power.
Luckily for me, Blender has a number of pre-baked simulations, and fire is one of them (well, smoke that you give a dye job). Couple of YouTube tutorials later, and we were most of the way there:
Down below is a noise modifier, but it's not for the flames. That's already doing its thing. But I wanted a little more light, a little more flicker. Specifically I wanted the light bouncing off the mountainside there. You can see the lights I placed inside the inferno to create that effect, and even though it kills a bit of the scaling, I was overjoyed to see it turn out the way it looked in my head.
Trivia: The snowman was original supposed to set the fire with a jerry can. Modeled a jerry can myself and everything. In practice I found this took too long to communicate and just wasn't as funny as the molotov. Second bit of trivia: I didn't know how to make the fire look like it naturally erupted from the inside spreading out, so I layered in a gas explosion noise and just cut to a shot where it's already burning. Looks fine enough for me.
Chapter 07: Audio
Now I don't know if this is surprising or if those more familiar with the process already guessed, but doing all the sounds was maybe the second-most time-consuming thing I did. Y'know how many things make noise?
Don't have a lot of images to share for this one. Besides, I'm running out of slots. A majority of all sounds are royalty-free clips from freesound.org, which got me 99% of the way there. I did not record any sounds myself, though maybe I'd like to try it some time. That remaining 1% is the snow crushing sounds, made whenever a character is walking on snow or whenever the snowman moves. If you guessed what it was, you guessed correctly: it's Minecraft sounds. Sorry Mojang plz forgive me it was just exactly what I was looking for.
The music credits are as follows:
>A karaoke version of Band Aid's Do They Know it's Christmas that sings the hook for some reason. I tried out a few Christmas songs, all the pop hits; it was very nearly Alvin & the Chipmunks. Really it was a matter of what would be funnier. I thought Band Aid supplied a bit of fun irony.
>The requiem from 2001: A Space Odyssey scores the majority of the gingerbread house interior. I knew as early as I knew anything that piece would feature.
>Rau ma dor Manutele plays as the snowman runs out of the house. What is that? Who? Huh? Well there was a particular mood I wanted that scene to have, I just didn't know the song yet. I wanted it in a language other than English, I wanted a semi-frantic tempo. To find it, I started searching "[eastern European county] folk song" before eventually landing on this number from Moldova. I did look up the English lyrics before committing, it's about stomping wine grapes or something.
>A 1917 recording of God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen. Thanks to the Internet Archive for the hookup. Exact vibe I wanted for credits music.
One of the absolute last-minute creative choices was the ominous jingle bells heard in the first half. The second half is very music-heavy, and it needs that to really sell the distinction, but I started to feel like the outside sequence needed some prelude to that. What I settled on was more a musical sting. It signals transitions, developments, etc. I like it a lot.
Chapter 08: What I'd Do Different
I knew this section was coming. By virtue of it being my first attempt, you probably knew it too. But there is no shame in being the beginner. You cannot learn before admitting you do not know. And hooo did I not know.
I'm not going in any order of importance here, just what's springing to mind as I sit here typing:
1: Storyboard some stuff.
second verse same as the first, I could have avoided a lot of headaches in the bottom half if I just had a better idea of what needed to be there going in. Spontaneity is fun, but you reap what you sow.
2: Render in a higher resolution.
All the footage in The Long Christmas was rendered in 1440x1080 (eventually pillarboxed to 1920x1080). At the time I thought this would be enough. Come to find out, or rather remember, that YouTube will compress videos. I tried every encoder, every export resolution, and every time there would always be compression issues, pixelating, poor bitrate nonsense. The final version has the least amount of this, but were I to do it again I would be working with a much higher resolution than what eventually goes out. Save a thousand tears.
3: Name my clips when I export them.
Quick thing about the Blender workflow: when a frame sequence is all assembled together and exported to a workable video file, it will be given a generic name based on the amount of frames. If you are rendering multiple shots that all happen to include the same amount of frames, Blender will save the newest video over the old one. This resulted in several instances where I'd get a lot of shots done, feel proud of myself, then realize some of those were banished because they had the same name as a more recent file. Easy solution: name files when you export them.
Chapter 09: Thank You Goodbye!
I had a lot of fun putting this together. As in putting together the short film. But this was also cool.
It's creatively energizing to work in something new. Especially when you have the privilege of ignorance with regard to, idk, good practices? I never felt The Long Christmas had to be anything specific, fit into a niche or demographic, and therefore could be whatever I felt was right. If I'm allowed to call it good, then it's good because of the way it looks and moves and sounds, not in spite of any naivety. I started knowing next to nothing, ended knowing a little about some things, but along the way learned something by doing what I wanted to do. That makes learning fun.
I hope you liked it. Or will like it when you watch it eventually. May it become an annual tradition to ring in the season and may no one know what it's really about (but I know, teehee, and I'm not telling, heeheehaa).
Just in time for the season and ready to enter the holiday tradition of 🫵YOUR family.
The Long Christmas was modeled & animated in Blender, starting as a personal project to merely familiarize myself with the Blender workflow and eventually becoming what everything I endeavor to create becomes - too much.
I'm very proud of it. I was thinking about Jonathan Glazer, Alejandro Jodorowsky, old CG cartoons that frightened me as a toddler. There's a beginning and an end, things happen in-between those points; it's got everything. And if that's not enough, there may even be violence. If you've got eight minutes, give it a peep.
I'll be back in some time to talk about behind the scenes stuff; there are stories to tell, frustrations to vent, warnings for what I did that no one else should replicate. Until then, enjoy.
Was doing my work and listening to the new Defunctland podcast style but I had to pause it at a point and rotate an anecdote in my head. It's the bit where he talks about the room that charges everything. Absolutely captivating string of words. You go in the room and it charges everything. Anything that needs a charge is charging, but only within the boundaries of the room that charges everything. It's like if Shel Silverstein was still alive.
On closer inspection it seems like anything that needs a charge is fitted with some kind of special receiver, but imagine if you will it didn't need that. And they open some attraction where a guy wearing a PCB cape identifies himself as the Technomancer. And with a force of his arms he directs you to check your phone, to which you discover it is charging. Now you don't know about the room that charges everything in this scenario - how do you react? I would promptly flee from the room and book a radiologist. I would offer the Technomancer my watch as a bargaining chip, which in this scenario is a silver Seiko 5 with an amethyst bezel (this is still a scenario btw).
I won't be pejorative and insist the room that charges everything is unsafe based on nothing. Just know I'm imagining you'd open your mouth and the air would taste like coins.
Strong headwind on the next book. I don't think there's anything specific I wanna say about it at this time apart from once again voicing my belief that it's gonna be great
Movies have been so devoid of sauce that Twilight's visual design has circled back around to something interesting. Everyone made fun of the color grade but since greenscreenification has so thoroughly homogenized the look of movies wrt color and lighting, idk. Can't help but find something compelling in the movies who endeavor to provide some holistic visual information.
Welcome, and happy 30th birthday to American Mumblecore classic, Clerks. In celebration of this little movie that could, the popularity it's maintained in spite of its humble ambitions, and the havoc it's wrought on my mind in the 20+ times I re-watched it to conceptualize and finish this project, I can think of no better film to christen the launch of my new essay series. Welcome to DIARY-120.
Exploring the personal relationship to specific films as experienced through the form of VHS tapes watched and rewound dozens or hundreds of times, DIARY-120 is a school of film criticism less concerned with how film as art responds to the greater culture and more how it responds to the self. The goal isn't to play the adjudicator; only the observer of screen and soul.
The entire essay collection is available for free and hyperlinked down below, section by section for a smooth reading experience. Read all of them! Read only the ones with funny titles! Read none of them!
Happy Birthday, Clerks. You terrorize my mind and the problem has only gotten worse.
All essays in the Clerks edition of Diary-120 have been unprivated! idk why I did it like that the first time to be honest. Yeah man release all those papers and make it so nobody can read them unless they click the one link on your blog. This is why you make 100k a year in business consultation
Originally held back because I forgot to put it there, you can now SKIP the download and read (The) Diamond Planet entirely from your browser (along with my other books).
I'm all about options and not at all about generating revenue, and for that I think I speak for everyone when I say The Internet Archive is an indispensable resource for the turbulent, digital now. You won't need an account to read but I think you should have one in any case.
PDF edition of the novel (The) Diamond Planet, originally published August 30th, 2024.
Dealt with a particularly aggressive wave of self-loathing this morning (I probably just needed to eat) but working on the new book made me feel better, as tends to be the case.
idk what I'm gonna do with this graphic, but it looks a lil cool. Still working out the visual design, as one of my New Book Resolutions is to incorporate more interior graphics, like what (The) Diamond Planet lightly experimented with.
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
vaporwave
areudirty
annaxmalina
gummygunk
pixelskylines