2/3 through fading Modest, OK

Worked late last night and am 2/3 finished.

I found out this morning that Roy Clark is from Tulsa. It reminded me that for the next step in our project toward a possible movie installation that I wanted to get clips/images from some of the films we are working with—Oklahoma, Tulsa, etc—and we can add Hee Haw to that list too.

The animation on Modest has been basically a four-step process: 1) insert a keyframe in each layer/letter where I want the dissolve to begin and then one frame later in the layer below, 2) placing keyframes at the end of the fade (approx 20 frames or 1 sec. away), 3) changing each character into a symbol at the end keyframe and then changing the tint to white, and 4) putting motion tween the two keyframes. For some of the fade, I timed it with the voice-over, but that ends basically in the middle of the piece, with the remainder fading at a very steady, mechanical rate.

I’m hoping that the mechanistic fade will draw attention and enact the reverse of the kind of electronic mail composition referred to in the poem. We use computers so often to generate and disseminate texts, not to erase them.