The Coughing McOctober Monthly

A month in which I developed a hideous cough and spent roughly 40 hours making stop-motion videos.

DEBUTING THIS MONTH:

• animated voice memo

• a new podcast

• BFF video

• Kombucha teaser

This month, a bunch of projects bloomed! I love PUBLISHING, FINISHING, REAPING WHAT I SOW. But did you know that you cannot constantly reap what you sow, even if you are perpetually sowing and dreaming of reaping? Disturbing and unfair. So I am enjoying the bloom while it’s here.

It’s especially fun to see the sneak peek teaser of the horror film we shot in July. Because I really enjoyed doing the work (merrily we sow along) and then I promptly put it out of my head and forgot that it will be a movie that people will see! Sometime next year.

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A STEP-BY-STEP LOOK AT HOW MY PAINTING + STOP MOTION THING CAME TO BE

I was very sick for the first few weeks of October, sick with the kind of cough where you sleep sitting up and actually don’t sleep at all. I was miserable, cancelling my plans each day when I realized my Extreme Hacking would be socially offensive. But the bright side was, trapped in my apartment, I started messing around with acrylic paint. During peak pandemic, I bought a cheap pack of 24 tubes of acrylics and I never got into them— too gloppy and hard to manage. But lately I’ve been wanting to try gouache (a midway between acrylic and watercolor) and I don’t feel that I’m allowed to buy more paint until I use the paint I have, when the paint I have is pretty similar to the paint I want. What is desire? Okay, so I began to paint in my sketchbook.

A couple weeks prior, one of my best friends from college had sent an unhinged voice note to the group chat. I listened to it three times in a row while I fried ginger and cabbage in my kitchen. The next day I texted her:

So as I coughed violently around my house, I thought, I’ll do that and forget the paper animation- let’s give acrylics a shot! So I storyboarded:

Then I painted the pieces. I actually hated them at first and I wanted to scrap it altogether, because the colors were ugly and I couldn’t get the faces to look cute. But after a second session, where I added patterns and details (and crucially, pupils to the eyes), I suddenly loved them. 

This is about halfway between hate + love

Then I cut out all the pieces and tested them on different backgrounds (construction paper, magazines). The vintage magazines look better because the paper is more matte and has less shine. I hated it all once again, because the background color completely changed how the colors of the paintings looked. I probably spent four hours looking through magazines and taking test shots with my phone. I got really frustrated because I didn’t plan out a color palette and I don’t know anything about color theory, so it was just trial and error and changing my mind all the time. I reminded myself that this is how one learns, how one develops an eye, but frankly I was wishing I was already in possession of a very refined and developed eye.

I made a new storyboard, updated to reflect the changes I’d made and noted the correct paper colors. This was my map. After I shot a section, I highlighted it.

Luckily, I knew how to set up the camera because I’d figured it out the week prior for a different stop motion project (stay tuned!). It’s pretty simple, industry-standard stuff:

tape your tripod to your desk, add cans of beans for weight, get a kitchen stool and tape that to the floor with some cardboard on it (also tape down the cardboard), ask if you can borrow your roommate’s ring light, bring out the bedroom lamp, remove the lamp shade (too yellow) and put a piece of white paper over the bulb instead, then attach the camera to your computer with a cord that’s too short because it’s meant for something else (my Kindle?) so that you can remotely take the photo and not jostle the camera each time. 

I set up after the sun went down (so the light wouldn’t change) and spent about two and a half hours hunched over, which is conveniently reduced into a thirty second time-lapse:

After that, I picked the photos I wanted and tweaked the colors in Photoshop, then dropped them in Premier to edit into a video. I added a couple sound effects by ripping them off Youtube. Then captions. And voila.

czmcfadden

A post shared by @czmcfadden

Nearly half a million people watched it on TikTok and everyone in the comments is curious about and loves Lara. Which is fun to see because I am curious about her and love her immensely. And this is not nearly the wildest story from her life. She’s now a wildlife biologist and ends up doing all kinds of things with animals—safely, platonically— that you wouldn’t imagine.

Lara with a baby fox.

Oh, and here’s a cute credit sequence I made and decided not to use:

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CIA CARPOOL: AN IMPROVISED PODCAST

My friend Sarah Drew of Stinky Dog Art Stuff produced a podcast, which Sarah, Kim and I recorded over a couple sessions in the spring. We wanted to do a limited series audio project where we return to the same characters, so we had a couple meetings to brainstorm and came up with:

Three women who work at the CIA and carpool together, idly chatting. I’m a spy, Sarah is in Sales and Kim works in HR.

Four of the six episodes are out and you can listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or look up “CIA Carpool” wherever you listen to things. 

Here is a teaser video Sarah made for one of my favorite episodes:

darahsrew

A post shared by @darahsrew

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CLAIRE & KIM: UPCOMING SKETCH SHOWS

Speaking of Kim, we are teaming up to write a sketch show! We’ve been planning to do this for ages, and we realized we don’t have enough time for a whole polished shebang, so we’re going to make a fun, loose show (you may see some scripts in hand) at Logan Square Improv on Saturday November 23rd and on December 14th. The ticket link isn’t up yet, so don’t even try.

I made three show posters and I’m not sure which one we’ll primarily use, so I’m putting them all here and please vote in the comments.

During our rehearsal last week, we also improvised another BFF video:

kimquindlen

A post shared by @kimquindlen

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TUNE OUT NOVEMBER 2024

Last year I didn’t consume any content in November. I called it Tune Out November. And I can feel it calling to me again…So I think this month I’m going to go cold turkey on C*O*N*T*E*N*T. Here’s what that means for me:

OUT: podcasts, TV, Youtube, TikTok, Reels, scrolling Twitter

IN: music, books, movies

I don’t count movies as “content” because these are my rules and movies are not my issue. Movies are not fracturing my attention and sucking the minutes out of my hours. My issue is opening my phone for what I think is going to be a quick Instagram check and then watching a bunch of videos I don’t care about. Or, putting on a podcast while I cook or draw, when I should really be thinking my own thoughts, not drowning them out. Or watching a Youtube video intentionally, and then mindlessly watching four more that populate the side bar. My problem is filling my head with public opinion and virtual angst, celebrity gossip about people I don’t care about and fitness tips for a body I don’t want.

😇

If you are interested in doing Tune Out November or something similar, let me know and we can start a WhatsApp group.

Have a good day, okay?

love,

Claire