I’ve spent a little time preparing the site for the upcoming changes; I’ve collapsed the NPF Diary into the blog page, moving all of the categories and posts onto the blog and have redirected the NPF Diary page to the blog itself. Hopefully there won’t be any trouble with old links, as it seems the blog software is automatically redirecting links to the correct place.

I’ve also removed the ‘Courses’ menu link, since that has been redirecting to the SOP site for a while now, and will be unecessary in the future once the Learn Online stuff has been moved.

I have to make more of an effort not to keep changing things  On the other hand, it’s nice to see things collapsing down a bit and getting more streamlined. Sometimes, in the process of adding new content, you can forget that this is also a website that needs to be easily navigable. 

I am endeavouring to catch up on actual building, which gets time consuming. I stopped doing the videos for the moppets a week or so ago out of frustratingly not being able to save an entire recording on BlogTV. I tried again a few days ago, and of course, the same thing happened. Not willing to give up this time, I tried again and managed to get two videos done. 

I did finally get my new shadow puppet screen working (not wanting to wait until it’s actually finished before getting my next video done… really, then you’d have to wait several more weeks, if not months, by the time I get to it), because it doesn’t stand very well on its own. When I post the pics of it, you’ll understand more about why I’ve had such trouble, but luckily I managed a very low-tech fix and it works like magic. (A while ago on Twitter I complained about ‘good idea, bad execution’, which referred to the design of the screen. The idea is good, but needs a very specific stand in order to make the whole thing work. Change the execution even slightly, and the resulting difference is huge)

Even better is that I’ve been playing with a different way of lighting the shadow puppet, and have managed to invent a very amazingly cool effect using filtered colours on the lighting beam combined with the natural colour of the puppet itself. It was really just a way to try and fix some striations in the beam of light, being caused by some scratches on the lens; funny how things work out. When I watched the playback of the test video, I was amazed at how cool it looked.

As usual, I had to stop just as I was ready to make a proper video, due to dead battery. Then of course, I had to take the screen down - mainly for fear that gravity would cause it to topple and severely cause damage to the house - so I’m now waiting for another opportunity to try again.

Anyway, I’m hoping to keep pushing on with these things and move backwards… yeah, backwards not forwards. Cause I keep starting new things and forgetting the old ones.