Now I'm getting down to it. I have one linux laptop zooming with both its fans, rendering frame after frame of some fluidiom animations using POV-Ray. I have fluidiom generate a whole bunch of povray scripts, one for each frame, and then finally a special index script which works with the clock system of povray. I have povray run through the index script thousands of times, each time including another of the frame scripts. It manages about 8-12 frames per minute, so with a few thousand frames per clip that laptop will be working very hard today and the rest of this week. I want lots of animations to slip into the movie, and I've been looking for music to put them to. I'll probably use Philip Glass, although I have no idea what to do about securing rights to use the music. I hope Philip doesn't sue me.

Probably more than half of the movie is already cobbled together in a rough way in iMovie on the powerbook right now, with some title sections and all the different clips of me talking to the camera in more or less the right order. iMovie is a brilliant piece of software. I suppose everybody knows how weird it sounds when you hear your own voice played back out of a recorder. Well it's even harder to put up with a movie of yourself, so I'm starting to really ignore myself in the image and concentrate on the content.

I'll probably finish the whole thing like this, with titles that fade in and then out, animations of fluidiom walkers set to Phil Glass, and clips of me talking. The hardest part will be to match up the audio of my voice, but I'll do that at the end.

Looks like there's more than enough material to fill out a pretty cool bit of film. Officially I'm making this movie for the DECOI summer school for grad students, but I'll also put it on the web afterwards.