I’ve been sent the abstracts for the papers being presented by my potential interviewees at Thursday’s warp drive conference. I don’t understand much of any of them. This is going to be a challenge.

How am I going to come up with a series of sensible questions the answers to which can be edited into something understandable?


Here’s an expert:
First of all, it can be seen that if we restrict ourselves to deal with superluminal warp drives then it turns out that the interior of warp bubble becomes endowed with thermodynamic properties analogous to those of black holes, with the temperature in the spaceship rising up as its apparent velocity increases. Second, the size of warp drives in the current accelerating universe would readily inflate comovingly to the expansion of the universe so that these drives may eventually lead to violation of the conjecture of quantum interest according to which a negative energy pulse must always be over compensated by a necessarily existing positive energy pulse by an amount proportional to the time elapsed between the two pulses. On the other hand, stable and sub microscopic warp drives pervading the quantum spacetime foam can accrete cosmic dark and phantom energy in such a fast way that their size and the energy involved at the bubble are expected to increase so rapidly that they would actually become gigantic in the far future. Perhaps we ought to change mind and, instead of trying to image the advent of an advanced civilization able to construct a warp drive and place superluminal travel in the realm of proper technology, we simply let nature act as the true spontaneous constructer of macroscopic spaceships in the future.


Hmm…

on friday, Lisa was attending an Occupational Therapist housing conference in Brighton

I spend the morning walking around Brighton listening to a podcast on robots… that’s not totally random. I’m adding to my list of projects by planning to make a documentary (or more likely a three part series) on the state of robotics and artificial intelligence. It’s a subject that fascinates me and there’s so much going on with implications that most people aren’t even aware of.

My current idea is to make 3 50 minute episodes about robot bodies, robot intelligence and the connections between robots and humans. Should be fun, but Going to Gliese is the priority one right now.

One of the podcasts is about a competition for robot cars held last year – teams managed to convert a car to drive an 130km desert course entirely on its own.

Apparently this year’s task is to drive a course in an urban area.

Artwork on sale
I pop into WHSmiths and see a dinosaur DVD bundled with a magazine type book. It’s got the Natural History museum logo on it and I’d love to be making video with them as a partner, so I’m interested in this publication and buy it.

I open the magazine and find one of my Stock images has been used as a pull-out poster in the middle of the mag. It looks great. A few pages further on they’ve used another of my pics – a much less careful piece of work which they’ve chosen to blow up far too big. It looks rubbish.
The DVD accompanying the book was made in 1993 and looks awful. There’s some live footage shot at the museum, some creaky dialogue and some CG which looks like it came out of a videogame. The 3d glasses provided don’t seem to work.

I resolve to try to get a meeting with the museum and propose something a little more grown up…. I’m not sure what yet though.


Steven Poliakoff (I’m sure the spelling’s wrong) and editing

There’s an evening dedicated to the writer director on this weekend. He makes some great films and actually has control over them. When asked how he stops TV execs ruining his work, he said that on “shooting the past” he was told to speed it up and make it more action packed. He simply refused and the result was so popular (as popular as the Eastenders Christmas episode) that nobody stops him now.

We then saw one of his films – a monologue. It was rubbish.

I start wondering whether having other people with some control over your creative work is good or bad overall. For me, collaborative work has strengths – in that the jokes are better, the focus is sharper and the adherence to storytelling or other perceived ‘rules’ of creative work tends to be better because there’s someone there stopping any one person going off the rails.
However, most artistic projects go beyond the rules and the instant impact and only those working constantly on them can ever really get the whole picture. If someone taking a brief (or even a sustained) look at the finished product has control over it, they whittle it down to focus on their perception rather than the whole – more complex – picture.

This gives collaborative projects on the whole more impact and instant appeal, but less complexity and lasting strength.

In my own case, I often find when I’m working to a brief where the commissioner wants to change a lot of what I do, there’s often a very positive result – I end up improving the work. However, this only happens up to a point – beyond which the work starts to become too de-focused and the original ideas are lost or distorted.


Stock footage
I’ve been told that one of the specialist picture libraries I contribute to is planning to launch a video clip library – great news for me because it means I can sell stock footage in a meaningful way.I’ve got stock videos on a few sites already – but they don’t make much money right now.

The reason is they’re mostly microstock sites (eg. http://www.footage.shutterstock.com/) and you only get a few dollars per sale. I’d rather be doing more specific animations that will be worth more and I can spend more time on.

Also it will give me the opportunity to animate some dinosaurs and spaceships!


Anyway, this library is going to have to get off the ground with a base of animations fast, and for that reason, I want to go through my still image scenes and see if I can create simple, but interesting animations with them very quickly – i.e. just animating the camera to spin around a 3d model for example.It’s not much fun, but because I’ve already put lots of effort into the models, the animations should look good with little effort.

I’ve now given my PC something to think about – probably enough High definition rendering to last a week or two! I really must figure out how to network the machines into a render farm...