A short week this week – but I’ve managed to do quite a lot of work on modelling and animating my trilobites. I’ve really gone for bright colours – without any scientific reasoning beyond the fact that trilobites are the first creatures with true eyes, and developed into such amazing shapes – so I’m treating them a little like reef fishes.
I’m doing some quite impressive shots – so I’m ending up with lots and lots of creatures in each shot, which really taxes my machine – and slows everything down. Still, I’m having lots of fun with physics simulations and crowd behaviour, so there are some interesting techniques being used.
Website
My SEO (search engine optimisation) work earlier in the year does seem to have placed me higher in internet searches, and it is driving visitors to my site (around 70-80 per day ) but it’s not generating any enquiries. The enquiries I got from 200 or so visitors garnered using Google’s sponsored links generated roughly an enquiry every day, so there’s a definite difference in quality of visitors.
It seems the searches are less targeted and a lot of them are image searches. It’s no bad thing to have people viewing my work in this way, but it would be good to be getting some actual work from it!
All I’m getting right now is a lot of people emailing looking for work experience….
Maybe it’s a sign of the times.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
I’m really getting somewhere with the documentary now – it’s almost the right length and almost the right shots. It’s also looking pretty interesting… I think we could have a good programme here.
Meanwhile, how to colonise the stars has been sold to an airline, so now I have the rather rubbish task of doing all the fiddly and expensive stuff – like creating tapes of the various soundtracks the distributors need…. It’s a real pain, and something I should build into my editing to make it easier – but I don’t.
Anyway, when I took the hard drive into Stanleys, they couldn’t get the info off my hard disk, so it looks like I’ll have to get a new one and do another copy….
I also got a bit more information on why transfer from disk to tape costs so much – or rather how I can make the transfer cheaper and easier. basically, I have to use uncompressed video and a firewire hard drive…. So I’ve ordered one and maybe that’ll give me a better chance…
Things have taken a lot longer than I thought they would this week, and lots of little jobs have made things a bit slow. I’ve got a logo I’m supposed to be designing and it’s taking ages – mainly because I don’t seem to be able to incorporate all the complexities into a simple enough design for the clients. That’s always the problem with logos I guess – there’s so much to communicate with them, but it all has to be clear and simple.
That’s why people charge so much I suppose (although I don’t – I don’t do the kind of logos that require masses of research and focus groups – it’s just not worth it!)..
Anyway, I finally got into the animation for “the trilobite hunters” documentary - and spent most of Wednesday trying out a technique for doing one particular shot which took ages. Basically I wanted a shot of a mountain rising out of the ground and the rocks inside it fracturing…
There’s an easy way to show this, but I decided it would look rather nice to model hundreds of breaking rocks as they shattered into pieces and create the animation as a simulation (rather than animating each piece one at a time). The problem is, it’s very difficult to get the rocks to break realistically, and it takes ages to simulate the effects on hundreds of rocks at the same time.
I don’t think the result is as good as it could have been – I had to abandon my idea of having sand pouring in from the top layer to flow over the broken rocks because it would have meant hundreds of thousands of particles flying about and even a quad core 8gb machine couldn’t handle it….
still, it's good to be doing a bit of experimental animation again - so often you end up just doing the same things over and over again the same way because you've got no time to play with new ideas!
Meanwhile, how to colonise the stars has been sold to an airline, so now I have the rather rubbish task of doing all the fiddly and expensive stuff – like creating tapes of the various soundtracks the distributors need…. It’s a real pain, and something I should build into my editing to make it easier – but I don’t.
Anyway, when I took the hard drive into Stanleys, they couldn’t get the info off my hard disk, so it looks like I’ll have to get a new one and do another copy….
I also got a bit more information on why transfer from disk to tape costs so much – or rather how I can make the transfer cheaper and easier. basically, I have to use uncompressed video and a firewire hard drive…. So I’ve ordered one and maybe that’ll give me a better chance…
Things have taken a lot longer than I thought they would this week, and lots of little jobs have made things a bit slow. I’ve got a logo I’m supposed to be designing and it’s taking ages – mainly because I don’t seem to be able to incorporate all the complexities into a simple enough design for the clients. That’s always the problem with logos I guess – there’s so much to communicate with them, but it all has to be clear and simple.
That’s why people charge so much I suppose (although I don’t – I don’t do the kind of logos that require masses of research and focus groups – it’s just not worth it!)..
Anyway, I finally got into the animation for “the trilobite hunters” documentary - and spent most of Wednesday trying out a technique for doing one particular shot which took ages. Basically I wanted a shot of a mountain rising out of the ground and the rocks inside it fracturing…
There’s an easy way to show this, but I decided it would look rather nice to model hundreds of breaking rocks as they shattered into pieces and create the animation as a simulation (rather than animating each piece one at a time). The problem is, it’s very difficult to get the rocks to break realistically, and it takes ages to simulate the effects on hundreds of rocks at the same time.
I don’t think the result is as good as it could have been – I had to abandon my idea of having sand pouring in from the top layer to flow over the broken rocks because it would have meant hundreds of thousands of particles flying about and even a quad core 8gb machine couldn’t handle it….
still, it's good to be doing a bit of experimental animation again - so often you end up just doing the same things over and over again the same way because you've got no time to play with new ideas!
Friday, May 8, 2009
festivals
Ok – I’ve now pitched “how to colonise the stars” to 10 or so festivals. I have no idea what to expect. There are a couple of festivals dedicated to scientific programming, so they’re the ones I’m thinking I’ve got the best chance with. Still, anything (and nothing) is possible.
I did have a bit of good news. My distributor’s just returned from Mipcom and gave me a call to say they’ve had more requests for screeners for “how to colonise the stars” than for any of their other titles. That’s about 45 channels considering buying it – which is good news – and one airline has already taken it up.
That’s even though they’ve decided to market it as SD rather than HD. It seems as though HDV is no longer good enough for the HD market.
Lucky I’m now working in full HD for the next projects I guess…
My next documentary – the vegas, bug digging one without a name – is now coming on faster. I’m actually getting to the stage where I can see the whole production. And it’s even a bit over length – which is great considering it was shot over just a week. I always like to be able to trim down rather than pad out whatever I’m working on.
I’m hoping to have a rough edit by the end of next week, and start working on the animations.
It’s about time too…
And another piece of good news is that I’m going to be able to use the new version of Max, so things should be faster and smoother.
Max 2010, I can see already is a great step forward in subdivision surface editing – if that makes any sense at all to you….
I also got a chance to visit a big animation studio this week (Darkside Animation). It’s always good to see how the other half of the industry live… and how they work on very large projects (projects which I can’t tell anyone about right now, but which will hit the limelight later in the year). Anyway, the one thing you do notice is the very specific skills of the animators – each person seems to specialise in a small part of the process – very different from my work where I do everything from modelling to texturing animation, rendering and editing…
I can see why they work the way they do, and they certainly produce very good work, but I’m pretty convinced I’d rather work my way because I can bring in specialists for certain areas of a production when I need to, but at the same time I do have a pretty good overall understanding of every part of the job, so I can be flexible.
Pirates
There’s been a lot of discussion on documentary forums about the decision by the courts to imprison the owners of Pirate Bay – the bit torrent site which allows users to swap everything from music to films…
The discussion was mainly around whether it was right or wrong that people can now download pretty much anything they like regardless of copyright – and as my living depends entirely on copyright, I’ve got a bit of a vested interest.
However, it seems to me a bit of a pointless argument – copyright is on the way out. It’s not dead yet, but it’s not going to survive the internet revolution, and the best we can do as filmmakers, writers and animators is look for ways to make it work for us.
I’m not entirely sure how that will work out – or even whether TV and film will eventually become things that only get produced by people willing to do it for nothing… However, I’m pretty sure there will still be production one way or another because if there’s one thing that will stop file sharing dead in its tracks, it’s if there’s nothing being produced to share….
Ok – I’ve now pitched “how to colonise the stars” to 10 or so festivals. I have no idea what to expect. There are a couple of festivals dedicated to scientific programming, so they’re the ones I’m thinking I’ve got the best chance with. Still, anything (and nothing) is possible.
I did have a bit of good news. My distributor’s just returned from Mipcom and gave me a call to say they’ve had more requests for screeners for “how to colonise the stars” than for any of their other titles. That’s about 45 channels considering buying it – which is good news – and one airline has already taken it up.
That’s even though they’ve decided to market it as SD rather than HD. It seems as though HDV is no longer good enough for the HD market.
Lucky I’m now working in full HD for the next projects I guess…
My next documentary – the vegas, bug digging one without a name – is now coming on faster. I’m actually getting to the stage where I can see the whole production. And it’s even a bit over length – which is great considering it was shot over just a week. I always like to be able to trim down rather than pad out whatever I’m working on.
I’m hoping to have a rough edit by the end of next week, and start working on the animations.
It’s about time too…
And another piece of good news is that I’m going to be able to use the new version of Max, so things should be faster and smoother.
Max 2010, I can see already is a great step forward in subdivision surface editing – if that makes any sense at all to you….
I also got a chance to visit a big animation studio this week (Darkside Animation). It’s always good to see how the other half of the industry live… and how they work on very large projects (projects which I can’t tell anyone about right now, but which will hit the limelight later in the year). Anyway, the one thing you do notice is the very specific skills of the animators – each person seems to specialise in a small part of the process – very different from my work where I do everything from modelling to texturing animation, rendering and editing…
I can see why they work the way they do, and they certainly produce very good work, but I’m pretty convinced I’d rather work my way because I can bring in specialists for certain areas of a production when I need to, but at the same time I do have a pretty good overall understanding of every part of the job, so I can be flexible.
Pirates
There’s been a lot of discussion on documentary forums about the decision by the courts to imprison the owners of Pirate Bay – the bit torrent site which allows users to swap everything from music to films…
The discussion was mainly around whether it was right or wrong that people can now download pretty much anything they like regardless of copyright – and as my living depends entirely on copyright, I’ve got a bit of a vested interest.
However, it seems to me a bit of a pointless argument – copyright is on the way out. It’s not dead yet, but it’s not going to survive the internet revolution, and the best we can do as filmmakers, writers and animators is look for ways to make it work for us.
I’m not entirely sure how that will work out – or even whether TV and film will eventually become things that only get produced by people willing to do it for nothing… However, I’m pretty sure there will still be production one way or another because if there’s one thing that will stop file sharing dead in its tracks, it’s if there’s nothing being produced to share….
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