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….