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!