Trilobites and newsletters
It looks like I’ve got another big job on – and right up my street too. It’s a trilobite animation for a museum and hopefully it’ll give me the chance to resurrect some critters from the Cambrian period.

Trilobites are complex beasts to build and animate, and they come in a huge variety, but there are some amazing fossils around because they preserve so well (even their eyes were made of stone).

The first few tests look very promising and I’m busily writing a storyboard for the animation which will have to be 10 minutes long and be scientifically as accurate as possible.

A quick calculation tells me that if I’m to bring this animation in on time, I’m going to need some serious rendering power – 15,000 frames – and let’s say 5 minutes per frame – that means 52 days rendering day and night. The deadline is the end of October, so I don’t have 52 days.

This means I’ll need a render farm – several computers all rendering different scenes. Now, you can buy time on render farms, but it turns out to be more expensive than buying extra PCs (especially as 3ds max allows you to render on multiple machines with one licence).

My solution: buy 2 new PCs, rejuvenate an old one with a copy of windows Vista and if necessary run more rendering on my wife’s laptop… four computers running 24 hours a day and my main machine available for the night shift should mean I can get the renders done in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve probably got another job doing a web banner, a trademark for one of my previous clients and somebody emailing about another pop video – I’m going to insist on payment up front for pop videos from now on – small bands are flexible and do a lot of good stuff, but you never know when they’re going to disappear.

I’ve also turned off my advertising for a while – I’ve got two big projects on now and that’s enough to keep me going up to the end of October.

I’ve also got the video editing newsletter coming round again. This has now increased to include effectively 3 newsletters a month - and I’ve been trying to do that today.

All in all…. Busy busy busy – and although I keep saying it – I’m really keen to do some documentary work!

Elance
My venture into the world of Elance – farming out some of my animation work to other people seems to be working – although I haven’t seen any results yet. I’ve picked the 2nd cheapest offer and I’m hoping to see at least one of the characters I’ve asked them to produce bones for in the next day or so.

In the meantime, I think I’ve done something dumb – I’ve built all the characters and objects for my current animation separately and they’re all different sizes.

Resizing isn’t a problem usually in 3ds max, but there are some situations where it’s tricky and one of them is characters – re-scaling a character seems to distort its model for some reason and it’s going to be a real problem if I can’t sort that out quickly….

Outsourcing madness

This week I’ve been working on the new safety video animation I’ve been asked to do. It’s a big project which I can’t say much about because of a confidentiality agreement.

Anyway, there’s a lot to do and I’ve decided to try out the outsourcing thing – that is, contracting out some of the 3d animation work on www.elance.com. Basically, Elance lets you put out an advert for any job, get quotes in (I’ve got 5 in the first day) and have the work done and returned to you online.

It sounds like a great system – we’ll see how it works out, but I’ve put out the rigging of four 3d characters. Character rigging is simply taking a 3d model, giving it bones and making sure the right parts of the model move when you bend the arms and legs.

It’s a straightforward enough job if you’re a character animator, but it’s not much fun for me – and having spent a day on it on Thursday and got some unsatisfactory results (the shoulders don’t look quite right, bits of the body bend out of shape when you move the arms, that sort of thing), I’ve put the task out to tender.


First responses look good, and although all look pretty reputable, there’s one offering a very low quote – maybe I’ll go with them, but I’ll have to check carefully because I know myself how long the job should take and… mind you, different countries, exchange rates, etc… you never know…. I’ll update as it goes along.


prehistory
Somebody who contacted me ages ago expressing an interest in the film I want to make about trilobites has got back to me. He’s working for a museum and might want to create some kind of 3d display. This is something I’d love to work on, but it’s another big project (they want a 10 minute animation featuring all the life from an extinct coral reef!) and I’m not sure they’ve got the budget.

I really want to do it though, so I’m busy thinking up ways they could do the project for less money.


I’ve also got word back about the Trex poster. The company has suddenly seen another poster and wants to change direction. Now, a few months ago, I did another poster for them – on human anatomy and after lots of work went into it and lots of changes were made they finally dropped the idea – so I was left getting nothing for my substantial work on the project.

I suppose I should have insisted on some kind of guarantee this time round. Anyway, I’ve told them if they want this degree of change, I’ll have to charge them more. I’ve also said it’ll take longer. I’ve got enough work on now to get me through till mid September…

Forearmed is half an octopus
I also got a call this week from someone wanting an animation of how to assemble a gun. It’s for a ministry of defence training video. Now, I do think we need an army – even though I disagree with most of the things they’re asked to do right now - and I certainly think that army should be well trained. However, this video isn’t just for training – it’s for sales as well – in other words, it’s an arms dealer and I’ve no idea who their other clients are.

While I’m happy to do work for the British army, I’m not quite so happy about doing an animation that will be used to train random gun buyers all around the globe….

I’ve asked them to send me more info, but if I can’t get more safeguards, I’ll have to turn this one down.

On Friday I finally managed to start going through my documentary, doing the final tiny bits of editing. Balancing the sound, adding the odd bit of colour correction, removing flash frames, and trimming moments when I cut in or out too early. It’s a dirty job and not one you look forward to because what you’re really doing is going through your project with a toothpick looking for problems. You come out of it feeling that:

a) you’re a bit rubbish at editing because you didn’t spot these things before
b) your programme’s a bit of a tatty bodge job because everything you’re now doing is patching up holes and doing dirty fixes.
c) It’s all a waste of time anyway because you’re doing things you hadn’t budgeted time to do because you thought you’d pretty much finished.
d) You just want to get the whole thing out of the way and get on with the next project.
e) Even when you’re done, you don’t feel happy because there’s always the nagging feeling that you’ve missed something and nobody’s now going to check your work before it gets to the distributors.

Added to this, the process always takes longer than you’d anticipated and requires you to make some tough decisions.

Top of the tough decision tree on Friday was the fact that NASA hadn’t come up with the high resolution footage I needed of a solar sail test. I’d been given the footage at 320x240 resolution and used it in the edit where it worked well, so I was looking forward to getting it at HD quality (or even PAL or NTSC)… Unfortunately, nobody at NASA was able to locate it – and even trying to contact the people responsible for the test failed, so I’ve eventually opted to replace the test footage with some general CGI shots of solar sails created by me as a test at the beginning of the project…. It doesn’t really work brilliantly, as the footage isn’t totally relevant to what’s being said.

Still, I’m not going to get the footage I need and the main focus now is to finish the project.



Refusing work
Ok – having said last week that I owe it to myself to refuse work that I know isn’t going to be worthwhile, I’ve actually put it into practice. In fact, I’ve refused two pieces of work in two working days….

The first was a book cover: the guy had a very specific idea of what he wanted to produce, but he only had a budget of $125 – which was fine, but not going to work for me in the UK where the dollar exchange rate isn’t so good. I’d have wanted to spend a couple of days on the project at least and £60 wouldn’t get me minimum wage if I had done.

The second was this morning. A client I’ve done work for before came to me with a photo composite they’d seen before, but couldn’t find anything like in any stock libraries.

It was a fun image and one I could have reproduced and been paid for. They’re a good client and know what they want and have decent budgets, so I’d have been sure of producing some good work.

However, when I started to search for textures to use in the image, I came up with the exact image they wanted on a micro stock library… priced at $2!

Of course, I could have just ignored it and done the job. But I didn’t. I told them where to find the picture they wanted and saved them £400…

‘cos I’m nice like that.

Well, I managed to finish off the film – pictures as I get them. And it was a very long job. I really should have known it was going to be. I ended up working Friday night when I should have been on the way down to Worthing to spend time with Lisa and George.

Right now, most of my projects seem to be on hold and I’m waiting for people to get back to me with small, but important pieces of information. This has meant that I’ve been able only to do small tidying up jobs and frustratingly slight progressions on work while I wait for the info that will let me really get stuck into jobs.

This is doubly annoying because I know there are a lot of jobs in the pipeline waiting for me to work on – so the longer I spend not being able to do them, the bigger the rush when they all inevitably turn up on the same day…

It looks like I’m doing one big project now though – which will involve me going to Palma next week for a couple of days…. Which would be a nice break if it wasn’t just a 24 hour visit.

Still, the one thing I can get on with is the Trex poster… here’s where I am so far – it’s really beginning to shape up.

the only problem is it’s so large (both in terms of polygon detail and scale) that the rendering is really hard – every little change takes ages to make, and ages to check by rendering…. Also, the finished piece is going to be so big (10,000x7000 pixels) I’m going to have to render it in pieces and that’s something I’ve never done with a single picture. And every time I try a different way of doing it I have to wait hours for the inevitable crash… and then start again.

Documentaries
Hopefully all this delay means I’ll be able to do at least some documentary work this week… I’m nearly ready to do the final tweaks to “how to colonise the stars” and then I need to launch into the next run of documentaries… which it’ll be great to finally start proper work on!

This week I took on a job I knew I shouldn’t have. In fact, there were a couple of them.

The main one is a short film someone’s making for a competition. He had a grand idea involving multiple CGI characters in a hand drawn animation style running around in a real filmed environment.

However, it quickly became clear that the script involved a lot of CGI work and that the money and timescales weren’t nearly sufficient to do the job.

I took it on on the basis that I’d do the work in a day, but of course the director added shots and didn’t really know what he needed and it grew and grew.

Even on the basis I accepted the work, I knew it was going to be a struggle. It’s now taken 2 and a half days, and been very stressful. I’ve had to delay going away for the weekend and I feel as though the job was a bodge.

I really owe it to myself not to take on projects where the budget and deadlines aren’t sufficient for the work being asked for. I’m getting enough work now and I really am having to delay real properly paid work to do this.

The film will end up being a lot better than the producer thought it was going to be and I’m sure he’ll be happy in the end, but I’ve had a rotten couple of days doing something that was far too ambitious and getting paid the kind of rate I’d have been on 15 years ago.

It’s so easy when you’re freelance to just take on whatever is handed to you, but it’s not always worth it, and you really have to see beyond “I could do this” to “why should I?”

All I’ve really done, actually is convinced a young director that if he demands the impossible, he can get it. And that does nobody any favours.

I’m a professional and I need to treat myself as one.

presents
On the plus side, I’ve already used the money I did get for the project to buy a new widescreen monitor and a proper graphics tablet – two things I’ve been meaning to get myself for ages. It’s so good to be able to see High definition work in High definition as I’m working with it, and it’s also useful to be able to edit pictures and do 3d sculpting with a more responsive tool than a mouse!

Ok, it seems the re-vamp of the website has paid off. Despite halving my investment on Google adverts, I’ve now got 3 more jobs confirmed and another 2 that might come off in the last week.

One was a pretty standard piece of illustration for a card company.. one is a short animated sequence zooming from outer space to the Earth – again, not difficult in itself, but I’m going to make it quite sophisticated looking… The third is a filmmaker who wants to add some animated figures into a real life scene.

Fair enough, except that he wants to do it by next Friday and he wants to do it for an absurdly low budget… I’m going to take the job anyway because it looks like fun – even though there’s a hell of a lot of animation, it doesn’t have to be strictly naturalistic, so it should be just about do-able.

Anyway, that’s for next week.

There’s also a possibility of a pop video for a group who have just finished touring with the Killers… and a safety video for a yacht on the cards.

All in all, the re-vamp is doing pretty well for me.

Apart from the fact that it’s so successful my ISP is complaining that I’m overusing my bandwidth… so it might be time to get another host for the site – or at least buy a domain name so I can switch if and when I need to.

Did manage to grab a quick look at my notes for my next documentaries – and I think I may be able to turn the plan from 4 60 minute pieces into 6 30 minute documentaries.

This will be a lot easier to manage, shoot and organise… not least because I can use the same interviewees without them looking overused. And that’s quite a consideration because there aren’t that many experts on specific dinosaur species, so I’m going to have to use the people I can get.

The next step here is to arrange interviews and write questions for them. But right now that feels a bit like taking the plunge…

Once I commit to when I’m doing interviews that gives the whole project a momentum… which of course is what I need to do, but it’ll mean putting other paid work on the backburner and I’m only just getting used to the idea that there’s enough of that around to keep me going!

In the meantime I’m really hoping to get somewhere towards finishing the space exploration documentary next week… NASA haven’t come up with the footage I need of the solar sail test, but I guess I’ll have to do without it.

Managed to finish (hopefully, but there’s been no feedback yet) the advertising image for Vodaphone.. they wanted an impossible shape and although that was quite a challenge working in 3d (where you have to be able to really build whatever you want to draw!), the result looks good.

The rap video is coming together too, but I can’t go much further with it without the artist providing some visuals and photos himself. Hopefully these will turn up next week.

I’ve also had to do some extra writing work – three advertising emails – but they’re pretty much OK. I’ve even managed to hit another deadline I’d forgotten about: I’ve done the re-writes for my latest book “the really really really easy step by step guide to creating and editing digital videos using your computer”

Pithy title eh? Not my choice….

David Davis
After the Government barely managed to get through legislation allowing them to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days (although the bill will almost certainly not survive the house of Lords), David Davis – one time runner for leader of the Tory party has resigned on principle. His idea is to force a by-election which he’s going to campaign on the basis of fighting the erosion of civil liberties.

Good for him – and I told him so in an email:

Hi
Just a note to say that I thought your actions today were honourable and intelligent.

You may be feeling isolated without the backup of the party mechanisms you’ve become used to right now, but be assured, you are not alone in believing that the principles on which our democracy was founded are worth defending.

The British have always guarded our freedoms jealously, and the veil under which they are now being eroded is thin indeed. Our freedoms were forged in times far more dangerous than these, and we forget sometimes quite how hard won they are.

I am not a natural Tory supporter – and I’m unlikely to become one any time soon, but I’d like to commend you for your stand today. As an IT journalist I’m constantly reminded of the small, technical developments that are eroding our personal freedoms piece by piece and of the difficulties of bringing the real issues underlying those changes to the public eye. The excuse of terrorism may be allowing our police and our leaders to persuade themselves that more and more draconian measures are needed, but it is good for them to be reminded that democracy makes them our servants, not our masters.

Good luck with your stand.


Christian Darkin


It turns out this morning that the government aren’t going to stand against him and neither are the Lib Dems – but if they don’t, Kelvin Mackensie – one time editor of the Sun (and somebody I once had to sue to get my money out of Highbury house – a collapsing publishing company) will stand.

Apparently he’s being backed by Rupert Murdoch.

This would be fantastic – great theatre! I’ve got half a mind to go up and follow the campaign with a video camera – it would make a great documentary!