Today’s my last working day before Christmas, and instead of doing all the admin I really ought to have finished off, I did a little admin and spent the rest of the time putting together a short how-to article for my website giving museum and exhibit creators a few pointers on how to commission animation. Obviously it’s partially a way to get people to come to my website, but it should be helpful to people hopefully. I also set up a new domain name – something that only takes a few minutes but which I’ve for some reason not done.
I’m now officially www.anachronistic.co.uk – and the article is at www.anachronistic.co.uk/exhibit
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
Ok – I think I’ve finished my “how to colonise the stars” documentary. I think because I haven’t actually watched the final render through to check it, but I’ve made all the changes I think it needs and tried to get all the shots fine-tuned, so I think it’s finished.
Does that mean the project is over? No. I’ve now got to send it to the distributors and hope they like it. Then I’ll have to do all the paperwork – music cue sheets, script, that kind of thing, and finally I’ll have to shell out for the full HD copy to be made along with all the audio versions so buyers can edit out my carefully written narration and replace it with their own…
In the meantime, I’ve been doing a little work on designing characters for my children’s animation series… I’m pleased with the way they look, and with the first script basically there, I should soon be able to start seeing how it all works in practice.
It may seem to you that this project is plummeting forward with undue haste, but it has to. I’ve only got a little time before I start taking on more paid work in the new year and if this project can’t be fitted in relatively easily around it, it won’t get done. This has to be a bit of a production-line job because I know it won’t make me much if any money. There’s no point wondering how good it would have been if it never gets made, so the aim has to be to do something that will look spectacular, and have the ideas in it I want to get across, but is easy enough to get done and get done fast.
So far, it’s looking great.
Expansion plans
I’m also thinking of ways to expand my work – and planning to go on an aggressive marketing drive at the beginning of next year (not that I haven’t got plenty to do already). Basically this mainly involves my Google advertising, but I’m increasingly thinking there may be other ways to get people interested – without shelling out money for advertising. And that will probably involve using my skills as a writer to create some content that’s useful to the clients I’m trying to attract, and publicises my site at the same time. That way, I can try to get it linked to by other sites my clients tend to visit…
More on that story as it comes in…
Does that mean the project is over? No. I’ve now got to send it to the distributors and hope they like it. Then I’ll have to do all the paperwork – music cue sheets, script, that kind of thing, and finally I’ll have to shell out for the full HD copy to be made along with all the audio versions so buyers can edit out my carefully written narration and replace it with their own…
In the meantime, I’ve been doing a little work on designing characters for my children’s animation series… I’m pleased with the way they look, and with the first script basically there, I should soon be able to start seeing how it all works in practice.
It may seem to you that this project is plummeting forward with undue haste, but it has to. I’ve only got a little time before I start taking on more paid work in the new year and if this project can’t be fitted in relatively easily around it, it won’t get done. This has to be a bit of a production-line job because I know it won’t make me much if any money. There’s no point wondering how good it would have been if it never gets made, so the aim has to be to do something that will look spectacular, and have the ideas in it I want to get across, but is easy enough to get done and get done fast.
So far, it’s looking great.
Expansion plans
I’m also thinking of ways to expand my work – and planning to go on an aggressive marketing drive at the beginning of next year (not that I haven’t got plenty to do already). Basically this mainly involves my Google advertising, but I’m increasingly thinking there may be other ways to get people interested – without shelling out money for advertising. And that will probably involve using my skills as a writer to create some content that’s useful to the clients I’m trying to attract, and publicises my site at the same time. That way, I can try to get it linked to by other sites my clients tend to visit…
More on that story as it comes in…
Friday, December 12, 2008
Back to documentary work – or at least a little of it.
I’ve edited the footage shot in Mexico into a taster for the Nevada desert fossil hunt project I should be filming at the end of January. It’s looking like fun, but I really need some feedback about just how it’s going to work.
The idea is to take a team of fossil hunters into the desert to search for the remains of the world’s first super-predator – anomalocaris, and to film the adventure. I’m going to focus on the characters of the team – who I introduce in the trailer clip.
I’m not sure how much of this clip will appear in the finished program, but it’s aiming to give an idea of the style and rhythm of the project…
So the questions I need to answer – any comments you’ve got would be gratefully received:
Am I making the characters clear enough and engaging enough for a 50 minute documentary?
If this documentary works out, is there potential here for a series in which the team go to fossil sites around the world on quests to solve ancient mysteries?
Should I be in it? In other words, do I need to be a part of the programme too – would it work best from the point of view of MY journey with them, or should the camera be in independent observer with an impartial narration? Should I be helping them dig for fossils, or watching them?
Planning to expand in a recession
Ok – it looks like I’ve got a decision to make. Do I keep my business the same size – i.e. with a workforce of one – where I do everything – and only take on the work I can do. Or, do I expand and bring in other people at the risk of
A) Loosing creative control
B) Ending up managing rather than doing the work I enjoy
And
C) having to pay people for work they’ve done, but which the client hasn’t ended up using
hmm…
Obviously I don’t want to be a manager or a salesman any more than I am now, and obviously there are some jobs I’ll want to keep for myself. However, I’ll have to learn to be a manager – and a decent one if I don’t want to get sucked into making management my main job.
Equally, If I’m to do this, I’ll need a flexible system where I only have people working for me when I have the work to give them. This isn’t too much of a problem as much of the animation industry is freelance and wants to stay that way.
On top of that, I’ll need to have a policy of keeping on advertising even when I’ve got lots of work on – and know instantly what to do when things come in that I can’t do on my own…
Ok – I’m not sure what I want to do here – but I do know I need to find out more before I can make a decision.
Perhaps the first step is to find the artists I’d bring in if I have work for them – get a whole load of CVs and showreels together so I have the access I need to freelancers.
Next stop – Elance…. And maybe Amazon for books on management.
Should I even be thinking about this in a recession? Why not? It doesn’t seem to be a recession for me. I’m busier than I ever have been.
Colonising space
Anyway, as well as the new documentary outline, I managed to finally do the last few bits of work I need on my previous documentary – the one about colonising space. There’s a little more to do – I still have to make sure all my paperwork on music and stock footage is up to date, but the creative stuff is done now and at least now I can submit it to my distributors. The next step after that will be the costly process of getting HD and PAL masters created. This is actually the most expensive bit of my production.
More work
Having cleared the decks of work for the rest of the year, it now looks like I’ve got more magazine work and more newsletter work on the horizon – and with this kind of stuff, the horizon tends to come up on you pretty fast. I was, and still am hoping for a little slack between now and Christmas – but we’ll see!
Children’s TV
And the reason I want the slack is so that I can begin work on my idea for a children’s animation. I think a lot of kids TV talks down, and I’d like to make something that treats children as capable of understanding a lot more – because to be honest, even if they can’t and just see a lot of colours and funny faces – what does it matter? – at least I’ve tried not to patronise!
The idea, I hope, will be do-able both in terms of scripting and in terms of animation, and having checked out the competition, it seems that 11 minute shows in series of 13 are the way to go.
That means I’ve got to be able to produce 130 minutes of animation – and I’ve got enough “real work” to keep me busy, so I’m going to have to be able to do it fast – i.e. not taking more than a couple of days to animate each episode. Realistically if it takes more than that, it won’t get done.
This sounds pretty unrealistic – but in my defence, Oliver Postgate (the maker of the fantastic and surprisingly grown up kids TV shows I grew up with) -who died this week was forced to use very fast “production line” type methods and reduce his animation style to the barest essentials, and still created some of the best most thoughtful TV ever made.
I’m setting him as my benchmark – and some would call that reckless considering his style of TV doesn’t seem to be that popular anymore… We’ll see.
Still, the ideas are coming thick and fast and I spent today writing the first script – I decided to start with episode 3 for no very good reason.
It’s gone pretty well, but isn’t finished. I’ve also got an idea it’s too long. Anyway, more of this later – when there’s some animation to show… In the meantime, here are the clangers…
The idea is to take a team of fossil hunters into the desert to search for the remains of the world’s first super-predator – anomalocaris, and to film the adventure. I’m going to focus on the characters of the team – who I introduce in the trailer clip.
I’m not sure how much of this clip will appear in the finished program, but it’s aiming to give an idea of the style and rhythm of the project…
So the questions I need to answer – any comments you’ve got would be gratefully received:
Am I making the characters clear enough and engaging enough for a 50 minute documentary?
If this documentary works out, is there potential here for a series in which the team go to fossil sites around the world on quests to solve ancient mysteries?
Should I be in it? In other words, do I need to be a part of the programme too – would it work best from the point of view of MY journey with them, or should the camera be in independent observer with an impartial narration? Should I be helping them dig for fossils, or watching them?
Planning to expand in a recession
Ok – it looks like I’ve got a decision to make. Do I keep my business the same size – i.e. with a workforce of one – where I do everything – and only take on the work I can do. Or, do I expand and bring in other people at the risk of
A) Loosing creative control
B) Ending up managing rather than doing the work I enjoy
And
C) having to pay people for work they’ve done, but which the client hasn’t ended up using
hmm…
Obviously I don’t want to be a manager or a salesman any more than I am now, and obviously there are some jobs I’ll want to keep for myself. However, I’ll have to learn to be a manager – and a decent one if I don’t want to get sucked into making management my main job.
Equally, If I’m to do this, I’ll need a flexible system where I only have people working for me when I have the work to give them. This isn’t too much of a problem as much of the animation industry is freelance and wants to stay that way.
On top of that, I’ll need to have a policy of keeping on advertising even when I’ve got lots of work on – and know instantly what to do when things come in that I can’t do on my own…
Ok – I’m not sure what I want to do here – but I do know I need to find out more before I can make a decision.
Perhaps the first step is to find the artists I’d bring in if I have work for them – get a whole load of CVs and showreels together so I have the access I need to freelancers.
Next stop – Elance…. And maybe Amazon for books on management.
Should I even be thinking about this in a recession? Why not? It doesn’t seem to be a recession for me. I’m busier than I ever have been.
Colonising space
Anyway, as well as the new documentary outline, I managed to finally do the last few bits of work I need on my previous documentary – the one about colonising space. There’s a little more to do – I still have to make sure all my paperwork on music and stock footage is up to date, but the creative stuff is done now and at least now I can submit it to my distributors. The next step after that will be the costly process of getting HD and PAL masters created. This is actually the most expensive bit of my production.
More work
Having cleared the decks of work for the rest of the year, it now looks like I’ve got more magazine work and more newsletter work on the horizon – and with this kind of stuff, the horizon tends to come up on you pretty fast. I was, and still am hoping for a little slack between now and Christmas – but we’ll see!
Children’s TV
And the reason I want the slack is so that I can begin work on my idea for a children’s animation. I think a lot of kids TV talks down, and I’d like to make something that treats children as capable of understanding a lot more – because to be honest, even if they can’t and just see a lot of colours and funny faces – what does it matter? – at least I’ve tried not to patronise!
The idea, I hope, will be do-able both in terms of scripting and in terms of animation, and having checked out the competition, it seems that 11 minute shows in series of 13 are the way to go.
That means I’ve got to be able to produce 130 minutes of animation – and I’ve got enough “real work” to keep me busy, so I’m going to have to be able to do it fast – i.e. not taking more than a couple of days to animate each episode. Realistically if it takes more than that, it won’t get done.
This sounds pretty unrealistic – but in my defence, Oliver Postgate (the maker of the fantastic and surprisingly grown up kids TV shows I grew up with) -who died this week was forced to use very fast “production line” type methods and reduce his animation style to the barest essentials, and still created some of the best most thoughtful TV ever made.
I’m setting him as my benchmark – and some would call that reckless considering his style of TV doesn’t seem to be that popular anymore… We’ll see.
Still, the ideas are coming thick and fast and I spent today writing the first script – I decided to start with episode 3 for no very good reason.
It’s gone pretty well, but isn’t finished. I’ve also got an idea it’s too long. Anyway, more of this later – when there’s some animation to show… In the meantime, here are the clangers…
Monday, December 8, 2008
Finished the boat safety video this week, or at least I think I did. There were a few last-minute changes, and this weekend. The whole thing gets shown to the brokers (who I assume, will want to make some alterations of their own).
The animation for Stafford Castle is also pretty much complete and we’re waiting for the council to take a look at to see if they want any changes. In addition, the cover for Nature is essentially finished, but we’re tweaking it as it is passed between different people within the magazine
One of the keys of any project like this, is that you really need to know exactly who it is that is making the final decisions about everything. Quite often the person commissioning you knows what they want, however, there are either people overseeing them or people holding the purse strings, or simply other partners in the business, who once everything is done will want to take a look and put their own ideas.
It also now looking as though the boat project might end up expanding. The same company want to produce some training videos for their staff -- and they want to do it in the same kind of style. It looks as though these projects might be substantially bigger. So that rather than creating a four-minute animation, it may add up to an hour or more. I think I might have to expand my operation.
3December
Every year, the 3-D industry (which is rapidly becoming just another word for Autodesk) runs a series of seminars all round the world. And I was invited to the London one this year.
Press events like this are always worth going to. You always end up getting something out of them. Even if it is not always what you expect.
This time, I met the editor of a popular science magazine aimed at convincing school students that science is a good thing. Leafing through the magazine, it’s something I’d really like to write for.
I email the editor the next day with a link to the shark documentary and my images on science photo library, and he immediately sends me back a cover of his magazine. It turns out they’d already used my pictures from science photo library as part of a feature on shark evolution which turns out to be based on the documentary.
Small world.
I’ll hopefully be writing something for them soon… having lots of ideas…
The animation for Stafford Castle is also pretty much complete and we’re waiting for the council to take a look at to see if they want any changes. In addition, the cover for Nature is essentially finished, but we’re tweaking it as it is passed between different people within the magazine
One of the keys of any project like this, is that you really need to know exactly who it is that is making the final decisions about everything. Quite often the person commissioning you knows what they want, however, there are either people overseeing them or people holding the purse strings, or simply other partners in the business, who once everything is done will want to take a look and put their own ideas.
It also now looking as though the boat project might end up expanding. The same company want to produce some training videos for their staff -- and they want to do it in the same kind of style. It looks as though these projects might be substantially bigger. So that rather than creating a four-minute animation, it may add up to an hour or more. I think I might have to expand my operation.
3December
Every year, the 3-D industry (which is rapidly becoming just another word for Autodesk) runs a series of seminars all round the world. And I was invited to the London one this year.
Press events like this are always worth going to. You always end up getting something out of them. Even if it is not always what you expect.
This time, I met the editor of a popular science magazine aimed at convincing school students that science is a good thing. Leafing through the magazine, it’s something I’d really like to write for.
I email the editor the next day with a link to the shark documentary and my images on science photo library, and he immediately sends me back a cover of his magazine. It turns out they’d already used my pictures from science photo library as part of a feature on shark evolution which turns out to be based on the documentary.
Small world.
I’ll hopefully be writing something for them soon… having lots of ideas…
Friday, November 28, 2008
Re-writes
this week, I had a magazine editor get back to me asking me to rewrite a tutorial. I had written for them. This is quite rare, at least for me. I can't remember the last time I got asked to do significant rewrites on an article. However, when I re-read the piece, it was obvious, the editor was quite right. It wasn't that there was anything particularly wrong with the style of the writing, but I had pitched it at completely the wrong audience.
The feature was for PC plus, a magazine aimed at a really techno-savvy group of readers. The sort of people who build their own PCs. In fact many of them are probably the sort of people who write their own operating systems. And here was I giving them step-by-step instructions on how to open a document.
The magazine has just changed the way it lays out its tutorials. Instead of having the tutorial written as a block of text (which is unusual, but which I quite like because it means you don't have to be quite so prescriptive and you have room to talk a little bit more generally about techniques) they are now going for a more traditional layout for their tutorials (where each job is broken down into a series of numbered steps). In changing from one style of layout to the other, I lost my grip on what kind of reader I was aiming the article at.
It's a tricky one, because the kind of tutorials I write for the magazine are showing people how to do quite complicated things, but with freeware software they can get for nothing. Whereas m is of the readers, if they are at the level of experience, where they want to do those things, are probably quite capable of obtaining pirated copies of the top-selling software packages. In some ways I'd like to be able to work with (for example.), 3-D studio or photoshop. However, it's not really on to admit that your readers have in all probability, nicked most of the software you use in your tutorials.
Nature
I’m now really feeling as though I may get to the end of the work I’ve got on. I've got the animation for the castle queued up and rendering on all the machines. I've pretty much finished and safety video (I've got a couple of shots to redo, but it's all under control) and I'm now making lists of all the stupid little jobs I've neglected over the last few months -- things like doing my accounts, tidying my desk, clearing my inbox and backing up all the files I'd be in deep trouble if I lost. Who knows, I might even be up to do some Christmas shopping before Christmas Eve.
Just as I'm ready to start doing this, another job turns up. It's the science journal Nature, and they want me to do an illustration for their cover. Actually, it's rather a nice job, and it should be quite relaxing. In comparison to the very detailed and fiddly work I've been doing on the animations over the last couple of weeks.
The extinction of Trex
I also have finally got an e-mail from the company who wanted me to do a poster of Tyrannosaurus rex. At the beginning of the year, the same company wanted me to do a human anatomy poster. I did an awful work on the project, including spending £300 of my own money, buying a 3-D model of various parts of the human body, and got the project almost finished, only to have the company decide they didn't want to use it. I was a little reticent when they asked me to do the Tyrannosaurus rex poster, in the middle of the year. However, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. Again, I did a lot of work on poster, and it was nearly finished when the company came back wanting to do the image of a completely different way, which would have meant me starting from scratch more or less.
I told them, then that they needed to either give me a firm commission (in other words, a promise to pay me even if they didn't use the work -- which is the way most engagements of artists work) or at the very least, agree to pay me an additional fee for the extra work I would have to do.
They decided to try a reworking of some of the image elements I'd already done and I did agree to do a bit more work on spec in shifting the images around to try to make something that would work.
Today, finally, they decided not to go ahead with the poster. No surprises there, and to be honest I'm not really annoyed about it. I had kind resigned myself to this being the final outcome.
Doing my taxes
I decided really quite responsibly to spend Friday getting all my accounts up to date. In preparation for doing my taxes. I managed to do some of the dull and irritating work in the morning, popped out to grab something for lunch, and returned to discover I'd locked myself out. Lisa had gone to IKEA, with Sam (the only other person with a set of keys), and I knew they'd be there most of the afternoon.
It was raining, far too hard to do any Christmas shopping. So reluctantly, I was forced to spend the afternoon, sitting in the pub reading a book I bought on Lordship Lane.
Its book called “bad science”, written by a guy named Ben Goldacre, who writes a column I always read in the weekend Guardian. Basically it's about the way people get intentionally or unintentionally hoodwinked by pseudoscience or badly done science. So, the column covers everything from how to fool fingerprint detectors using household jelly to why people end up dying unnecessarily because they abandon proper medicine in favour of homoeopathic nonsense.
I always find the columns entertaining, if a little shocking.
The first part of the book was concerned mainly with homoeopathy (apparently a really good homoeopathic “cure” is one where the active ingredient has been diluted to a level at which -- and this is no joke -- if the entire universe was filled with water, there would be one molecule of the ingredient in it) and the way clinical trials can be skewed by the researcher’s subconscious intentions.
It's fairly obvious that if in a trial, you don't take care to make sure that neither the doctor nor the patient knows who is taking a placebo and who is taking a real drug you’ll mess up your results. However, I was quite surprised by the degree to which this kind of mistake is made in real trials, and the degree to which the results are affected.
Apparently they've actually done analysis, to discover that simply by letting the person doing the testing know which patients are taking which drugs, even if they don't tell the patients, the results could end up being skewed by 40%.
The power of the subconscious is pretty impressive - which made me wonder how it was that I managed to lock myself out on the one day in the year when I was supposed to be doing my taxes, rather than a job I actually wanted to do.
this week, I had a magazine editor get back to me asking me to rewrite a tutorial. I had written for them. This is quite rare, at least for me. I can't remember the last time I got asked to do significant rewrites on an article. However, when I re-read the piece, it was obvious, the editor was quite right. It wasn't that there was anything particularly wrong with the style of the writing, but I had pitched it at completely the wrong audience.
The feature was for PC plus, a magazine aimed at a really techno-savvy group of readers. The sort of people who build their own PCs. In fact many of them are probably the sort of people who write their own operating systems. And here was I giving them step-by-step instructions on how to open a document.
The magazine has just changed the way it lays out its tutorials. Instead of having the tutorial written as a block of text (which is unusual, but which I quite like because it means you don't have to be quite so prescriptive and you have room to talk a little bit more generally about techniques) they are now going for a more traditional layout for their tutorials (where each job is broken down into a series of numbered steps). In changing from one style of layout to the other, I lost my grip on what kind of reader I was aiming the article at.
It's a tricky one, because the kind of tutorials I write for the magazine are showing people how to do quite complicated things, but with freeware software they can get for nothing. Whereas m is of the readers, if they are at the level of experience, where they want to do those things, are probably quite capable of obtaining pirated copies of the top-selling software packages. In some ways I'd like to be able to work with (for example.), 3-D studio or photoshop. However, it's not really on to admit that your readers have in all probability, nicked most of the software you use in your tutorials.
Nature
I’m now really feeling as though I may get to the end of the work I’ve got on. I've got the animation for the castle queued up and rendering on all the machines. I've pretty much finished and safety video (I've got a couple of shots to redo, but it's all under control) and I'm now making lists of all the stupid little jobs I've neglected over the last few months -- things like doing my accounts, tidying my desk, clearing my inbox and backing up all the files I'd be in deep trouble if I lost. Who knows, I might even be up to do some Christmas shopping before Christmas Eve.
Just as I'm ready to start doing this, another job turns up. It's the science journal Nature, and they want me to do an illustration for their cover. Actually, it's rather a nice job, and it should be quite relaxing. In comparison to the very detailed and fiddly work I've been doing on the animations over the last couple of weeks.
The extinction of Trex
I also have finally got an e-mail from the company who wanted me to do a poster of Tyrannosaurus rex. At the beginning of the year, the same company wanted me to do a human anatomy poster. I did an awful work on the project, including spending £300 of my own money, buying a 3-D model of various parts of the human body, and got the project almost finished, only to have the company decide they didn't want to use it. I was a little reticent when they asked me to do the Tyrannosaurus rex poster, in the middle of the year. However, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. Again, I did a lot of work on poster, and it was nearly finished when the company came back wanting to do the image of a completely different way, which would have meant me starting from scratch more or less.
I told them, then that they needed to either give me a firm commission (in other words, a promise to pay me even if they didn't use the work -- which is the way most engagements of artists work) or at the very least, agree to pay me an additional fee for the extra work I would have to do.
They decided to try a reworking of some of the image elements I'd already done and I did agree to do a bit more work on spec in shifting the images around to try to make something that would work.
Today, finally, they decided not to go ahead with the poster. No surprises there, and to be honest I'm not really annoyed about it. I had kind resigned myself to this being the final outcome.
Doing my taxes
I decided really quite responsibly to spend Friday getting all my accounts up to date. In preparation for doing my taxes. I managed to do some of the dull and irritating work in the morning, popped out to grab something for lunch, and returned to discover I'd locked myself out. Lisa had gone to IKEA, with Sam (the only other person with a set of keys), and I knew they'd be there most of the afternoon.
It was raining, far too hard to do any Christmas shopping. So reluctantly, I was forced to spend the afternoon, sitting in the pub reading a book I bought on Lordship Lane.
Its book called “bad science”, written by a guy named Ben Goldacre, who writes a column I always read in the weekend Guardian. Basically it's about the way people get intentionally or unintentionally hoodwinked by pseudoscience or badly done science. So, the column covers everything from how to fool fingerprint detectors using household jelly to why people end up dying unnecessarily because they abandon proper medicine in favour of homoeopathic nonsense.
I always find the columns entertaining, if a little shocking.
The first part of the book was concerned mainly with homoeopathy (apparently a really good homoeopathic “cure” is one where the active ingredient has been diluted to a level at which -- and this is no joke -- if the entire universe was filled with water, there would be one molecule of the ingredient in it) and the way clinical trials can be skewed by the researcher’s subconscious intentions.
It's fairly obvious that if in a trial, you don't take care to make sure that neither the doctor nor the patient knows who is taking a placebo and who is taking a real drug you’ll mess up your results. However, I was quite surprised by the degree to which this kind of mistake is made in real trials, and the degree to which the results are affected.
Apparently they've actually done analysis, to discover that simply by letting the person doing the testing know which patients are taking which drugs, even if they don't tell the patients, the results could end up being skewed by 40%.
The power of the subconscious is pretty impressive - which made me wonder how it was that I managed to lock myself out on the one day in the year when I was supposed to be doing my taxes, rather than a job I actually wanted to do.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
My latest new toy arrived yesterday. I'm having a go at replacing typing (I'm actually quite a good typist -- I took touch typing at school and that's one of the few things I learned there that I use regularly in my life now) with speech recognition. I've invested in Dragon dictate and the best microphone I can buy for that with £15. I'm actually quite amazed at how good it is. I can speak almost at normal speed and as long as I pronounce my words pretty well, it recognizes moral less everything I say.
I once say using it is instinctive, but it really is pretty good from the moment you install it. I've spent about 10 minutes training it (and all that means is reading a few paragraphs aloud), and it's spent a few minutes going through my “ my documents” folder getting used to my style of writing. It's probably been given a bit of a head start because I write a lot, and most of it I have to say is probably fairly formulaic -- after all, I write a lot of tutorials and reviews for similar kinds of magazine. There are also couple of books I've written in those folders, so there's a lot of material for it to do what it calls a collocational analysis on. Basically this means working out what words are unlikely to say given what's already in the sentence. As a writer, it's a bit dispiriting to realise that a computer can predict with a relatively high accuracy what you're going to write based entirely on how similar it is to what you've already written in the past. And there was I thinking I was being original.
And it said that the success rate is very high. I'm having to get used to saying the word comma and the word full stop, so this entry is probably lacking in punctuation. Dictating this sentence I realised that I don't know how to actually write the word comma -- I have decided with the keyboard because whenever I say it the computer adds a punctuation mark.
Not sure to what extent using voice recognition will change the way I write. The problem with typing is that however fast you type you tend to forget what you were writing before you get to the end of the sentence and that means you tend to rewrite as you go along. With voice recognition things go onto the page almost as quickly as you think them, so perhaps it's possible to be a bit more flowing. On the other hand, maybe that's not a good thing. Maybe you need the time it takes you to actually type to work out whether what you were going to say makes sense or not.
Probably, it's just about getting used to the system.
One problem I think and have is that the programme takes a lot of processing power so if I'm doing something else, which I usually am, it slows right down. Given that if I'm writing a tutorial I'm usually running the programme the tutorial is about in the background that might be a problem.
D-Day
Today is D-Day for the yacht animation. By the end of today I have to get finished version over to the client. I've realised that there's one thing I forgot to add and that's the on-screen text. I want the text to be a bit stylish, so it may take a while.
There's also a few fussy little details, the odd flicker here and there, and pieces of lighting and aren't quite right. That I'm hoping to correct and that could slow me down because I have to re-render a few shots.
I finally got everything done and had a completed movie by the end of the day however, getting effectually rendered out in a format that was high enough quality, but still small enough to be uploaded online turned out to be a bit of a pain. I had to keep going upstairs to the office throughout the evening to check whether whichever version I'd rendered was good enough and small enough to be sent. It was about nine o'clock before I got finished version out. Even then, I'm sure there will be some changes that need to be made. I don't think this is the end of this project.
Andrew
Andrews back problem, which has been troubling him for a while, has got a lot worse. He's had to take several weeks off work (something he never does) and move back into my parents house. And with mum recovering from her operation and unable to bend down and him on painkillers and unable to stand up it sounds like things are a little difficult in the house. It's a lot for dad to cope with I imagine.
20th of November 2008
Work
checking through my invoices and looking at them against what bank account, something I've only just had time to do, because of all the work I've been doing, I've now realised that there's an awful lot of them that haven't been paid. And we now going to have to go through and contact some of my clients to remind them to pay me -- sometimes the work I did months ago. This is a pain for two reasons. One is that I don't like having to pester people about money. The other is that it makes me feel as if I have been remiss in not knowing when I've got paid and what for.
Probably to most people who have regular jobs, where they get paid every month. It's difficult to understand how I can simply not know whether I've been paid or not. However, when you're doing dozens of different jobs sometimes all at the same time. You tend to think once you've completed the job and invoiced for it, you can forget about it. Checking my bank details for every deposit is something I don't really have time to do, unless it's a really big project. I suppose this is a bit of a weakness in the way that I work, but I tend to concentrate on the job but I'm doing, rather than the money that I'm paid for it.
Castles
Today I'm working on the castle animation. It's looking good already, but when only to add some extra detail, and that means people in period costumes, animals, farming equipment and furniture. I've also redone the texture of the landscape. I started off by using a very large (4000 pixel across) texture, drawn in z-brush but that wasn't detailed enough. I wanted to create a landscape with grass, but paths through the grass, and that meant a lot of detail, especially because I had to zoom in very close to the model. So, what I've done use, used a much smaller texture and used it to draw a black and white mask. I've painted the paths in white and the rest in black. Then I've used 'd use that in 3ds max to define where I place two different textures -- 1 of grass, and one of muddy earth.
The good thing about this is that it means I can now title. The grass and earth textures, so that they are repeated over the whole model. So now when I zoom in close, There's still a lot of detail.
The result is that I can have a very large area of texture, but I don't have to use a really huge image to map onto it. I can use several much smaller images and use masks to define where their place, which makes the whole thing much more manageable.
Hopefully, this is going to allow me to use a lot more of my processing power on the extra detail I want to add to the models. The people I'm going to place into the scene will be from Poser and so they will be fairly high resolution. I'm hoping I don't end up making the scene so big that it's impossible to render.
I once say using it is instinctive, but it really is pretty good from the moment you install it. I've spent about 10 minutes training it (and all that means is reading a few paragraphs aloud), and it's spent a few minutes going through my “ my documents” folder getting used to my style of writing. It's probably been given a bit of a head start because I write a lot, and most of it I have to say is probably fairly formulaic -- after all, I write a lot of tutorials and reviews for similar kinds of magazine. There are also couple of books I've written in those folders, so there's a lot of material for it to do what it calls a collocational analysis on. Basically this means working out what words are unlikely to say given what's already in the sentence. As a writer, it's a bit dispiriting to realise that a computer can predict with a relatively high accuracy what you're going to write based entirely on how similar it is to what you've already written in the past. And there was I thinking I was being original.
And it said that the success rate is very high. I'm having to get used to saying the word comma and the word full stop, so this entry is probably lacking in punctuation. Dictating this sentence I realised that I don't know how to actually write the word comma -- I have decided with the keyboard because whenever I say it the computer adds a punctuation mark.
Not sure to what extent using voice recognition will change the way I write. The problem with typing is that however fast you type you tend to forget what you were writing before you get to the end of the sentence and that means you tend to rewrite as you go along. With voice recognition things go onto the page almost as quickly as you think them, so perhaps it's possible to be a bit more flowing. On the other hand, maybe that's not a good thing. Maybe you need the time it takes you to actually type to work out whether what you were going to say makes sense or not.
Probably, it's just about getting used to the system.
One problem I think and have is that the programme takes a lot of processing power so if I'm doing something else, which I usually am, it slows right down. Given that if I'm writing a tutorial I'm usually running the programme the tutorial is about in the background that might be a problem.
D-Day
Today is D-Day for the yacht animation. By the end of today I have to get finished version over to the client. I've realised that there's one thing I forgot to add and that's the on-screen text. I want the text to be a bit stylish, so it may take a while.
There's also a few fussy little details, the odd flicker here and there, and pieces of lighting and aren't quite right. That I'm hoping to correct and that could slow me down because I have to re-render a few shots.
I finally got everything done and had a completed movie by the end of the day however, getting effectually rendered out in a format that was high enough quality, but still small enough to be uploaded online turned out to be a bit of a pain. I had to keep going upstairs to the office throughout the evening to check whether whichever version I'd rendered was good enough and small enough to be sent. It was about nine o'clock before I got finished version out. Even then, I'm sure there will be some changes that need to be made. I don't think this is the end of this project.
Andrew
Andrews back problem, which has been troubling him for a while, has got a lot worse. He's had to take several weeks off work (something he never does) and move back into my parents house. And with mum recovering from her operation and unable to bend down and him on painkillers and unable to stand up it sounds like things are a little difficult in the house. It's a lot for dad to cope with I imagine.
20th of November 2008
Work
checking through my invoices and looking at them against what bank account, something I've only just had time to do, because of all the work I've been doing, I've now realised that there's an awful lot of them that haven't been paid. And we now going to have to go through and contact some of my clients to remind them to pay me -- sometimes the work I did months ago. This is a pain for two reasons. One is that I don't like having to pester people about money. The other is that it makes me feel as if I have been remiss in not knowing when I've got paid and what for.
Probably to most people who have regular jobs, where they get paid every month. It's difficult to understand how I can simply not know whether I've been paid or not. However, when you're doing dozens of different jobs sometimes all at the same time. You tend to think once you've completed the job and invoiced for it, you can forget about it. Checking my bank details for every deposit is something I don't really have time to do, unless it's a really big project. I suppose this is a bit of a weakness in the way that I work, but I tend to concentrate on the job but I'm doing, rather than the money that I'm paid for it.
Castles
Today I'm working on the castle animation. It's looking good already, but when only to add some extra detail, and that means people in period costumes, animals, farming equipment and furniture. I've also redone the texture of the landscape. I started off by using a very large (4000 pixel across) texture, drawn in z-brush but that wasn't detailed enough. I wanted to create a landscape with grass, but paths through the grass, and that meant a lot of detail, especially because I had to zoom in very close to the model. So, what I've done use, used a much smaller texture and used it to draw a black and white mask. I've painted the paths in white and the rest in black. Then I've used 'd use that in 3ds max to define where I place two different textures -- 1 of grass, and one of muddy earth.
The good thing about this is that it means I can now title. The grass and earth textures, so that they are repeated over the whole model. So now when I zoom in close, There's still a lot of detail.
The result is that I can have a very large area of texture, but I don't have to use a really huge image to map onto it. I can use several much smaller images and use masks to define where their place, which makes the whole thing much more manageable.
Hopefully, this is going to allow me to use a lot more of my processing power on the extra detail I want to add to the models. The people I'm going to place into the scene will be from Poser and so they will be fairly high resolution. I'm hoping I don't end up making the scene so big that it's impossible to render.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Last week seemed to be a week full of interruptions – either having to stop work early or start late, or not being able to do the work I was supposed to do because I didn’t have the information I needed.
I got a lot done, but it was all chopped into segments – I spent the week wondering what should I do with this hour, or that 20 minutes, or what I should do while I’m waiting for that email, or this delivery.
Still, I did remarkably well. I got this months’ newsletters written – the company I write the newsletters for has suddenly sold off the arm producing one of the products I write about (a TV receiver for computers) and decided to concentrate on their video editing products. This is good news for me because obviously video editing is more my speciality. Also, there’s less and less to write about USB TV receivers and I really struggle to do a 400 word feature about a different aspect of them every month.
Conversely, concentrating the newsletter on editing makes a lot of sense because it means I can do two features per month – one aimed at novice users and done as a “push this button then push that button” style tutorial, and one more discursive feature that forms part of a series on something a bit more meaty.
I’m starting a five part series on documentary filmmaking – which should be fun.
I’m also toying with the idea of doing a filmmaking competition for users of the product… hmm.. might be fun.
Anyway, the newsletter’s out of the way, for this month. As is a feature I’m writing for PC plus on basic photo editing.
yachts
I also managed to do most of the work on re-doing the scenes that didn’t work in the yacht safety animation I’m doing for a luxury yacht… this project is nearing completion. Right now, I’m rendering out what I hope will be a final version (although once I check through it and give it to the client, there’s bound to be a few tweaks).
Anyway, that’s a long term project and it’s good to see it finally on the way to completion. There comes a time in every project when you’ve made all the creative decisions and done all the fun work, and it becomes about just getting the thing out of the door.
With this project, though, my last few days work on it have been (as well as re-doing some pesky animation shots that just won’t go right) putting in bought in sound effects and music – and that’s actually quite fun.
In contrast to the trilobites project finished a couple of weeks ago, adding sound effects to this animation has worked really well. I guess it’s a mixture of the fact that this project’s a little bit more comical and less realistic, so I can afford for the effects to be a little less naturalistic and the fact that it’s a lot easier to come across the sound of an alarm siren, or someone falling into the water than it is to re-create sounds made by an underwater creature that died out 300million years ago…
Castles
The castle animation seems to have been well received – and I now just have to add people, animals and a bit more animation to the movie. I think I’ve now got the details I need to do that. I’m going to buy in clothes and use them on poser characters because it’s a lot easier and will be more realistic than modelling everything from scratch.
Wedding videos
I also managed to upload the footage shot in Mexico to my new 8gb PC and install CS3 on it. This was a version of CS3 that was on my previous PC that totally crashed a few months ago, and I thought I’d have trouble installing it because there’s some de-registration process you have to go through before you can put it on a new machine. If the old machine is broken, you can’t de-register it….
Still, I installed it and for some reason it seemed to work….
And as a bonus, when I captured all my footage, there were no jumps in it.
I’ve been worried for a while that my HDV camcorder was breaking down because I kept getting jumps appearing in my captured footage. It turns out that this was just because my PC (a 2gb dual core) was too slow (or maybe the disk drives I was capturing to or the firewire port I was importing through)…. Whatever, the problem seems to have been solved by simply getting a new PC.
Who’d have thought it would be that easy.
Just replace everything and suddenly it works.
Anyway, the problem this problem has been replaced by is that the new PC keeps randomly crashing after it’s been on a few hours…. Hmmm… don’t like the sound of that.
Still, I did manage to edit together the interviews I took at Jake the digger’s wedding and upload them to youtube for him. Not actually work, but it did allow me to make sure everything was working on the new system before I had to do any critical editing work!
I got a lot done, but it was all chopped into segments – I spent the week wondering what should I do with this hour, or that 20 minutes, or what I should do while I’m waiting for that email, or this delivery.
Still, I did remarkably well. I got this months’ newsletters written – the company I write the newsletters for has suddenly sold off the arm producing one of the products I write about (a TV receiver for computers) and decided to concentrate on their video editing products. This is good news for me because obviously video editing is more my speciality. Also, there’s less and less to write about USB TV receivers and I really struggle to do a 400 word feature about a different aspect of them every month.
Conversely, concentrating the newsletter on editing makes a lot of sense because it means I can do two features per month – one aimed at novice users and done as a “push this button then push that button” style tutorial, and one more discursive feature that forms part of a series on something a bit more meaty.
I’m starting a five part series on documentary filmmaking – which should be fun.
I’m also toying with the idea of doing a filmmaking competition for users of the product… hmm.. might be fun.
Anyway, the newsletter’s out of the way, for this month. As is a feature I’m writing for PC plus on basic photo editing.
yachts
I also managed to do most of the work on re-doing the scenes that didn’t work in the yacht safety animation I’m doing for a luxury yacht… this project is nearing completion. Right now, I’m rendering out what I hope will be a final version (although once I check through it and give it to the client, there’s bound to be a few tweaks).
Anyway, that’s a long term project and it’s good to see it finally on the way to completion. There comes a time in every project when you’ve made all the creative decisions and done all the fun work, and it becomes about just getting the thing out of the door.
With this project, though, my last few days work on it have been (as well as re-doing some pesky animation shots that just won’t go right) putting in bought in sound effects and music – and that’s actually quite fun.
In contrast to the trilobites project finished a couple of weeks ago, adding sound effects to this animation has worked really well. I guess it’s a mixture of the fact that this project’s a little bit more comical and less realistic, so I can afford for the effects to be a little less naturalistic and the fact that it’s a lot easier to come across the sound of an alarm siren, or someone falling into the water than it is to re-create sounds made by an underwater creature that died out 300million years ago…
Castles
The castle animation seems to have been well received – and I now just have to add people, animals and a bit more animation to the movie. I think I’ve now got the details I need to do that. I’m going to buy in clothes and use them on poser characters because it’s a lot easier and will be more realistic than modelling everything from scratch.
Wedding videos
I also managed to upload the footage shot in Mexico to my new 8gb PC and install CS3 on it. This was a version of CS3 that was on my previous PC that totally crashed a few months ago, and I thought I’d have trouble installing it because there’s some de-registration process you have to go through before you can put it on a new machine. If the old machine is broken, you can’t de-register it….
Still, I installed it and for some reason it seemed to work….
And as a bonus, when I captured all my footage, there were no jumps in it.
I’ve been worried for a while that my HDV camcorder was breaking down because I kept getting jumps appearing in my captured footage. It turns out that this was just because my PC (a 2gb dual core) was too slow (or maybe the disk drives I was capturing to or the firewire port I was importing through)…. Whatever, the problem seems to have been solved by simply getting a new PC.
Who’d have thought it would be that easy.
Just replace everything and suddenly it works.
Anyway, the problem this problem has been replaced by is that the new PC keeps randomly crashing after it’s been on a few hours…. Hmmm… don’t like the sound of that.
Still, I did manage to edit together the interviews I took at Jake the digger’s wedding and upload them to youtube for him. Not actually work, but it did allow me to make sure everything was working on the new system before I had to do any critical editing work!
Friday, November 7, 2008
Just back from Mexico, and it looks like I've got a new documentary to make...
As I type this I'm somewhere over the Atlantic on the way to Mexico to see the animation I've put together for the brand new trilobite museum in Cancun... and it doesn't look like the journey I started in a taxi at 4:30am is going to be an easy one. The clerk at check in looked through my travel itinerary and shook his head "you should change your travel agent" he said.
Anyway, the flight information boards weren’t working so Heathrow was full of bleary eyed passengers wandering aimlessly about, but after a change of plain and some trouble with the doors, we finally left 2 hours late. Meaning the trek across Washington to get my connecting flight from a different airport is probably going to be in vain.
It looks like I'll miss my flight and I've no idea how I'll get t Cancun. Given that I'm supposed to have a meeting as soon as I arrive, things are looking a little tricky. Oh,, and the flights are with different airlines so my current carrier will probably wash their hands of me in Washington.
The airline as always forgot I was a vegetarian, but as always, they found something for me anyway. Consequently breakfast was a Muslim meal. Hurrah for religious inclusive.
Monday
I'm very impressed with United Airlines. They didn’t abandon me in Washington. As soon as I found their counter they looked for the first way to get me to Cancun, quickly realised it wouldn't be until tomorrow, put me up in a hotel, got me a meal voucher and organised a cab to get me back to the airport for my 6am flight the following morning.
I'd have expected this if I'd been flying United all the way, but my connection was with a different carrier in a different airport, so the fact that they just dealt with it without hassle was a welcome surprise.
Customs was a bit odd - the guy took my passport and papers made me scan my fingerprint and have my photo taken and then handed everything back to me. A few minutes later in the toilet while waiting for my bags, the same officer approached me and asked to see my passport again. I opened it and it was someone else’s. I checked my pockets and found I was carrying my passport as well.
The guy must have kept the previous visitor's passport and handed it to me along with my own... for all I know he's also registered my photo and fingerprint on her details or vice versa...
Anyway, I thought I might wander over to the Smithsonian while I was in town... but this is America and nobody wanders anywhere. The hotel was far from the centre and all I managed to do was have a nice dinner in the restaurant and go to bed at about 8pm in time for my 3:30 wake up call.
I did turn the news on for the latest on the election and saw an unsettled looking McCain protesting that his campaign was still viable... It looks like Obama will win - which looks like a surprisingly good choice by the voters... I flicked through a few other news channels - I think my hotel was for businessmen as it only seemed to have news (and pay per view porn).
I thought the Simpson's newsreader, Kent Brockman was a caricature, but he's pretty representative of US journalism from what I saw.
From Washington to a very cold Chicago on an early flight, and then a connection to Cancun. Chicago airport is huge - big enough to make a good home for a Brachiosaurus - the tallest, heaviest dinosaur known. I can say this with a fair degree of confidence because there's one - or at least the full size replica skeleton of one - standing in the arrivals hall. Very impressive. it's an advert for the museum which also houses Sue - the world's most complete (and expensive) Trex.
The epic scale is even more in evidence outside. On the way in, we seemed to taxi for ages. And because I had a window seat, I could see we made a complete circuit of the huge airport, joining a long traffic jam of planes. Eventually our sarcastic pilot gave us the reason. New contracts had meant all the air traffic control staff had left, so the airport was in the hands of trainees who didn't know their way around the place.
For miles outside Chigago. the landscape is gridded. Sliced by perfectly straight roads into identically sized squares. Each square is given over to something different - a farm, a housing area, a car park, but they're all identically sized and they extend out of Chicago for miles... there seems to be nothing truly wild in this landscape - even as the towns give way to countryside, it's still just squares of different crops all the way out until you reach the messy border between land and water that I assume is the Mississippi delta.
I was met at the airport by the brand new wife of enrico through who I've been mainly working on the animation and the very soon to be wife of Jake the American Fossil hunter. Their wedding will take place apparently at Carlo's new hotel complex in five days time.
We drove out of Cancun to the resort and trilobite museum and I quickly realised what a project Carlo was involved in. The resort is far from finished. In fact the main lobby is pretty much a building site.
As for the museum, it's being worked on constantly by Jake, Enrico and their partners - who seem to have been completely sucked into the project. Enrico I'm told has barely left the museum all week.
The museum itself is not huge. It would take about 2 minutes to walk through, or 15 if you stopped and read everything. Nevertheless, it contains probably the best collection of trilobite fossils in the world.
Enrico is tall, Italian and the intellectual of the group. Jake is a cross between Indiana Jones and a Hollywood dealmaker, who travels the world unearthing and selling fossils, working with museums and private collectors like Carlo.
Carlo soon put in an appearance. He's quite a character, who lives with both feet on the accelerator and everyone around him is sucked into the vortex of whatever project he thinks up next. When Carlo wants to do something, I'm told it gets done - and I don't doubt it.
I've got a lot of time for people like that, but I realise that they can be dangerous too... You have to be careful not to loose sight of your own needs in their enthusiasm. but it's hard not to respect someone who's seen an alligator infested swamp smelling of bad eggs and built paradise there.
It's not eco friendly but you've got to admire his vision.
This is his third hotel complex. I'm staying in his second - just down the beach - it's an all inclusive luxury resort with fine dining and free drinks served by "beach butlers" Nice.
what's Carlo got planned for me? well, he's got an idea for a documentary series which basically involves visiting the world's most significant fossil beds on a series of five day expeditions. The three of them certainly have the characters to turn this into an interesting series, but it's a big project and my part in it would be demanding....
In the evening we all went into Cancun town - about half an hour's drive through the foul smelling swamp. Carlo took us to a steak house (I don't think he'd understand vegetarianism) but they did tuna steaks (very well). As an initiation the men all had to eat whole chillies. Oh joy.
it’s clear to me that Jake, Enrico and Carlo's partners (who are all with us) have become very involved - they all seem to have been digging in deserts despite the fact that none have chosen palaeontology as their passion.
Later we had tequila back at the resort before finally falling into bed at 12~30... a long day which didn't stop me waking up at 3 next morning.
Tuesday
Carlo meets us for breakfast at 8 and we're taken back to the museum to talk more. Carlo is spending a lot of time with us considering he's got a wedding in his unfinished hotel in five days (he's not only hosting, he's also the padre)
He's as busy as you'd expect but seems to take it all in his stride. I don't think this is going to be a relaxing break....
_
Ok, it looks like this documentary is going ahead. 2 weeks in February we're heading for Vegas - or at least the desert around Vegas. "What Carlo wants, Carlo gets" is a phrase I hear a lot around here. Carlo is an Italian who turned up in Cancun 15 years ago to open a dive shop. He's certainly done well for himself.
At lunch we ordered a dish which wasn't on the menu - called, in typical style, pasta Kier (Carlo's surname). It’s actually a traditional Italian dish, only with far more chillies (because if you don't eat very hot food you're not a "real man").
In the meantime, Guests are starting to gather for the wedding. First, a surfer dude and his girlfriend appear. They fit the stereotype so well that it's hard to believe I'm not watching one of those Californian beach movies. When I say I've never skied they look at me as if I must be from another planet. Still, they're nice enough.
Later, Dave the preparer turns up. A retired teacher, Dave's the guy who turns the finds from marks in the rock into beautiful intricate fossils. He spends his time with a .1mm sandblaster carving away the rock to reveal the creature within it. It's somewhere between dentistry and sculpture. He lives next door to Alaska and smokes his own salmon.
I hope Dave can be in the film. He’ll bring some careful sanity to proceedings.
Enrico and his wife should have flown back to Belgium but their plane was delayed so they joined us for dinner. The restaurant we ate at had three different menus - one serving only lobster. Mine was a stew in which pieces of bacon appeared unannounced (I of course ate them anyway - out of a mixture of politeness and the fact that it tasted good).
Wednesday
I suggested a few ideas for the film to Carlo and one of them involved a pre-expedition meeting. Carlo decided instantly that today would be the best time to start filming... I guess that was predictable.
He found me a tripod and two extra cameras, but then was so busy we couldn't actually have the meeting. I'm not unhappy because the museum is so noisy with all the building works and its acoustics so bad that with my one microphone, covering a meeting would be very tough.
Anyway, I now have to think of what I can shoot while I'm here without relying on Carlo - or at least by taking into account the fact that he's only ever around randomly (and at mealtimes).
It turns out Carlo 15 years ago bought up a whole strip of swamp along the coast at next to nothing. Now he owns a string of hotels. the new one has 500 rooms and there are 400 people working on site in the run-up to opening. However, his office contains two desks and a computer - and he's rarely there. He seems to run the whole show from an iphone. He's involved at every level from installing the lighting to putting the pictures up.
More guests are arriving for the wedding all the time. The free bar is taking its toll of most of them. Enrico and his wife made their way reluctantly to the airport last night. It's a shame I couldn't have done any filming of him, but it'll work out somehow.
Thursday
The meeting still hasn't happened, and with the wedding approaching it's looking less likely. There are too many agendas around here already without me trying to have one too. I've abandoned trying to organise things for a policy of simply taking the camera everywhere and being prepared for whatever happens.
So I managed to film a little of Dave repairing some of the specimens that were damaged in the building site that is the hotel.
The hotel is pretty much finished now - the roof did cave in in the morning and there was water dripping from the light fittings, but by the afternoon it was all repaired and the wedding guests moved in.
Jake's business partner turned up too – Jason, another digger who will probably be on the expedition. He explained to me over dinner that he has very dense bones so needs to eat a lot. mind you, he'd drunk a lot too by then.
Dinner was in the brand new restaurant in the brand new resort, and the chef was doing his first service - 60 guests all appearing at once, so there was no menu - spaghetti carbonara for everyone. I ate it - after all, in Italian meat cut up small counts as vegetarian food... besides, I too have dense bones.
I also met Jake's Dad. I liked him a lot despite the fact that he's a rampant republican and supports America’s foreign policy. We had quite a political discussion - mainly about American healthcare (he's an anesthesiologist).
I'm missing Lisa and George a lot. Everyone here knows everyone else and although they're doing their best to include me, I end up as a spare part a lot of the time.
Friday
Went for a snorkel in the morning, but there wasn't much to see. Then I walked over to the new resort along the beach. Between the two complexes is a third which was built by Carlo and then sold to another company. It's now called Desire and is a naturist/swingers resort. The beach was lined with fat naked Americans.
Grabbed an interview with Carlo in the museum. There's still a lot of noise going on there but I think it may be usable. I also managed to interview Jake, but the meeting I really want to cover looks as unlikely as ever.
Later I was moved over to the newly opened complex. My new room has a hot tub and a large screen TV. However, the TV isn't connected yet and neither is the hot water. The restaurants here are just running in too so they don't have choices, just set meals, and there's nowhere else to go, the resort is surrounded by mangrove swamps. I've come to the conclusion that it's not viable to be vegetarian here. If I want to eat, I have to eat what I'm given.
The evening is Jake's stag night, which involves Jason, his digging partner ordering tequila and whiskey shots throughout the night. whilst watching a display of world dancing in the Mohita lounge and listening to a band of big hatted Mexicans playing La bomba around our table at the Tapas restaurant
I'm not 25 anymore and I can see where this is going and rather than argue, I quickly pour each tequila shot away before the toast is drunk. Consequently I remain relatively sober. Which is lucky because when most of the party disappear off to the Desire camp, I remain behind and help Dave and his wife get Jason who's completely drunk by now despite his dense bones back to his hotel room (where his key doesn't work, so I have to get him a new one.
The new resort is clearly having a few teething problems, but not any more than you'd expect. My alarm clock goes off at 3am and again hat half past. I eventually pull its plug out.
Saturday
The day of the wedding. There's not a lot going on around the site today. The problems with the water have persisted and almost everyone seems to be having trouble.
I eventually get an interview with the dense boned Jason who comes from a family of trilobite diggers. The meeting with Carlo hasn't taken place and I'm loosing hope that it will.
The wedding itself takes place on the roof of one of the apartment blocks as the sun goes down. Carlo is the padre and Jake and Stacy are duly married. It's actually a sweet ceremony which seems to take place without anyone getting stressed or apparently organising anything.
Afterwards we have drinks on the beach accompanied by the Mexican band and for some reason a donkey which the Americans take turns in being photographed next to wearing big hats.
The tables at the reception were of course different trilobites. Carlo explains that the open area the reception was held in was going to be a garden until he went out and drew a large circle in the ground . I get the feeling that much of the architect's plans for the place were revised on the fly by Carlo. He tells me that by being involved in every level of the hotel he saved $27,000,000 on the price.
I grab video messages from thee guests for the couple - which I'll have to edit later, then grab a whiskey with Dave and his wife before going to bed.
Sunday
At breakfast I meet Jake’s Dad, the Rampant republican again. It turns out that he's not too convinced by global warming. However. I'm surprised to find he does humanitarian work in Peru. He's an anesthesiologist and helps out in hospitals there every year.
I'm determined to make this planning meeting for the vegas trip happen before I leave. if the film is going to work it'll be a useful starting point. Carlo has said he'll make some time this morning, but there's a problem. The water is off again and it turns out there's something big wrong with the whole water system for the entire resort. The system can't handle the 150 guests here now, and they're booked for 400 by the end of the year. Carlo is in meetings with plumbers.
In the end I pretty much give up, and start grabbing interviews with people about how things seem to get done without prior planning. Carlo, it appears just says "let's go" and everyone goes.
That’s one thing about documentary making – there’s a conflict between shooting what you think is what’s happening and shooting what does actually happen. Part of me says that there must be planning for a trip like this, and I ought to film it. The other part says if they’re not organising a meeting, trying to set one up is false – maybe there is no plan and trying to create one is my doing…
Eventually with about half an hour to go before I leave, Carlo turns up and we have the meeting. However, it's a little forced - possibly because it’s not a meeting they’d normally have – possibly not…
I say my goodbyes and get a cab to the airport. When I get there I find my watch is wrong and Carlo's estimation of check in times is a little optimistic. Check-in is closed. I'm half an hour late and have to run for my plane. I'm less than surprised. Order is the Mexican word for Chaos.
I end up getting my holiday gifts from Chicago airport – I’ve gone the whole week without finding a shop that sells anything.
by the way, didn't all aeroplanes used to provide sick bags? They don't now – not that I need one, but did air sickness just disappear when everyone started taking regular flights? Was it a psychological thing that we all just got over suddenly when everyone stopped talking about it?
Back home
Back home, I arrive at the airport to meet Lisa and George. It’s lovely to see them both again. George seems pleased to see me – I’d wondered if he’d take a while to remember who I was, but he knows immediately.
Lisa has had a busy week, and she’s been feeling ill too. I’ve been busy, but it feels like time off – she needs some now.
The prospect of the Vegas trip seems to have gone down well – since while I’m breaking stones and sleeping in the freezing desert, she, George and Sam are going to live it up on the Vegas strip.
A couple of days later, and I’m back into the swing of work. I’ve got one big deadline – an animation of Stafford Castle – but there are another two or three waiting in the wings. That said, things aren’t nearly as busy as they were before I went and soon, I hope to have things a little more balanced.
When I heard the news that Obama had been elected, US president, it was mostly a feeling of relief – pretty much as I guess the rest of the world was feeling. But later on, watching the news, it was really quite moving. The general point of most of the coverage was that this is something even the republicans will eventually feel proud of – that America is a different country now. I think of Jake’s Dad. I don’t think he’ll be feeling proud just now. Maybe in a few years.
Anyway, the flight information boards weren’t working so Heathrow was full of bleary eyed passengers wandering aimlessly about, but after a change of plain and some trouble with the doors, we finally left 2 hours late. Meaning the trek across Washington to get my connecting flight from a different airport is probably going to be in vain.
It looks like I'll miss my flight and I've no idea how I'll get t Cancun. Given that I'm supposed to have a meeting as soon as I arrive, things are looking a little tricky. Oh,, and the flights are with different airlines so my current carrier will probably wash their hands of me in Washington.
The airline as always forgot I was a vegetarian, but as always, they found something for me anyway. Consequently breakfast was a Muslim meal. Hurrah for religious inclusive.
Monday
I'm very impressed with United Airlines. They didn’t abandon me in Washington. As soon as I found their counter they looked for the first way to get me to Cancun, quickly realised it wouldn't be until tomorrow, put me up in a hotel, got me a meal voucher and organised a cab to get me back to the airport for my 6am flight the following morning.
I'd have expected this if I'd been flying United all the way, but my connection was with a different carrier in a different airport, so the fact that they just dealt with it without hassle was a welcome surprise.
Customs was a bit odd - the guy took my passport and papers made me scan my fingerprint and have my photo taken and then handed everything back to me. A few minutes later in the toilet while waiting for my bags, the same officer approached me and asked to see my passport again. I opened it and it was someone else’s. I checked my pockets and found I was carrying my passport as well.
The guy must have kept the previous visitor's passport and handed it to me along with my own... for all I know he's also registered my photo and fingerprint on her details or vice versa...
Anyway, I thought I might wander over to the Smithsonian while I was in town... but this is America and nobody wanders anywhere. The hotel was far from the centre and all I managed to do was have a nice dinner in the restaurant and go to bed at about 8pm in time for my 3:30 wake up call.
I did turn the news on for the latest on the election and saw an unsettled looking McCain protesting that his campaign was still viable... It looks like Obama will win - which looks like a surprisingly good choice by the voters... I flicked through a few other news channels - I think my hotel was for businessmen as it only seemed to have news (and pay per view porn).
I thought the Simpson's newsreader, Kent Brockman was a caricature, but he's pretty representative of US journalism from what I saw.
From Washington to a very cold Chicago on an early flight, and then a connection to Cancun. Chicago airport is huge - big enough to make a good home for a Brachiosaurus - the tallest, heaviest dinosaur known. I can say this with a fair degree of confidence because there's one - or at least the full size replica skeleton of one - standing in the arrivals hall. Very impressive. it's an advert for the museum which also houses Sue - the world's most complete (and expensive) Trex.
The epic scale is even more in evidence outside. On the way in, we seemed to taxi for ages. And because I had a window seat, I could see we made a complete circuit of the huge airport, joining a long traffic jam of planes. Eventually our sarcastic pilot gave us the reason. New contracts had meant all the air traffic control staff had left, so the airport was in the hands of trainees who didn't know their way around the place.
For miles outside Chigago. the landscape is gridded. Sliced by perfectly straight roads into identically sized squares. Each square is given over to something different - a farm, a housing area, a car park, but they're all identically sized and they extend out of Chicago for miles... there seems to be nothing truly wild in this landscape - even as the towns give way to countryside, it's still just squares of different crops all the way out until you reach the messy border between land and water that I assume is the Mississippi delta.
I was met at the airport by the brand new wife of enrico through who I've been mainly working on the animation and the very soon to be wife of Jake the American Fossil hunter. Their wedding will take place apparently at Carlo's new hotel complex in five days time.
We drove out of Cancun to the resort and trilobite museum and I quickly realised what a project Carlo was involved in. The resort is far from finished. In fact the main lobby is pretty much a building site.
As for the museum, it's being worked on constantly by Jake, Enrico and their partners - who seem to have been completely sucked into the project. Enrico I'm told has barely left the museum all week.
The museum itself is not huge. It would take about 2 minutes to walk through, or 15 if you stopped and read everything. Nevertheless, it contains probably the best collection of trilobite fossils in the world.
Enrico is tall, Italian and the intellectual of the group. Jake is a cross between Indiana Jones and a Hollywood dealmaker, who travels the world unearthing and selling fossils, working with museums and private collectors like Carlo.
Carlo soon put in an appearance. He's quite a character, who lives with both feet on the accelerator and everyone around him is sucked into the vortex of whatever project he thinks up next. When Carlo wants to do something, I'm told it gets done - and I don't doubt it.
I've got a lot of time for people like that, but I realise that they can be dangerous too... You have to be careful not to loose sight of your own needs in their enthusiasm. but it's hard not to respect someone who's seen an alligator infested swamp smelling of bad eggs and built paradise there.
It's not eco friendly but you've got to admire his vision.
This is his third hotel complex. I'm staying in his second - just down the beach - it's an all inclusive luxury resort with fine dining and free drinks served by "beach butlers" Nice.
what's Carlo got planned for me? well, he's got an idea for a documentary series which basically involves visiting the world's most significant fossil beds on a series of five day expeditions. The three of them certainly have the characters to turn this into an interesting series, but it's a big project and my part in it would be demanding....
In the evening we all went into Cancun town - about half an hour's drive through the foul smelling swamp. Carlo took us to a steak house (I don't think he'd understand vegetarianism) but they did tuna steaks (very well). As an initiation the men all had to eat whole chillies. Oh joy.
it’s clear to me that Jake, Enrico and Carlo's partners (who are all with us) have become very involved - they all seem to have been digging in deserts despite the fact that none have chosen palaeontology as their passion.
Later we had tequila back at the resort before finally falling into bed at 12~30... a long day which didn't stop me waking up at 3 next morning.
Tuesday
Carlo meets us for breakfast at 8 and we're taken back to the museum to talk more. Carlo is spending a lot of time with us considering he's got a wedding in his unfinished hotel in five days (he's not only hosting, he's also the padre)
He's as busy as you'd expect but seems to take it all in his stride. I don't think this is going to be a relaxing break....
_
Ok, it looks like this documentary is going ahead. 2 weeks in February we're heading for Vegas - or at least the desert around Vegas. "What Carlo wants, Carlo gets" is a phrase I hear a lot around here. Carlo is an Italian who turned up in Cancun 15 years ago to open a dive shop. He's certainly done well for himself.
At lunch we ordered a dish which wasn't on the menu - called, in typical style, pasta Kier (Carlo's surname). It’s actually a traditional Italian dish, only with far more chillies (because if you don't eat very hot food you're not a "real man").
In the meantime, Guests are starting to gather for the wedding. First, a surfer dude and his girlfriend appear. They fit the stereotype so well that it's hard to believe I'm not watching one of those Californian beach movies. When I say I've never skied they look at me as if I must be from another planet. Still, they're nice enough.
Later, Dave the preparer turns up. A retired teacher, Dave's the guy who turns the finds from marks in the rock into beautiful intricate fossils. He spends his time with a .1mm sandblaster carving away the rock to reveal the creature within it. It's somewhere between dentistry and sculpture. He lives next door to Alaska and smokes his own salmon.
I hope Dave can be in the film. He’ll bring some careful sanity to proceedings.
Enrico and his wife should have flown back to Belgium but their plane was delayed so they joined us for dinner. The restaurant we ate at had three different menus - one serving only lobster. Mine was a stew in which pieces of bacon appeared unannounced (I of course ate them anyway - out of a mixture of politeness and the fact that it tasted good).
Wednesday
I suggested a few ideas for the film to Carlo and one of them involved a pre-expedition meeting. Carlo decided instantly that today would be the best time to start filming... I guess that was predictable.
He found me a tripod and two extra cameras, but then was so busy we couldn't actually have the meeting. I'm not unhappy because the museum is so noisy with all the building works and its acoustics so bad that with my one microphone, covering a meeting would be very tough.
Anyway, I now have to think of what I can shoot while I'm here without relying on Carlo - or at least by taking into account the fact that he's only ever around randomly (and at mealtimes).
It turns out Carlo 15 years ago bought up a whole strip of swamp along the coast at next to nothing. Now he owns a string of hotels. the new one has 500 rooms and there are 400 people working on site in the run-up to opening. However, his office contains two desks and a computer - and he's rarely there. He seems to run the whole show from an iphone. He's involved at every level from installing the lighting to putting the pictures up.
More guests are arriving for the wedding all the time. The free bar is taking its toll of most of them. Enrico and his wife made their way reluctantly to the airport last night. It's a shame I couldn't have done any filming of him, but it'll work out somehow.
Thursday
The meeting still hasn't happened, and with the wedding approaching it's looking less likely. There are too many agendas around here already without me trying to have one too. I've abandoned trying to organise things for a policy of simply taking the camera everywhere and being prepared for whatever happens.
So I managed to film a little of Dave repairing some of the specimens that were damaged in the building site that is the hotel.
The hotel is pretty much finished now - the roof did cave in in the morning and there was water dripping from the light fittings, but by the afternoon it was all repaired and the wedding guests moved in.
Jake's business partner turned up too – Jason, another digger who will probably be on the expedition. He explained to me over dinner that he has very dense bones so needs to eat a lot. mind you, he'd drunk a lot too by then.
Dinner was in the brand new restaurant in the brand new resort, and the chef was doing his first service - 60 guests all appearing at once, so there was no menu - spaghetti carbonara for everyone. I ate it - after all, in Italian meat cut up small counts as vegetarian food... besides, I too have dense bones.
I also met Jake's Dad. I liked him a lot despite the fact that he's a rampant republican and supports America’s foreign policy. We had quite a political discussion - mainly about American healthcare (he's an anesthesiologist).
I'm missing Lisa and George a lot. Everyone here knows everyone else and although they're doing their best to include me, I end up as a spare part a lot of the time.
Friday
Went for a snorkel in the morning, but there wasn't much to see. Then I walked over to the new resort along the beach. Between the two complexes is a third which was built by Carlo and then sold to another company. It's now called Desire and is a naturist/swingers resort. The beach was lined with fat naked Americans.
Grabbed an interview with Carlo in the museum. There's still a lot of noise going on there but I think it may be usable. I also managed to interview Jake, but the meeting I really want to cover looks as unlikely as ever.
Later I was moved over to the newly opened complex. My new room has a hot tub and a large screen TV. However, the TV isn't connected yet and neither is the hot water. The restaurants here are just running in too so they don't have choices, just set meals, and there's nowhere else to go, the resort is surrounded by mangrove swamps. I've come to the conclusion that it's not viable to be vegetarian here. If I want to eat, I have to eat what I'm given.
The evening is Jake's stag night, which involves Jason, his digging partner ordering tequila and whiskey shots throughout the night. whilst watching a display of world dancing in the Mohita lounge and listening to a band of big hatted Mexicans playing La bomba around our table at the Tapas restaurant
I'm not 25 anymore and I can see where this is going and rather than argue, I quickly pour each tequila shot away before the toast is drunk. Consequently I remain relatively sober. Which is lucky because when most of the party disappear off to the Desire camp, I remain behind and help Dave and his wife get Jason who's completely drunk by now despite his dense bones back to his hotel room (where his key doesn't work, so I have to get him a new one.
The new resort is clearly having a few teething problems, but not any more than you'd expect. My alarm clock goes off at 3am and again hat half past. I eventually pull its plug out.
Saturday
The day of the wedding. There's not a lot going on around the site today. The problems with the water have persisted and almost everyone seems to be having trouble.
I eventually get an interview with the dense boned Jason who comes from a family of trilobite diggers. The meeting with Carlo hasn't taken place and I'm loosing hope that it will.
The wedding itself takes place on the roof of one of the apartment blocks as the sun goes down. Carlo is the padre and Jake and Stacy are duly married. It's actually a sweet ceremony which seems to take place without anyone getting stressed or apparently organising anything.
Afterwards we have drinks on the beach accompanied by the Mexican band and for some reason a donkey which the Americans take turns in being photographed next to wearing big hats.
The tables at the reception were of course different trilobites. Carlo explains that the open area the reception was held in was going to be a garden until he went out and drew a large circle in the ground . I get the feeling that much of the architect's plans for the place were revised on the fly by Carlo. He tells me that by being involved in every level of the hotel he saved $27,000,000 on the price.
I grab video messages from thee guests for the couple - which I'll have to edit later, then grab a whiskey with Dave and his wife before going to bed.
Sunday
At breakfast I meet Jake’s Dad, the Rampant republican again. It turns out that he's not too convinced by global warming. However. I'm surprised to find he does humanitarian work in Peru. He's an anesthesiologist and helps out in hospitals there every year.
I'm determined to make this planning meeting for the vegas trip happen before I leave. if the film is going to work it'll be a useful starting point. Carlo has said he'll make some time this morning, but there's a problem. The water is off again and it turns out there's something big wrong with the whole water system for the entire resort. The system can't handle the 150 guests here now, and they're booked for 400 by the end of the year. Carlo is in meetings with plumbers.
In the end I pretty much give up, and start grabbing interviews with people about how things seem to get done without prior planning. Carlo, it appears just says "let's go" and everyone goes.
That’s one thing about documentary making – there’s a conflict between shooting what you think is what’s happening and shooting what does actually happen. Part of me says that there must be planning for a trip like this, and I ought to film it. The other part says if they’re not organising a meeting, trying to set one up is false – maybe there is no plan and trying to create one is my doing…
Eventually with about half an hour to go before I leave, Carlo turns up and we have the meeting. However, it's a little forced - possibly because it’s not a meeting they’d normally have – possibly not…
I say my goodbyes and get a cab to the airport. When I get there I find my watch is wrong and Carlo's estimation of check in times is a little optimistic. Check-in is closed. I'm half an hour late and have to run for my plane. I'm less than surprised. Order is the Mexican word for Chaos.
I end up getting my holiday gifts from Chicago airport – I’ve gone the whole week without finding a shop that sells anything.
by the way, didn't all aeroplanes used to provide sick bags? They don't now – not that I need one, but did air sickness just disappear when everyone started taking regular flights? Was it a psychological thing that we all just got over suddenly when everyone stopped talking about it?
Back home
Back home, I arrive at the airport to meet Lisa and George. It’s lovely to see them both again. George seems pleased to see me – I’d wondered if he’d take a while to remember who I was, but he knows immediately.
Lisa has had a busy week, and she’s been feeling ill too. I’ve been busy, but it feels like time off – she needs some now.
The prospect of the Vegas trip seems to have gone down well – since while I’m breaking stones and sleeping in the freezing desert, she, George and Sam are going to live it up on the Vegas strip.
A couple of days later, and I’m back into the swing of work. I’ve got one big deadline – an animation of Stafford Castle – but there are another two or three waiting in the wings. That said, things aren’t nearly as busy as they were before I went and soon, I hope to have things a little more balanced.
When I heard the news that Obama had been elected, US president, it was mostly a feeling of relief – pretty much as I guess the rest of the world was feeling. But later on, watching the news, it was really quite moving. The general point of most of the coverage was that this is something even the republicans will eventually feel proud of – that America is a different country now. I think of Jake’s Dad. I don’t think he’ll be feeling proud just now. Maybe in a few years.
Friday, October 24, 2008
A day later, and the half a day of extra work has turned into a day – I’ve wrestled with getting the video into a format I can upload for the clients to see (the ‘real’ version is 2.8gb and even the compressed one is 450mb and that’s too large even for the large file sending sites – or at least the free ones). I tried one that claimed to be able to do it, but after uploading throughout the night, it had only reached 69%, so that’s not going to work.
The only solution is to take a physical version with me when I go to Mexico and post a really low quality version in the meantime. And that in itself is time consuming.
Plus, of course, they’re a different TV system and a different DVD region so I’ll have to carry multiple versions just to be sure of getting something that will work.
I’m going to take a DVD in Pal, and one in NTSC, a mpg version on a memory stick and a DV AVI on a DVD rom – that should cover it!
Still, I managed to get a few things tidied up in preparation for going to Mexico on Sunday – always, there’s the thought that I’ve probably forgotten something…
The only solution is to take a physical version with me when I go to Mexico and post a really low quality version in the meantime. And that in itself is time consuming.
Plus, of course, they’re a different TV system and a different DVD region so I’ll have to carry multiple versions just to be sure of getting something that will work.
I’m going to take a DVD in Pal, and one in NTSC, a mpg version on a memory stick and a DV AVI on a DVD rom – that should cover it!
Still, I managed to get a few things tidied up in preparation for going to Mexico on Sunday – always, there’s the thought that I’ve probably forgotten something…
It’s always the same – every project has that annoying last few days where everything’s in place and all you want to do is write it to a disk and get it out the door. Unfortunately, the more you look at it the more you see wrong with it. Tiny little errors creep in, things you either hadn’t noticed before, or had thought you could easily solve suddenly become time consuming and unsolvable.
Well, it’s that day for the trilobite animation. The deadline is close (I’d hoped to get it finished yesterday, but the real deadline is the weekend when I have to take it to Mexico).
Putting the voiceover in turned out to be a problem – I think my camcorder really does have a problem with it. Bits of audio keep disappearing and it’s only because I got the voiceover artist to record everything twice that I’ve got the script covered.
But also, there’s a recurring problem with bands of colour on my animations – they only seem to occur when I’m trying to do underwater scenes and there are large areas of empty ocean fading down into the darkness – and I think it’s got something to do with only having a limited number of shades of blue available on a TV screen.
Anyway, there’s also a problem with the depth of field effect I’ve used in After Effects – it doesn’t handle the edges of areas with different focus very well – and there’s a problem with flickering on some of the animations.
I’ve solved this by adding a slight grain to the image – which has the advantage of softening the CGI and making the whole thing a little grittier.
Also, there’s the old problem that Premiere won’t export more than a couple of minutes of finished work at a time, so I have to compile it in sections.
All of which adds up to about a day of extra work that I didn’t think I’d have to do. Luckily I’ve got that day in hand because I’ve scheduled everything with a bit of space.
The trouble with all this is that it focuses you on the bad points of your work and you end up not being able to appreciate the quality of what you’ve done. You feel disappointed with it and it seems to be rather tatty round the edges – despite the fact that looked at with fresh eyes, it looks really good.
Well, it’s that day for the trilobite animation. The deadline is close (I’d hoped to get it finished yesterday, but the real deadline is the weekend when I have to take it to Mexico).
Putting the voiceover in turned out to be a problem – I think my camcorder really does have a problem with it. Bits of audio keep disappearing and it’s only because I got the voiceover artist to record everything twice that I’ve got the script covered.
But also, there’s a recurring problem with bands of colour on my animations – they only seem to occur when I’m trying to do underwater scenes and there are large areas of empty ocean fading down into the darkness – and I think it’s got something to do with only having a limited number of shades of blue available on a TV screen.
Anyway, there’s also a problem with the depth of field effect I’ve used in After Effects – it doesn’t handle the edges of areas with different focus very well – and there’s a problem with flickering on some of the animations.
I’ve solved this by adding a slight grain to the image – which has the advantage of softening the CGI and making the whole thing a little grittier.
Also, there’s the old problem that Premiere won’t export more than a couple of minutes of finished work at a time, so I have to compile it in sections.
All of which adds up to about a day of extra work that I didn’t think I’d have to do. Luckily I’ve got that day in hand because I’ve scheduled everything with a bit of space.
The trouble with all this is that it focuses you on the bad points of your work and you end up not being able to appreciate the quality of what you’ve done. You feel disappointed with it and it seems to be rather tatty round the edges – despite the fact that looked at with fresh eyes, it looks really good.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
I’m now coming to the end of the trilobite animation – the voiceover was done last night and I just need to cut it into the video, tidy things up, add sound effects and polish up the whole project. Ok- that sounds like a lot, but it’s not too bad – the thing was well planned shot by shot before we started.
At the end of last week I did the first edit and located all the shots that didn’t quite work. I managed to spend time on Friday re-doing those shots and got the render farm going on them over the weekend. I’ve now sort of tracked down the problems with the rendering (machines kept disappearing from the rendering, and sitting around doing nothing). I’ve not solved the problem properly, but I’ve realised that if I turn the computers on in the right order, they generally work OK!
Anyway, by cutting the rendering resolution from High Definition to standard definition, I seem to have reduced render times hugely (by 10 or 20 times strangely – I was only expecting 4 times shorter renders). It’s a bit of a disappointment having to do it, but it has meant that I can re-do shots if they go wrong and I have time to add in extra shots if I need to so the advantages outweigh the problems.
I’ve also managed to spend some time re-doing shots for the yacht safety video animation (which does have to be done in HD) and that’s rendering now.
Because the last couple of months have been so hectic I haven’t turned back on my advertising on Google, so I’m not actively looking for new work. What that means is that when I get back from Mexico, I’ve got an animation for a castle in Stafford, two newsletters and an article for PC plus to do at the beginning of Novermber, and another animation waiting in the wings which may or may not happen.
In addition, I want to finish off my long-awaited documentary on space travel, look into making a children’s animated series and switch all my work from my current overloaded computer to the shiny new 8gb quad core machine currently rendering my animations.
At the end of last week I did the first edit and located all the shots that didn’t quite work. I managed to spend time on Friday re-doing those shots and got the render farm going on them over the weekend. I’ve now sort of tracked down the problems with the rendering (machines kept disappearing from the rendering, and sitting around doing nothing). I’ve not solved the problem properly, but I’ve realised that if I turn the computers on in the right order, they generally work OK!
Anyway, by cutting the rendering resolution from High Definition to standard definition, I seem to have reduced render times hugely (by 10 or 20 times strangely – I was only expecting 4 times shorter renders). It’s a bit of a disappointment having to do it, but it has meant that I can re-do shots if they go wrong and I have time to add in extra shots if I need to so the advantages outweigh the problems.
I’ve also managed to spend some time re-doing shots for the yacht safety video animation (which does have to be done in HD) and that’s rendering now.
Because the last couple of months have been so hectic I haven’t turned back on my advertising on Google, so I’m not actively looking for new work. What that means is that when I get back from Mexico, I’ve got an animation for a castle in Stafford, two newsletters and an article for PC plus to do at the beginning of Novermber, and another animation waiting in the wings which may or may not happen.
In addition, I want to finish off my long-awaited documentary on space travel, look into making a children’s animated series and switch all my work from my current overloaded computer to the shiny new 8gb quad core machine currently rendering my animations.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Work is frantic – trying to get the trilobite animation finished in time to take it to Mexico for the opening (I’m leaving on the 26th) is quite a job – mainly because I’m being very fussy about getting it right.
Well, actually it’s because it’s so long (10 minutes of animation) and complex (trilobites have many many animated legs!) and has to be scientifically accurate.
However, I’m getting there and I think it’s going to be really good.
I’ve had to down-size the rendering – even though I’ve now got 3 dual core pcs and 2 quad core machines working on the rendering. I’ve gone from HD to SD video – mainly because I know they’re not going to show it in HD and I was just doing HD to give them the option in the future.
SD feels very low resolution now, but it’s solved my rendering problems – what was going to take 20 days was done over a weekend!
I’m now at the stage of choosing music and writing the script – I’ve gone for the blue Danube which gives the whole thing a graceful, but unusual feel…
Well, actually it’s because it’s so long (10 minutes of animation) and complex (trilobites have many many animated legs!) and has to be scientifically accurate.
However, I’m getting there and I think it’s going to be really good.
I’ve had to down-size the rendering – even though I’ve now got 3 dual core pcs and 2 quad core machines working on the rendering. I’ve gone from HD to SD video – mainly because I know they’re not going to show it in HD and I was just doing HD to give them the option in the future.
SD feels very low resolution now, but it’s solved my rendering problems – what was going to take 20 days was done over a weekend!
I’m now at the stage of choosing music and writing the script – I’ve gone for the blue Danube which gives the whole thing a graceful, but unusual feel…
Thursday, October 2, 2008
having set up my new PCs, the render farm is having a few teething troubles. One or more computers in the network seem to be dropping off randomly so rendering isn't going as fast as it should.
I've also come to the conclusion that my schedule is impossibly tight for the trilobite animation. I've stripped it down a little. listing only those shots which are absolutely essential and concentrating on getting them rendering rather than working through the project scene by scene as I was doing.
hopefully there will be the chance to go back and finish off with some of my more interesting shots later, but I'm cutting it fine. I've just been contacted by the yacht people asking when the other project will be ready and I've proomised them something by early next week. in addition it's time to do the newsletter again and I've been given a small writing job by Computer Arts. This is something I can't turn down just now as I want to keep my hand in with the magazines.
All in all, I'm going to be doing overtime for the next couple of weeks. I'm not happy about that. but doing a couple of nights should make things more doable. Once my current projects are done I can relax the schedule a little, finish my documentary and look into developing the children's tv show I've just had an idea for....
Today I had to take most of the day out to go to the Avid offices in Pinewood studios for a meeting about the newsletter I'm writing. Most of it was stuff I already knew well, but it's always good to go to these things because it's the only chance you get to meet the people you're working for.
Pinewood seems to be about the only place in the UK you can still see people building things. There are carpenters, metalworkers, plaster of paris moulders, all busy building sets and props. In fact the site isn’t just a studio, it’s everything you need to make a movie – including the post production which is why I was there.
Our part of the complex was named Broccoli road – and went right past the Bond soundstage. You couldn’t see in though…
On the way back, my taxi driver gave out some free tips on the benefits of declaring yourself bankrupt… how to have £100,000 on credit cards and have them all wiped clean. He spoke from experience apparently.
Down on the farm
the render farm I'm setting up still isn't working properly. I'm coming to the conclusion that Backburner (the package you use to farm out jobs to each of the computers) isn't quite as bug-free as it should be. I'm slowly learning there are magic things you need to do before it will all work.
For example, you need to delete a certain file from the max installation on every machine. You also can't have computer names that begin with a number... when one machine is on, it throws others off the network... it's all a bit untidy.
On balance, of course, I'd rather have it than not have it, but I'm still not operating at full capacity.
That said, the rest of the project is going well - animations are coming along nicely and the clients seem very happy.
Looks like I'm paying a visit to Mexico in a few weeks for the grand unvieling...
I've also come to the conclusion that my schedule is impossibly tight for the trilobite animation. I've stripped it down a little. listing only those shots which are absolutely essential and concentrating on getting them rendering rather than working through the project scene by scene as I was doing.
hopefully there will be the chance to go back and finish off with some of my more interesting shots later, but I'm cutting it fine. I've just been contacted by the yacht people asking when the other project will be ready and I've proomised them something by early next week. in addition it's time to do the newsletter again and I've been given a small writing job by Computer Arts. This is something I can't turn down just now as I want to keep my hand in with the magazines.
All in all, I'm going to be doing overtime for the next couple of weeks. I'm not happy about that. but doing a couple of nights should make things more doable. Once my current projects are done I can relax the schedule a little, finish my documentary and look into developing the children's tv show I've just had an idea for....
Today I had to take most of the day out to go to the Avid offices in Pinewood studios for a meeting about the newsletter I'm writing. Most of it was stuff I already knew well, but it's always good to go to these things because it's the only chance you get to meet the people you're working for.
Pinewood seems to be about the only place in the UK you can still see people building things. There are carpenters, metalworkers, plaster of paris moulders, all busy building sets and props. In fact the site isn’t just a studio, it’s everything you need to make a movie – including the post production which is why I was there.
Our part of the complex was named Broccoli road – and went right past the Bond soundstage. You couldn’t see in though…
On the way back, my taxi driver gave out some free tips on the benefits of declaring yourself bankrupt… how to have £100,000 on credit cards and have them all wiped clean. He spoke from experience apparently.
Down on the farm
the render farm I'm setting up still isn't working properly. I'm coming to the conclusion that Backburner (the package you use to farm out jobs to each of the computers) isn't quite as bug-free as it should be. I'm slowly learning there are magic things you need to do before it will all work.
For example, you need to delete a certain file from the max installation on every machine. You also can't have computer names that begin with a number... when one machine is on, it throws others off the network... it's all a bit untidy.
On balance, of course, I'd rather have it than not have it, but I'm still not operating at full capacity.
That said, the rest of the project is going well - animations are coming along nicely and the clients seem very happy.
Looks like I'm paying a visit to Mexico in a few weeks for the grand unvieling...
Friday, September 19, 2008
Managed to get the voiceover done for the yacht video – the voiceover artist was recommended by the client and turns out to be very good. The initial version of this project is getting very near to completion now and today I’ve set the renderers up with the last two shots. After that it’s all just tidying up and editing (and any changes the client wants to make).
I’m starting to render the other project too – the trilobite animation for the museum. The images look great – and it’s possibly my enthusiasm for the project, but I’ve gone with all the highest quality settings for my rendering. I need to keep a reign on rendering times, and so far that’s not happening. I’m also rendering in HD which doesn’t help. It’s also not necessary strictly speaking – the clients haven’t asked for HD – I just think that if I can I’ll do as much of the project in HD as my rendering times allow.
Unfortunately, that’s meant 2 hours per frame on one shot – so I’ve had to re-think a little… Having done a couple of tweaks with the lighting (I’ve found area lights are a real time killer – especially when combined with raytraced shadows).
I also returned from holiday to find another project landing on my desk – another animation for another museum – this one a medieval castle – which should be fun and not too stressful.
Today, I also got an email from an old friend from Computer Arts – he’s now working for an osteoporosis charity and needs some medical illustration done. It’s easy enough since I’ve got a high quality medical model I bought for a poster project which didn’t come off at the beginning of the year.
All of this means I need to by my extra rendering PCs as soon as possible. Which I can’t do until I get the first payment for the trilobites animation… let’s hope that appears in the next week and I can begin to clear the rendering log-jam.
It’ll also be good to get a new pc with a bit more memory and shift my adobe suite onto it. For some reason, capturing video is becoming a real problem, with stuttering playback and lost sound.
When I recorded the voiceover yesterday, I did it using my camcorder and a tie clip mic. Transfering it to the computer eventually had to be done through the PCs sound card because firewire wasn’t playing ball…
I also returned from holiday with the desire to make a series of 10 minute animations for children’s TV… is that going to happen? It’s a big job…. Hmmm. I’ve got a documentary to finish first (although with my current computer not behaving with video, that will have to wait until I get a new 4 or 8gb machine).
I’m starting to render the other project too – the trilobite animation for the museum. The images look great – and it’s possibly my enthusiasm for the project, but I’ve gone with all the highest quality settings for my rendering. I need to keep a reign on rendering times, and so far that’s not happening. I’m also rendering in HD which doesn’t help. It’s also not necessary strictly speaking – the clients haven’t asked for HD – I just think that if I can I’ll do as much of the project in HD as my rendering times allow.
Unfortunately, that’s meant 2 hours per frame on one shot – so I’ve had to re-think a little… Having done a couple of tweaks with the lighting (I’ve found area lights are a real time killer – especially when combined with raytraced shadows).
I also returned from holiday to find another project landing on my desk – another animation for another museum – this one a medieval castle – which should be fun and not too stressful.
Today, I also got an email from an old friend from Computer Arts – he’s now working for an osteoporosis charity and needs some medical illustration done. It’s easy enough since I’ve got a high quality medical model I bought for a poster project which didn’t come off at the beginning of the year.
All of this means I need to by my extra rendering PCs as soon as possible. Which I can’t do until I get the first payment for the trilobites animation… let’s hope that appears in the next week and I can begin to clear the rendering log-jam.
It’ll also be good to get a new pc with a bit more memory and shift my adobe suite onto it. For some reason, capturing video is becoming a real problem, with stuttering playback and lost sound.
When I recorded the voiceover yesterday, I did it using my camcorder and a tie clip mic. Transfering it to the computer eventually had to be done through the PCs sound card because firewire wasn’t playing ball…
I also returned from holiday with the desire to make a series of 10 minute animations for children’s TV… is that going to happen? It’s a big job…. Hmmm. I’ve got a documentary to finish first (although with my current computer not behaving with video, that will have to wait until I get a new 4 or 8gb machine).
Friday, September 5, 2008
3d stuff
today I spent the morning at an Autodesk press event. Taking time out to go to these things is always worthwhile, but I could have done without it today – with the pre-holiday rush and the fact that I got very little done yesterday.
I really must make an effort to get some writing work about the 3d packages – otherwise my position as a journalist writing about 3d is going to drift… Don’t quite know where I’ll find the time, but it’s well worth doing.
What I got from this event was a chat with one of the 3d guys who pointed me at the value of normal mapping and the importance of render passes. Neither of which I’d really understood before….
Normal mapping, by the way is creating a kind of fake painted on bump effect which can make simple 3d models look like much more complex shapes without slowing your computer down.
Using Render passes on the other hand means getting the computer to produce separate pictures for the colour, shadows, reflections, lighting, etc. in a scene instead of putting them all together. The advantage being that you can go in later on in After Effects and adjust the effect of each element of your scene without having to go back and do it all again. If someone tells you they’d like the same thing in a different colour, it takes 10 seconds to change instead of 48 hours….
Anyway, one thing worth noting is that even though the company is absolutely right at the cutting edge of technology, they still couldn’t get either their coffee machine or their TV to work… it’s not just me, then.
Work on the safety video is going well – and I’m very nearly at the stage where I can see it actually being possible to finish it. There are a few shots that are taking their time to render, and a few others that will need re-doing, but now everything is in place, and I can see the project coming to a close.
After my holiday next week, I’m going to jump straight in and get the narration recorded, and then there are only a couple of shots to do before I can present a preliminary edit to the client.
Just in time too – as the trilobite animation is really hotting up and I just know, if I’m going to get it all rendered in time, I’ll need to stick hard and fast to my deadlines.
The images are looking good, and I’m really discovering in these projects just how valuable a firm shot-list is. It lets me know exactly where I am at any point and allows me to see where the tricky shots are likely to be. Even if I end up leaving shots out or adding others in, it’s at least a framework I can depend on.
It’s also something that I tend to leave out when I don’t think I have time – and it’s always a false economy.
today I spent the morning at an Autodesk press event. Taking time out to go to these things is always worthwhile, but I could have done without it today – with the pre-holiday rush and the fact that I got very little done yesterday.
I really must make an effort to get some writing work about the 3d packages – otherwise my position as a journalist writing about 3d is going to drift… Don’t quite know where I’ll find the time, but it’s well worth doing.
What I got from this event was a chat with one of the 3d guys who pointed me at the value of normal mapping and the importance of render passes. Neither of which I’d really understood before….
Normal mapping, by the way is creating a kind of fake painted on bump effect which can make simple 3d models look like much more complex shapes without slowing your computer down.
Using Render passes on the other hand means getting the computer to produce separate pictures for the colour, shadows, reflections, lighting, etc. in a scene instead of putting them all together. The advantage being that you can go in later on in After Effects and adjust the effect of each element of your scene without having to go back and do it all again. If someone tells you they’d like the same thing in a different colour, it takes 10 seconds to change instead of 48 hours….
Anyway, one thing worth noting is that even though the company is absolutely right at the cutting edge of technology, they still couldn’t get either their coffee machine or their TV to work… it’s not just me, then.
Work on the safety video is going well – and I’m very nearly at the stage where I can see it actually being possible to finish it. There are a few shots that are taking their time to render, and a few others that will need re-doing, but now everything is in place, and I can see the project coming to a close.
After my holiday next week, I’m going to jump straight in and get the narration recorded, and then there are only a couple of shots to do before I can present a preliminary edit to the client.
Just in time too – as the trilobite animation is really hotting up and I just know, if I’m going to get it all rendered in time, I’ll need to stick hard and fast to my deadlines.
The images are looking good, and I’m really discovering in these projects just how valuable a firm shot-list is. It lets me know exactly where I am at any point and allows me to see where the tricky shots are likely to be. Even if I end up leaving shots out or adding others in, it’s at least a framework I can depend on.
It’s also something that I tend to leave out when I don’t think I have time – and it’s always a false economy.
Monday, September 1, 2008
10x10
On Wednesday I managed to get to the 10x10 documentary filmmaking night – where five filmmakers show 10 minutes of their work and get 10 minutes of (constructive) criticism from the audience. It’s a great evening to go to – and always makes me want to do more documentary work.
Time pressure is still pretty strong and I can’t see when in the next couple of months I’m going to be able to finish my current documentary – despite the fact that there’s only a couple of days work to do on it.
On the plus side, my other projects mean I’ll have to get a more powerful computer (actually 2 of them) so when I come back to the project I hopefully won’t have the same problems with Premiere crashing during rendering.
Anyway – among Wednesday’s films were a snippet from a film on Lost Vagueness – the bizarre festival/theatrical experience I’ve been to on a couple of occasions. Lost Vagueness is difficult to explain (and I think that’s going to be a problem for the documentary maker) but my experience of it involves a Victorian mental hospital, a fair featuring such games as “guess the name of my cat” and a man who only spoke backwards.
I look forward to seeing the finished documentary.
There was also a documentary made by someone who had William Shatner’s name tattooed on his right buttock for some reason he can’t quite explain – and his quest to explore the murky world of the star trek fan.
Good luck to him. They’re a funny lot.
…compared to us sensible Doctor Who fans that is…
A reality cheque
Just as a bit of reality for documentary makers. I got my first invoice request from my distributors for the shark evolution documentary – it’s been with them since just before Christmas and they’ve sold the programme to four different countries including Canada and Spain.
Pretty good going I think and their set-up charges (about £500) and commission (35%) aren’t bad deals, so I’m happy with their work.
The profit though, comes out at £1,700 with another roughly £600 still to come.
In other words, it’s not going to make a living for me. The documentaries are great fun to make and I’m not backing away from doing them. I enjoy it and it’s worthwhile. It’s just that even if the income continues at this rate for 5 years, the programme will just about have justified my time. I don’t imagine that it will.
Trilobites
The trilobite project – a museum display animation – looks like it will entail a trip to Mexico at the beginning of November.
The project is proceeding very well right now and I’m managing to re-create some fascinating creatures. I’m making them extremely bright and colourful and I’ve put together a storyline which turns this animation into a real documentary – or at least a fictional film based on real evidence….
The guys I’m working with are doing their best and seem very helpful but they’re both very busy and live at opposite ends of the world. One is getting married and the other trying to set up a museum and neither speak English as a first language – so I’m largely working on my own and hoping I’m getting things right.
I’m trying to send updates to them as often as possible so as to minimise any re-working of the models and animations.
Poster
The Trex poster, a project I was working on a couple of months ago but which seemed to grind to a halt, is now back on. This is a wall poster which I’d got very closer to completing when the company who’d requested it suddenly changed their minds about what they wanted.
Now, they’d previously done this with another poster (on human anatomy) and the whole image had eventually been cancelled after I’d done an awful lot of work for which I didn’t get paid. I told them I wasn’t willing to re-do the Trex poster unless they could do what most other clients do and issue a commission – a firm commitment to pay me.
They’ve instead suggested some minor changes – and I’m willing to do them – although when I’ll get time to, I’ve no idea.
Credit crunching
Last week I emailed a couple of other clients about some projects which I thought were pretty firm (a pop video and a documentary intro). They haven’t responded – which I’m taking to mean that they’re pulling out.
This would bother me if I didn’t have so much work on – especially as I’d already done a couple of days work on these projects). However, these are tough times, so if the clients don’t feel they can continue I’m not going to kick up a stink
I also dropped a line to another client who asked me to do a small piece of work illustrating some sales ideas he had. This work was finished and used, but he’s now said his business is failing and he can’t pay.
Well, it’s only a small amount (£125) but I worked hard for it and he had plenty of opportunity to contact me and discuss the problem earlier, so I’m afraid I don’t have much sympathy.
Luckily, there’s legislation in place (the late payments act) which allows small businesses to charge late payment fees (about £40) and interest if an invoice isn’t settled within a month. I’ve politely highlighted this to him, but not directly imposed it. I’m giving him every opportunity to pay, but if he persists in not paying, I will sue him through the small claims court. I’ve done it before (in fact I sued Highbury Publishing for about £3,000 and they payed up just before the company collapsed owing millions).
Anyway, as a small business, and especially as a creative one, you can’t afford to have bad debts and you especially can’t afford to be seen as a soft touch.
On Wednesday I managed to get to the 10x10 documentary filmmaking night – where five filmmakers show 10 minutes of their work and get 10 minutes of (constructive) criticism from the audience. It’s a great evening to go to – and always makes me want to do more documentary work.
Time pressure is still pretty strong and I can’t see when in the next couple of months I’m going to be able to finish my current documentary – despite the fact that there’s only a couple of days work to do on it.
On the plus side, my other projects mean I’ll have to get a more powerful computer (actually 2 of them) so when I come back to the project I hopefully won’t have the same problems with Premiere crashing during rendering.
Anyway – among Wednesday’s films were a snippet from a film on Lost Vagueness – the bizarre festival/theatrical experience I’ve been to on a couple of occasions. Lost Vagueness is difficult to explain (and I think that’s going to be a problem for the documentary maker) but my experience of it involves a Victorian mental hospital, a fair featuring such games as “guess the name of my cat” and a man who only spoke backwards.
I look forward to seeing the finished documentary.
There was also a documentary made by someone who had William Shatner’s name tattooed on his right buttock for some reason he can’t quite explain – and his quest to explore the murky world of the star trek fan.
Good luck to him. They’re a funny lot.
…compared to us sensible Doctor Who fans that is…
A reality cheque
Just as a bit of reality for documentary makers. I got my first invoice request from my distributors for the shark evolution documentary – it’s been with them since just before Christmas and they’ve sold the programme to four different countries including Canada and Spain.
Pretty good going I think and their set-up charges (about £500) and commission (35%) aren’t bad deals, so I’m happy with their work.
The profit though, comes out at £1,700 with another roughly £600 still to come.
In other words, it’s not going to make a living for me. The documentaries are great fun to make and I’m not backing away from doing them. I enjoy it and it’s worthwhile. It’s just that even if the income continues at this rate for 5 years, the programme will just about have justified my time. I don’t imagine that it will.
Trilobites
The trilobite project – a museum display animation – looks like it will entail a trip to Mexico at the beginning of November.
The project is proceeding very well right now and I’m managing to re-create some fascinating creatures. I’m making them extremely bright and colourful and I’ve put together a storyline which turns this animation into a real documentary – or at least a fictional film based on real evidence….
The guys I’m working with are doing their best and seem very helpful but they’re both very busy and live at opposite ends of the world. One is getting married and the other trying to set up a museum and neither speak English as a first language – so I’m largely working on my own and hoping I’m getting things right.
I’m trying to send updates to them as often as possible so as to minimise any re-working of the models and animations.
Poster
The Trex poster, a project I was working on a couple of months ago but which seemed to grind to a halt, is now back on. This is a wall poster which I’d got very closer to completing when the company who’d requested it suddenly changed their minds about what they wanted.
Now, they’d previously done this with another poster (on human anatomy) and the whole image had eventually been cancelled after I’d done an awful lot of work for which I didn’t get paid. I told them I wasn’t willing to re-do the Trex poster unless they could do what most other clients do and issue a commission – a firm commitment to pay me.
They’ve instead suggested some minor changes – and I’m willing to do them – although when I’ll get time to, I’ve no idea.
Credit crunching
Last week I emailed a couple of other clients about some projects which I thought were pretty firm (a pop video and a documentary intro). They haven’t responded – which I’m taking to mean that they’re pulling out.
This would bother me if I didn’t have so much work on – especially as I’d already done a couple of days work on these projects). However, these are tough times, so if the clients don’t feel they can continue I’m not going to kick up a stink
I also dropped a line to another client who asked me to do a small piece of work illustrating some sales ideas he had. This work was finished and used, but he’s now said his business is failing and he can’t pay.
Well, it’s only a small amount (£125) but I worked hard for it and he had plenty of opportunity to contact me and discuss the problem earlier, so I’m afraid I don’t have much sympathy.
Luckily, there’s legislation in place (the late payments act) which allows small businesses to charge late payment fees (about £40) and interest if an invoice isn’t settled within a month. I’ve politely highlighted this to him, but not directly imposed it. I’m giving him every opportunity to pay, but if he persists in not paying, I will sue him through the small claims court. I’ve done it before (in fact I sued Highbury Publishing for about £3,000 and they payed up just before the company collapsed owing millions).
Anyway, as a small business, and especially as a creative one, you can’t afford to have bad debts and you especially can’t afford to be seen as a soft touch.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Work is distracting me. I’ve got these two big projects on right now – the safety video for the yacht and a trilobite display for a museum in Mexico. Both are big, complex jobs and both have deadlines in September.
The problem with having these long term projects is you’re never quite sure where you ought to be on them at any point and you need to set (and keep to) goals throughout the project.
There are so many different aspects to these animations (both are really like mini films – involving narration, music, characters and editing as well as animation) that are all both exciting and difficult – so I sometimes end up getting preoccupied by them.
Although, obviously I want interesting and challenging work, it’s hard to turn that off when it comes to the end of the day.
I end up getting distracted – as though the real world is happening somewhere else with me – or my mind not connecting fully with it, and I don’t like that about myself. It must be obvious to people around me sometimes that I’m not all there…
The only real solution is to be as organised as I can – to plan out what I’m doing on what days. For some reason when I know I’ve got a difficult problem to tackle, knowing WHEN I’m going to tackle what portions of it frees me up somehow – it allows me to forget the problem for the most part – knowing that even if I don’t have the answers, I’ve at least dedicated a time-slot to dealing with them.
On Saturday I scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper, planning out the next couple of weeks. It helped a lot – and even if some of those plans don’t work out, I at least know I’ve got time for most of what I’ve got to do.
Hopefully that made me a little better company for the weekend….
The joy of farming
I’ve now got so much rendering to do for the two big animation projects on my plate right now that it’s become pretty clear that one computer isn’t going to cover it. If you make a guess that each frame of animation takes about 5 minutes to render (the practice of getting the computer to draw out every beam of light bouncing off every object in the scene to create a finished 3d picture), and there are 25 frames per second, my museum animation on its own is going to be about 50 days and nights of rendering.
Since I’ve got to deliver it at the end of September and I’m not even going to be able to start the rendering until all the other work is done on the project, I’m going to be in a spot of bother.
Luckily 3ds Max (my animation package) has a trick up its sleeve. Basically you can install (for free) unregistered versions of the software on as many PCs as you like, and network them together so that each computer renders out a portion of the job.
Commercial rendering farms as they’re called turn out to be more expensive than buying extra computers and doing it yourself.
Anyway – I’ve now set up Lisa’s laptop, and re-energised my old PC (which fell apart earlier in the year) with a copy of Windows Vista. So I’m now rendering 3 times as fast at a cost of about £100.
So I’ve managed to get a good chunk of my yacht safety video rendered over one weekend. What’s more, it doesn’t matter that some of the renders need tweaking because I can go back and do them again overnight whenever I like. It’s a very freeing experience.
At the end of the month, when the museum animation starts in earnest, I’m going to buy and add a couple of quad core machines – bringing my processor count up from 2 to 14 – so I should be able to take on these big tasks without worrying about rendering time.
It feels as though I’m slowly scaling up my operations what with render farms and Elance. This is something I’m not used to as a freelance artist – but it’s going fairly well…
Render farm idea
Here’s an idea for anyone with a bit of web programming skill: set up a website which allows people to donate downtime on their own home computers for network rendering. You’d be able to call upon hundreds (even thousands) of PCs to do a rendering task, pay the contributors a small amount per frame, and charge animators to use the service.
You’d be able to undercut all the commercial render farms out there, plus you’d have no overheads, and an almost unlimited supply of render machines.
What’s more, instead of a render task taking weeks, you could typically finish the job in minutes.
Just an idea.
The problem with having these long term projects is you’re never quite sure where you ought to be on them at any point and you need to set (and keep to) goals throughout the project.
There are so many different aspects to these animations (both are really like mini films – involving narration, music, characters and editing as well as animation) that are all both exciting and difficult – so I sometimes end up getting preoccupied by them.
Although, obviously I want interesting and challenging work, it’s hard to turn that off when it comes to the end of the day.
I end up getting distracted – as though the real world is happening somewhere else with me – or my mind not connecting fully with it, and I don’t like that about myself. It must be obvious to people around me sometimes that I’m not all there…
The only real solution is to be as organised as I can – to plan out what I’m doing on what days. For some reason when I know I’ve got a difficult problem to tackle, knowing WHEN I’m going to tackle what portions of it frees me up somehow – it allows me to forget the problem for the most part – knowing that even if I don’t have the answers, I’ve at least dedicated a time-slot to dealing with them.
On Saturday I scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper, planning out the next couple of weeks. It helped a lot – and even if some of those plans don’t work out, I at least know I’ve got time for most of what I’ve got to do.
Hopefully that made me a little better company for the weekend….
The joy of farming
I’ve now got so much rendering to do for the two big animation projects on my plate right now that it’s become pretty clear that one computer isn’t going to cover it. If you make a guess that each frame of animation takes about 5 minutes to render (the practice of getting the computer to draw out every beam of light bouncing off every object in the scene to create a finished 3d picture), and there are 25 frames per second, my museum animation on its own is going to be about 50 days and nights of rendering.
Since I’ve got to deliver it at the end of September and I’m not even going to be able to start the rendering until all the other work is done on the project, I’m going to be in a spot of bother.
Luckily 3ds Max (my animation package) has a trick up its sleeve. Basically you can install (for free) unregistered versions of the software on as many PCs as you like, and network them together so that each computer renders out a portion of the job.
Commercial rendering farms as they’re called turn out to be more expensive than buying extra computers and doing it yourself.
Anyway – I’ve now set up Lisa’s laptop, and re-energised my old PC (which fell apart earlier in the year) with a copy of Windows Vista. So I’m now rendering 3 times as fast at a cost of about £100.
So I’ve managed to get a good chunk of my yacht safety video rendered over one weekend. What’s more, it doesn’t matter that some of the renders need tweaking because I can go back and do them again overnight whenever I like. It’s a very freeing experience.
At the end of the month, when the museum animation starts in earnest, I’m going to buy and add a couple of quad core machines – bringing my processor count up from 2 to 14 – so I should be able to take on these big tasks without worrying about rendering time.
It feels as though I’m slowly scaling up my operations what with render farms and Elance. This is something I’m not used to as a freelance artist – but it’s going fairly well…
Render farm idea
Here’s an idea for anyone with a bit of web programming skill: set up a website which allows people to donate downtime on their own home computers for network rendering. You’d be able to call upon hundreds (even thousands) of PCs to do a rendering task, pay the contributors a small amount per frame, and charge animators to use the service.
You’d be able to undercut all the commercial render farms out there, plus you’d have no overheads, and an almost unlimited supply of render machines.
What’s more, instead of a render task taking weeks, you could typically finish the job in minutes.
Just an idea.
Friday, August 8, 2008
I’ve been working pretty constantly on my two big projects this week – pausing only to write my video newsletter – which of course arrived after a long delay with a very tight deadline.
It looks like I will be making the trilobite animation and that’s great news. It also seems the same people want to meet me in Mexico to talk about other possible projects – which would be great.
Elance
Having decided to use Elance for the first time to hire in people to help with my animation work – and having given a team in India the job of rigging some of my 3d characters, I got the finished rigs back this week.
They weren’t brilliant, I have to say. I did choose the cheapest people – which I guess says something - and the results were mixed. I don’t think they’d done much character rigging before.
Character rigging, by the way is adding animatable bones to a 3d person so that when you move their arms and legs, the right parts of the body bend. If you get it wrong, you get unlikely looking bends and tears and the character’s bodies go out of shape. This is what happened in this case – and if I’d been using them in the normal way, the results wouldn’t have been satisfactory. Fortunately, I’m only using the characters as silhouettes, so it doesn’t matter too much.
I’ll definitely use Elance again – it’s a good way to farm out work you can’t or don’t want to do – but you have to be careful about who you choose.
I think the main requirement – aside from an understanding of the task – is an understanding of English. You really need to be able to communicate complicated ideas when working on an animation projects – and that means a common language is a must.
It looks like I will be making the trilobite animation and that’s great news. It also seems the same people want to meet me in Mexico to talk about other possible projects – which would be great.
Elance
Having decided to use Elance for the first time to hire in people to help with my animation work – and having given a team in India the job of rigging some of my 3d characters, I got the finished rigs back this week.
They weren’t brilliant, I have to say. I did choose the cheapest people – which I guess says something - and the results were mixed. I don’t think they’d done much character rigging before.
Character rigging, by the way is adding animatable bones to a 3d person so that when you move their arms and legs, the right parts of the body bend. If you get it wrong, you get unlikely looking bends and tears and the character’s bodies go out of shape. This is what happened in this case – and if I’d been using them in the normal way, the results wouldn’t have been satisfactory. Fortunately, I’m only using the characters as silhouettes, so it doesn’t matter too much.
I’ll definitely use Elance again – it’s a good way to farm out work you can’t or don’t want to do – but you have to be careful about who you choose.
I think the main requirement – aside from an understanding of the task – is an understanding of English. You really need to be able to communicate complicated ideas when working on an animation projects – and that means a common language is a must.
Monday, July 28, 2008
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….
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….
Friday, July 18, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, July 7, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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.
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!
Friday, June 27, 2008
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!
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!
Friday, June 20, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, June 13, 2008
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!
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!
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