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!
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