I am finally getting around to learning HTML, and building a new website. This site is a totally stripped back wordpress theme, but I really dislike wordpress and its limitations, as well as its overall buggy-ness… hopefully a new site will be up and running within a couple of weeks!

When that happens I will update on all I have been up to in Blender, the 3D modelling and animation software.

I discovered the wonderful world of Blender roughly two weeks ago, and I’ve been stuck in front of it ever since!

A huge thanks goes to Andrew Price of BlenderGuru.com for the many many awesome tutorials.

The water is generated from a sphere, and the bigger the sphere the stronger the flow of water. I thought I’d test that…

This first video is a really really low quality render, with bad light settings, but I’m still pretty happy with it!

Hopefully soon I will have some character animation done.

I am a fan of lomograhy, I love the gritty look of it all, unashamedly reminding us all of what it is. The problem with ultra clean digital photography is we have lost sight of the magic of it all, which is a real shame.

But anyway, this is not a post lamenting the bygone days of film based photography…

Yesterday I tried to ‘scan’ an old negative I had lying around in order to process it myself. Snappy Snaps did print this one for me, but rather than looking at it creatively they just cropped the image so that the bit on the right is mostly image… I prefer like this, sprocket holes and all!

Please note this was only a quick test to see if the process worked… essentially i just held the negs against my computer screen, which was showing only pure white on full brightness, then took a picture with a DSLR. Ideally I would have had a tripod, a macro lens, a longer exposure time, low ISO, and something to hold the negatives in place, rather than my finger…

So, two months after starting to learn After Effects, Ariella, Tark and I were asked to create an advert. I say asked, we’re paid to do what we’re told… so we did! 12 days straight work and we ended up with this:

We didn’t film the boy, so I won’t take credit for his bad acting, and the dinosaur was a cardboard shadow puppet… but everything after the house was made by us three.

We’re pretty proud of ourselves for being able to pick up such a powerful and complex tool and pull off an advert which the client was 100% happy with (which never ever happens…)!

Tark (also known as Stefano) can be found over at tarkstuff.blogspot.it . He’s a cool guy, and says he will teach Ariella and I more tricks of the animation trade, as well as rebuild our sites from scratch, removing the limitations of the wordpress template system… which is why this site is currently white…

Ciao for now!

For a long time I have held the opinion that I have the ability to learn how to draw… this is essentially a cop out for my lack of actual ability at drawing, but backed up by the fact that every time I concentrate on it I do get better. For a week or so.

But anyway, aside from the fact I need to re-re-re-pick up anatomical drawing and all the other really useful stuff, like one minute like drawing etc, I am currently and constantly surrounded by people with more talent than I ever hope to possess… bastards… but it has lead me to start doodling randomly during meetings, during rendering, during time that I should be working. It was during one such doodle (this one a pre production meeting doodle) that I discovered I can draw weird alien creature things not half bad…

So yeh… this is it, I’m quite happy with it.

Just a quick play using after effects to help me pitch an idea at work. I’m quite happy with the result, and it worked!

Poster designed by Narayan O’Hanlon

This post is long overdue, but never mind…

June saw the end of my time at university, finished off nicely with a couple of film screenings at Roxy Bar and Regent Street cinema, as well as an exhibition at P3 in Marylebone. Bar Viola was greeted extremely well by all audiences, which was truly wonderful; but more on that later.

For the screenings, Jack Frank Godwin and myself created a few short i-dents to break the films apart; although they are very simple I am quite proud of these two which I knocked together the evening before the first screening (inspiration came… albeit a bit late…). I will encourage Jack to upload his to his website at which point I will point over to him, but until then here are the two that I made:

Fauxtograph was an exploration into the world of photograms, during which I enjoyed creating narratives within each image. The below image is an example of this; despite the appearance of an imminent embrace this photogram was in fact made by Ariella Abolaffio and I pressing our faces to the floor where the photo paper was placed, as I attempted to hold the flash gun above us.