OK Go - Here It Goes Again

For no other reason than it's Friday!

Ave Maria

Here's the second part to Wilfred Jackson's contribution to Fantasia. I think this is utterly beautiful. The tall, elegant trees and the light reflected on the water's surface. No character animation here, instead the whole piece is about composition and the wonderfully rich depth of field created with the simplest elements.

Night On Bald Mountain

I love this sequence. Wilfred Jackson also directed the Ave Maria segment which is wonderful. What I love from this is the skeletal horses and their riders weaving along the backgrounds. The wraith like ghost waving it's arms and the pained reaction of the devil as the church bell tolls, and slowly the ghouls return sleepily to their rest. It's all powerful and amazing and inspiring stuff. They don't quite make them like that anymore.

I'M STILL STANDING!

Still plodding on with the novel whenever I can. Drastically behind on word count, however, quite pleased with what I've done so far and the story I've discovered as it were. The drastically behind bit is not due to not affording the time, rather the time being spent researching the story quite thoroughly, as it has rather a lot of background detail. But I may make up the numbers just yet. Never say never, after all.

Been working furiously during the daylight hours. Currently helping develop Biteneck Beatniks, working on Grimmwood (I have a still from the pre-viz on the trailer for a 3D animated sequence where the camera moves through the trees following what will be 2D animated characters, they're just markers at the moment for where they appear in the shot etc... being able to fly a camera around in 3D space is wonderfully liberating... like I say, it's very much pre-viz, but I'm happy to say the trailer and the film itself are coming along, albeit slowly, but hey...), and Animex (more 3D shenanigans there), and have been pitching for a commercials contract (can't say what for at the moment) and various other bits and bobs that have kept me out of trouble. Busy busy busy. All work and no play makes Jack ... no, no we won't go there so you can put that baseball bat down thank you very much, I'm just fine.

Grimmwood and all production work is © 2006, Ian Culbard, All rights Reserved.

AND SO IT BEGINS...

Hit 1,929 words yesterday as I started writing my NaNoWrimo motivated novel. So that's clear of the 1,667 daily minimum in order to hit the target of 50,000 words in one month. For those that don't think they have the time.... it took me a little over an hour to hit that word count. My working day was divided into two currently running projects; Grimmwood and development work on Biteneck Beatniks, they presently take half a working day each (in a couple of days the Animex trailer will take the place of the Grimmwood work for a few weeks). So I fit the novel writing around it by hitting the keys for an hour at about 10am (till 11... I'd already been working on Grimmwood at this point, animated a 360 camera spin through woodland), and then coming back to it (not to work over what I'd already written but to add some more) at the end of the day for about twenty minutes. A busy day, but nothing timetabling didn't sort out. I managed to fit in an hours exercise (a half hour brisk walk followed by half an hour on the dumbbells). The weirdest thing though that I found having a structured target like that each day made me really motivated and organized about everything else I was doing that day (including the exercise). I suppose the key reason for this is because I'm doing it for myself.

The sequence I'm currently animating in Grimmwood involves a pursuit through woodland. So I built a 3D set in Swift3D of all the trees, with dangling leaves, flowers and fallen leaves on the forest floor and animated a stand in for Red Hood and a few wolves (which will be animated over in 2D. Currently 'dressing' the set as it were by going in and ensuring all elements are the right colours, that gradient's shift with camera pans etc. It's quite a laboured process, but I'm really enjoying doing it. Each day I run off a quicktime to see what it looks like. All the while I'm developing a working process so it's taking longer than it normally would do as I explore more time effective ways of doing things. Slowly, but most definitely surely.