Bank Holiday Monday

Okay. I guess I should start with the biggest news I found out today. Disney have bought Marvel. Now at first reading that scared the hell out of me. What were Disney going to do with Marvel and the comics they publish? Then I actually read through the press releases and the news websites and it appears to be nothing to really be concerned about. They appear to be throwing their money and weight into allowing Marvel to do what they already do. Disney knows that Marvel knows what it is doing, and they are going to let them keep doing it, much the same way as the Pixar take over occurred.

I also read a very interesting news article about how screwed we are in the event of a zombie outbreak. Some Canadian mathematicians who normally work out the spread of highly infectious diseases have turned their methods to plotting the spread of a zombie plague. Apparently part of the biggest problem is that normally, with infectious diseases, people die and then they are out of the system, they are no longer carriers, can no longer spread the disease themselves, but with a zombie outbreak, if you die, you just come back as a zombie and spread the disease further. According to these scientists there is no chance of co-existing with the zombies, either we die out or we kill all of them. Good to know that someone is working on the important things. Now I just need to finalise my zombie outbreak plans with this new information, and everything will be good.

So today is the August Bank Holiday so a lot of people have the day off. Such as my parents (my mother being a teacher has about 6 weeks off around this time of year anyway, but that is besides the point) so today, they visited me in Cambridge and we went for a meal at Wagamama which was very nice and then we went shopping in Cambridge.

Tomorrow, I will be filming with a couple of friends the fight sequence for the end of the Animus short I am currently working on, which I really need to get around to naming. I have decided that seeing as the short I am working is designed to be the first episode of a series I will write a story arc for a 5-10 episodes run and then maybe write certain scripts. I am also thinking about writing and making the finale episode of the run, which at present has a working title of “Two Little Birds”.

Podcast? Vlog?

I have been pondering on making a change to this format for the last couple of days, and I am still not sure about the best way to make send this information onto the Internet, but this seemed to be the fastest way to get it done for the moment.

I have been watching a lot of work by the talented people over at LoadingReadyRun for the past couple of weeks having been introduced to their work by the Escapist series that some of their crew work on called Unskippable. While watching some of the behind the scenes videos I started to wonder why I had never got round to making those for the project I do. Mostly my friends and I talk about it at the start of the project and at various stages throughout the work, but we never actually get anything filmed and always say we will do something next time. This seems to be because we exhaust ourselves actually making the in front of the scenes videos and don’t really have the time to make the behind the scenes stuff.

The other morning I was a little bored and skipping around several After Effects tutorial sites for a little inspiration and came across a tutorial at AeTuts.com to make a JibJab-style animated head, and the first seeds of a video podcast came into my head. I could use this to animate a photo of my own head and keep people up to date about what I am doing and ramble on at them for a while and upload it to the Internet using Flash video. Then a day or so passed and I thought about it more and decided it was: a. too much work to produce b. a little bit too close to South Park and the idea hit the back burner. In it’s place, and having watched several more making of videos at LoadingReadyRun I thought to myself "Wait a minute, my laptop has a camera on it"

And surely it would be easier to actually film myself that way and just post that to the internet.

I have been working recently on an Animus-based short, which would be an episode of a television program, or if Animus was a television program like Heroes is, a storyline that would be intercut between several episodes. I currently have 7 minutes of it filmed and hope to have it nearly finished by the end of this week assuming all the actors are available. The next glamorous piece of film-related work I have to do, go out and buy a cheap chess set for the sinister chess players to play their little games upon.