A couple of updates

Okay, been making some minor tweaks around the site. The front page will soon have the latest version of my showreel. The Twitter feed on the About Me page seems to have broken so I have taken it away. Not sure what will replace it at the moment.

The Animus: Runaways Trailer is now online, and the final touches are being added to the full length short.

My brother’s web site, which I have helped with the design work on, has been updated as well, so check that out too.

UPDATE

It’s been a while in the making but I decided to update the look of the website and continue making the changes I started the other day. Enjoy the new look.

RIP: Geocities

I found out this morning that Geocities, the site that hosted a ton of free sites during the 90s, including several of my own, closes down today. To commemorate this event, XKCD has undergone a redesign. Sadly this was the level of web design that people who had never had the opportunity to make and host a web site were suddenly able to make with the free website. I couldn’t let this event go unmentioned.

UPDATE:

In unrelated news, I have just made a major overhaul to my brother’s photography website, go check it out.

Animus: Runaways Wrapped

As they say in the business, That’s a Wrap!!! No time for a party yet, but that is a wrap. Animus: Runaways has finished filming and now awaits a few tweaks (mostly sound effects and music) before it makes it’s debut.

It has been a couple of months in the making and just kept extending and extending as things went on in people’s lives, and as the vision got grander and grander. Originally intended to be a short involving a couple of characters from Animus (A role-playing game my friend Jexus runs from his web site) being chased, it reached the end of the short, and it was unfulfilled. So I kept writing and it grew into what it is now. I have pitched it to people as the opening episode of a series, it doesn’t resolve all the plot lines in a neat bow at the end, some even reveal themselves in the concluding scenes, but they will evolve over the course of the season. It would be a short season, a mere 5 episodes, but I have been plotting recently and things may move forward with further adventures from Peter, Penny and Kim.

Emergency Services Bingo

Been meaning to write this up for a couple of days now, since talking about it with my friend Carl over MSN. Now, while waiting to hear back from the people at the Job Centre about the job interview I had yesterday, seem to be the perfect time. We were talking about a topic we hadn’t discussed since we had been at University, ‘How many emergency vehicles have you ridden in?’

Things hadn’t changed much between then and now, he had still only ridden in an Ambulance and a Detective’s Car, both of them for incidents involving him. I have ridden in an Ambulance, but I was going as support and supervision for a hockey player while I was their coach, and I had been in the Detective’s car as moral support for Carl following the incident (which wasn’t as exciting as it sounds). Neither of us have ridden in a fire engine, properly (i.e. the fire engine had been called for an emergency involving ourselves).
Finally, after a little bit of debate, it was decided that there were two levels of “Emergency Services Bingo”. Level 1 involves riding in an Emergency Services vehicle when it has been called for you, while Level 2 involves riding in an Emergency Services vehicle as moral support for someone else. Emergency Service Vehicles cover Fire Engines, Ambulances, Police Cars and Coast Guard vehicles (we didn’t actually discuss whether the boats and helicopters should count as the same or different vehicles, I will have to ask him).

Oh, and if you are wondering, I am waiting to hear back from the Job Centre about a temporary Christmas role at my local Gamestation. My fingers are crossed tightly, and hopefully I will have a job until January.

Filming is nearly finished for the Animus short I am currently working on. I have been planning out the major plot arcs for the following episodes, although I would really like to film them, looking at them it isn’t likely to happen.

ADDITIONAL:

Having talked it over with Carl, we have decided:

That Coast Guard boats and helicopter count as the same emergency service, you do get more shiny points if you get both, but you can claim level 1 from just one vehicle.
That Detective Cars count the same as Police Cars, because while they are slightly less flashy, the detectives are of a higher rank, and therefore it balances out.
I forgot to add breakdown vehicles. The AA ran an advert claiming to be the fourth/fifth emergency service, and all breakdown services use specialised vehicles that are not available for the general public. They have a slightly different ratings system, Level 2 is awarded if you are the passenger in a vehicle, while Level 1 is for the driver.

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.

London Film and Comic Con

Allow me to open this blog post with a well known fact about myself. I am a big geek. There I said it. It is the computer age, geeks are in... right? Well, anyway, I don’t care because I am one regardless of the fashionable status. So today, I went to the London Film and Comic Con at the Earl’s Court exhibition hall, and had a really good time.

I arranged to meet my old University friend, and house mate, Carl Mitchell at Earl’s Court train station at 10:30 am-ish this morning and went into the convention hall as soon as the ticket price lowered at 11 am. We spent the first hour looking around two or three of the rows of merchandising before we descended on the free screening of the excellent Lord of the Rings fan film, The Hunt for Gollum.

Very impressive piece of work that was thrown together over the course of two years for the very affordable price of £2000 and a large amount of love for the source material. But don’t just take my word for it, head on over to their site and take a look for yourself. After the Q+A session Carl and I noticed that the head of CGI for the film looked quite familiar, and it turned out that he had been at University on the same course as we had been. There was brief discussion between the three of us and an exchange of e-mail addresses, and hopefully we will get in touch with each other soon and collaborate on something.

After that we hit the final aisles of merchandise (there was an awful lot) and then hunger got the better of us. I had a decent enough hot dog, although it was slightly lacking in the ketchup department and Carl had an apparently not very nice portion of chips. We then went to investigate the option of the autograph section. After a lengthy wait, we finally managed to secure the autograph of the very pretty and talented Jewel Strait (Kaylee, from Firefly), although to Carl’s annoyance she wrote ‘stay shiny’ on mine and not on his. He also met with Danny John Jules (The Cat, from Red Dwarf), while I visited the armoury stand and purchased a replica of the Master Sword from the Legend of Zelda video game.

I had a really good time, although I am quite disappointed that there weren’t more artists offering commissions, or at least reasonably cheap sketches as I was hoping to get a couple of my Animus characters sketched, but I did get the e-mail address of one of the artists so I will be dropping him a line tomorrow or early in the week about getting a couple of head shots and maybe one full body shot.