Archive for July, 2009

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Short Film Plug: Pigeon Impossible

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
(c) Lucas Martell 2009

(c) Lucas Martell 2009

A quick plug this week for a great blog and seemingly Herculean effort by Lucas Martell and cohorts for the making of their short, Pigeon Impossible. You can check out the main website here and the blog here. I highly recommend reading through the blog and downloading the video podcasts (vidcasts?)


While Lucas and the team have been working in Autodesk XSI (though Softimage XSI at the time) the vidcasts are “3D application agnostic”. Actually that’s one of the reasons I am recommending you go check it out as Lucas focuses more on the *process* and the *concepts* and how they can help your production rather than “if you hit this button, X will happen”.

The thing is, creating a 6 minute long animation is a lot of work. Creating a 6 minute animation that looks professional quality is a totally different kettle of fish. Learn from Lucas’s mistakes (and of course hints from this very site) and you will hopefully be able to avoid many pitfalls and time-sinks which will let you keep your focus on your production rather than problems.

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Posted in Thoughts | 2 Comments »

Review: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (possible spoilers, but not really)

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

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This was a bit of an interesting one for me as it is the first Harry Potter movie I have seen since actually reading the book. As it turns out, I finished The Half Blood Prince only a week or so (if that) before I saw the movie so the story was fresh in my mind.

To tell the truth, I have kind of dipped in and out of the Harry Potter movies. I recall seeing the first one at the cinema, but to the best of my recollections, I have watched bits and pieces of the others on DVD and on TV when they were on, but haven’t really sat down and watched them from start to finish.

Emo? Check! (c) WB Pictures 2009



On a story/character note, I was a little disappointed, as I know many fans have been in the past. I fully realise that film and books are separate mediums with strengths and weaknesses and so much of the written exposition simply can’t be translated to the screen. However, and this is a big however, a lot of what made it to the screen (or was left out) was a little baffling. Without giving anything away I felt there were some strange decisions about including scenes that weren’t in the book that could have just as easily been shown by . . . bup budda bahhhhhHHH . . . using the scenes in the book.

Also, while I loved Jim Broadbent in Hot Fuzz, he just was not Professor Horace Slughorn. He physically wasn’t “right” (ie, not rotund enough ;) and his character’s personality was *competely* different to the book, again with no discernible benefit from the change. The unfortunate thing was the when I first read Slughorn’s dialogue, I pictured him exactly like actor Timothy Spall, a bit of a problem as he is already playing Wormtail! C’est la vie, as the Frenchies say.

(more…)

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Tips – Offset tracking in After Effects

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

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10mins 49sec 29meg Quicktime H.264 MOV


Alrighty, back with another one of those block rockin’ beats to quote those Englishmen, the Chemical Brothers.

Last time we looked at offset tracking in Shake, a relatively straightforward and easy affair . . . not so in After Effects as it turns out. Hopefully this will help you out. Thanks to my co-worker Dan Bryant for showing me this method which I then finally found somewhere else on the net with Carl Larsen’s video over at Creative Cow. If you are an After Effects user and aren’t checking Creative cow, then shame on you!

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Posted in After Effects, Compositing, Tips & Tricks | 4 Comments »

Site News: We (and I mean “I”) am back . . . gotta love technology.

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

Oh . . . my . . . freaking . . . goodness. I don’t think you would believe it if you experienced the amount of arsing about I have had to go through to get a basic phone line and slow ADSL internet set up. I think I mentioned it before, but if you are anywhere in North America, don’t complain about your internet. I am paying over $110 a month just for the internet (ADSL1) and another $20 for the line rental because I need it just for the net.

Of course, I had to take a day off work to wait for a Telstra technician to come to my house to check my line. Sure he was 3hrs late and four phone calls to Telstra resulted in them getting my contact details wrong four times and having them lie to me and say the technician knocked on my door and I didn’t answer . . . in a one bedroom apartment with me sitting about a metre away from the door.

Then after I finally get a phone line and internet connection I buy a Linksys router which proceeds to utterly not work and do a great impersonation of a lump of inert plastic. I had read varying reviews but decided to take the plunge after having a few connection issues with our last modem, a DLink G604T. Well, let’s just say the rumours of Linsys’s decline in quality are apparently true. The thing wouldn’t even connect to the phone line and just spun it’s wheels before failing. The funny thing is I took it back and exchanged it for, yes, a DLINK G604T (hey, better the devil you know), which proceeded to just have a completely pain free, straightforward and quick setup. So there you go.

SOooooo, while I had planned on a video tutorial today, it turned out an old mate and his family were in town so it was down to the beach for a late big breakfast and then onto the Musuem to check out the “Day in Pompeii” exhibit in which my mate Jay Miller was Environment and FX lead for the CG recreation.

Stay tuned for Wednesday when I will organise an “offset tracking in After Effects” tutorial as it is something that I though was uncessarily complicated compared to Shake, but made sense the more I have used After Effects.

Til then, stay cool!

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