Yeah! The first snow of the year.
I got up early and set up my d700 to shoot some time-lapse footage and was rewarded with some nice shots. I thought I would make a snowman film for Silas and halfway through making it the neighbors saw what I was up to and joined in on the fun. It was a very fun morning.
winter is upon us
Virginia, Silas and I were at the park last night with our lanterns and mooncake for the annual moon festival. I had my camera, a tripod and a flashlight with me. Just for the fun of it I started playing around with some long exposures. Running around the park with my flashlight on got the attention of a couple of curious boys who proptly came over to see what Silas and I were doing. Together we had a great time making “light paintings” as their mother called them.
shot on a nikon d700 50mm lens
I built a redirect page for the website today and to style it out a little bit drew this little cartoon. You can never fail with a good wizard of OZ reference!”
We bough the blueray remastered version of the movie a few weeks ago and ever since the songs have been playing in my head on repeat. What an awesome story. I’m happy to have flying monkeys running around my brain.
Silas brought me my hat this morning which was his way of yelling “Get Up!”. He spent a good half hour drawing in photoshop. Here is the mornings masterpiece. Â I helped by picking different colors for him every few minutes but other than that its all him.
I practically had to tear Silas away from my wacom tablet today. He was so passionate about his scribbling. He watches me draw at the computer all day so I guess Its no surprise that he would want to have a go at it as well.
More than anything I think he really just likes the shinny tablet pen. It is his precious. We’ve caught him running away with it several times this week and now I must make a habit of keeping it away from the edge of the desk.
Silas and I had a drawing adventure in the backyard today. I went to the local art store and picked up a tub of colored chalk and a couple tubes of finger paint. The morning rain had stopped and drawing outside on the porch just felt like a good idea. He thought so too.
I’m in the process of rebuilding the website to make it more flexible to use.
The old one was a bit of a beast. Split into several parts, with multiple domains and overly heavy bad code it was a nightmare to keep up. Posting media was always rather frustrating. It had to go eventually.
The goal rebuilding the site was to clean up the interface and make everything mobile friendly. Ever since I got an iphone I’ve been more aware of these things. Waiting for your own site to load in order to share something with a friend is rather frustrating. It being too small to read is maddening. So if your reading this on the go, enjoy. I spend way too much time learning, css, javascript and jquerry code so you can do that.
A good deal of the information on some of the new tabbed pages is just filler. In the coming days I’ll finish polishing them up. While in the processes of building them though I did find a bunch of old project, mainly old student films, that I’ve never put up on line. I put a few under the “wrapped” tab for you to watch. Descriptions and such will come later when I find the time. Thats it for now.
This is a time lape of me organizing some of the mess which is my home office.
I added a few bits of animation here and there just to make it interesting. The roots are a maya paint effects setup. For some reason it took way longer than I thought to render. Oh well, time flies when your having fun.
-update-
Oh, I should add that the time lapse was shot on a Nikon D700 using an AF-S Nikkor 14-24mm lens. The camera was set to shoot one frame every 20 seconds and it was all compress at 24fps. I composited the shot using TVPaint animation software.
Motion tracking with Maya Live. Who needs to buy toys when you can just make virtual ones!
I took some video footage of Silas on his Jolly Jumper and added in geometry and a bunch of nparticle balls for him to play with. There are a load of tracking mistakes that I could have fixed if I had used a few more tracking points but I was lazy and wanted to explore around with other things. The hard part was keying in his feet so they could kick the balls. I had to do that part by hand. This took forever to render, which is one of the reasons I was trying to set up the PS3 maya mental ray satellite earlier in the week. That did work out so I just had to let the ‘ol mac crunch away for a day or two. I wanted my mac back for other things so I didn’t bother rendering reflections. It was a fun side project. I like it and might try to do a few more things like this. I want to do something with a matte painting next. Where should we send Silas? hmmm… the possibilities are endless.
This is the rough wireframe version.