Time in Motion.

Happy New year everyone.
Well I Have only been back at work a few days and already its been an exciting few days.
I have been working on a 3d Model parrot. Someone else designed it and I am rigging and animating it, WOOT!!!

Will post some footage of the rig when i get time

really just a post to let you know I am not dead

Just a small note really that the Flip Festival started last night. Wont be able to attend today but tomorrow I will definitely be checking out the Stuff!!!!

By Now mike and Rachel will be high in the clouds winging their way across the pond Happy landing guys One good thing is with them out of the way temporarily I can really jump on some outstanding project work. Really got to get working on The Mocap and Film projects!!!

about 3 years ago, I was working in Europe, far away from Blighty, when during a night of random net surfing in happened across a collection of audio plays called FANZ

FANZ is about the misadventures of a group of Doctor Who fans and often took surreal and unexpected twists, a bit like spaced or the mighty Boosh but with longer scarves. I downloaded them all to my mp3 player and lo, it was good.

But then my .mp3 player died. I managed to get a new one and went to the website to re download the fanz episodes. They where not there. It was just like something out of a fantasy story, where the hero buys something from a shop which isn’t there the next day….

For the next 2 years I scoured the Internet hoping against hope to find a link, any link to FANZ.
A few nights ago my search was succsessfull and I found FANZ new home! YAY!

iF you want to hear what all the fuss is about then check them out here:

www.plasticgirafe.co.uk

now if you’ll excuse me. I got to get my FANZ on!

I am just finishing a 2 week vacation, and it seems like i will need a 2 week vacation to recover from it!

 I spent the majority of the time trying to do the house up. it is a mammoth task and wasnt helped by tradespersons who turned up late or asked the other project be bought forward to make their job easier.

You remember the film ‘revenge of the nerds?’ well I am calling bullshit on it. half a dozen scrawny nerdlings completely renovate a house with a robot to a cheesy 1980s track called one foot in front of the other. I am a nerdy guy and after 2 weeks of bashing holes in walls, standing up to my knees in paper and plaster and spending hours trying to get bits of brick out of my eyes the house isnt all done up. they did it in like 2 minutes and thats with takashii getting stoned and falling over!!!

One good thing about this vacation is today I am going to try and get a desktop PC today, this laptop I have had for the last 4 years has been a most faithful companion, and has traveled the world with me, losing a number 1 key a long the way. It is a little battle scarred but I still love it.

However, a lot of the things I want to do with software; in terms of using it and developing it are a little beyond it. So rejoice little laptop, here is a gold watch and welcome to part time service on the render farm and maintiaining this blog

 Also, my brother got married last week YAY!!!

i was best man and I hope he liked the speech, I had my hair cut off especially for the event. Its been a bit strange, for the last week I have been trying to pull non-existant hair out of the nack of a t shirt when i put it on, the sacrifices we make for those we love eh ?

Its funny isnt it? generally I can easily juggle 2 or 3 different projects but the last 2 weeks have been difficult,

This week I found myself doing some SFX work for Elliander Production ; A cool bunch of guys making a short film. I will probably be on that untill October I reckon.

Also this week i had to put my mocap hat on and work with some proprietry software for a mocap system.

Now i have been spoilt rotten by Vicon, so it was a real eye opener to have to use a different piece of software to smooth out all the little kinks in the mocap. at the start of it I was hating the software because it seemed so counter-intuiative, and now having used it for nearly 20 hours I know have a grudging respect for it. I still think there are some hefty flaws which mean that i will have to edit the data further but as a way of getting major discontinuties out of the motion then i guess it does what it says on the tin

I am sat here trying to think what i can do next. I am sort of blocked on both those projects for the time being, it is nearly 6pm, in 12 hours i begin 2 weeks of vacation, which will be spen up to my knees in plaster and paint doig DIY on the house. so tonight is the best chance I am going to have for a while to work on my own project.

The temptation is to grab a scene and do a layou and rough pass of animation, but what i will probably end up doing is taking an exisiting scene and tweaking it.

it does sometimes feel like there are not enough hours in the day, And the current heatwave makes finding or maintaining motivation all the more difficult

Its even harder on this machine, I often find i start surfing the internet at random as a displacement activity to actually making some animation. But i think no one can be 100% motivated on a given thing for ever, the trick surely must be to strike a happy balance between all things…

After many months of contemplation I have finally bit the bullet and signed up an acount here. However, now that I have the account its simply not a simple case of putting finger to keyboard and write some stuff. There is this whole wordpress thing to get a handle on and now having waited on tenderhooks awaiting the acceptance email from animationblogspot.com authorising the blog. Last night It came in and today I had chance to check all this out.  

A brief introduction should be the order of the day. I am an animator working in the United Kingdom, mainly in 3ds Max for the games industry. At present I am working on a personal project which this blog will be mainly used to document that project . Unfortunately there is not a great more i can write at the moment . I will be busy now until after the weekend