Time in Motion.

Hoo on Who

davesplace — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 10:53:17 +0000

Gave an interview for David Hooies wonderful podcast Hoo on Who. I have never given an interview before and I don’t think I did a very good job. In a way I was totally unprepared for it. He expected me to remember links for my own website

Got me thinking though, how little of my own work is actually on line. Apart from a the test animations here and a few other things I don’t actually have a website. I used to have a website years and years ago, but it was a lot of trouble to maintain - this was before youtube and vimeo made it easy to store video data externally from your website. I would have to encode up .asx and .asf files and store them in my allocated web space. Maybe I should think about putting up more work online - or at least devising an wasy way for people to see my work. Worth considering.

Heres the websie address:
Hoo on Who

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getting old…

davesplace — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:28:36 +0000

Went to see A and the Wildhearts Last night. Last time I saw A was 5 years ago and I was jumping up and down like a lunatic.
Last night I was so lethargic it was not even funny. Its kind of sobering to realise you are one of the ’stand at the back crowd’.

Also I read today that Oliver Postgate has died

I grew up watching Ivor the engine and Bagpuss . I have some place a radio interview he gave to Phil Jupitus talking about the little things he would knock up to make animation. Little additions to a Bolex camera, Usually made out of Meccano. I think in many ways He was a very British Animator, Part Artist, Part technician and with just the right amount of eccentricity.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7773124.stm

http://www.smallfilms.co.uk/

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first test footage….

davesplace — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:52:18 +0000

I have finally moved into my house, a mere 4 months after buying it!! The first thing i did was to set up the home studio to do work in.

have spent a bunch of time rigging some for the pirate robots up the production. Got to re rig another robot due to horrible scale issues but i am quite happy with how this rig is turning out, just got to set up to wobbling Castor and handle head rotations

for another robot i have made a small tool to help automate animation tasks which i will be uploading a video of here at some point.

Robot rig #1 from Dave Animator on Vimeo.

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8 hours left to live?

davesplace — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:32:53 +0000

Just as I was about to go to bed I spotted this story on yahoo:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/itn/20080909/twl-physicists-ignore-black-hole-theory-41f21e0.html

ITN - Tuesday, September 9 06:12 pm

Leading physicists are set to go ahead with a Big Bang experiment despite warnings it could destroy the universe.
Scientists at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) plan to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light to create mini-versions of the explosion believed to have triggered the birth of the cosmos.

Cosmologists think an explosion of an object the size of a small coin occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to the formation of all matter.

A key aim of the experiment is to find the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that some theorists believe give matter its mass.

But the experiment, which will take place inside a 17-mile tunnel deep underneath the Swiss-French border called a Large Hadron Collider (LHC), could shed light on other mysteries like the existence of supersymmetry, dark matter and dark energy.

News of the controlled explosion has led to warnings of potential disaster.

Some critics say the experiment will create “black holes” of intense gravity that could implode the Earth, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a “worm hole” in space-time.

A safety review by scientists at CERN and in the US and Russia rejected the prospect of such outcomes.

Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the research centre, said: “The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction.”

Professor Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, said: “Collisions at these and greater energies occur millions of times a day in the EarthÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s atmosphere, and nothing terrible happens.”

The experiment is set to begin soon after 8am on Wednesday

My old secondary science teacher spoke about this 15 years ago! C’mon guys! its taken you long enough to get there!

It would be interesting to see what happens, if they can find the secret of the origins of the universe. No doubt religous types will get all huffy about it when God/Allah/Buddah/Ik Onkar/Aliens/Flying spghetti monsters (ad infinitum) fails to make an appearance. I do like the idea of a health and safety inspecotr turning up at Cern with a clipboard.

“yes?”

“health and safety inspection. I am here to see your Large Hadron Collider”

” Very good, its this 17 mile tunnel”

“ I see, and has this 17 mile tunnel been PAT tested?”

The experiement is due to take place in approximately 8 hours.

So there is an incredibly remote possibility that in 8 hours a black hole could form and impode the earth, which after the weekend of rain we had here in blighty, would come as something of a relief. Just in case I think i will set my alarm for 8:30

nighty night all. in the meantime heres a quote from the hitchhickers guide to the galaxy which I thought was pretty apt

“there is a theory which states thats if ever anyone ever discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disapear and be replaced by something even more bizarely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

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Last minute problems

davesplace — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:43:36 +0000

With about 24 hours before meeting up with a director i have been working with I started to prepare some CD to hand off. But whats this? A whole scene is missing? AHHHH!!! no problem, just re make the scene from scratch but i really could do without the grief

The new computer arrived last wednesday, Its been a glorious week. but sadly I find myself cursing my laptop whenether i have to do anything with it How quickly my attitude has changed. Before the laptop was my work horse, now I wonder how i Ever managed with it

Of course it is useful Like tommorow when i meet the director becuause I can guarentee he wont bring a laptop with him so it will be a good job when i open up my laptop and show off the stuff i have been working on in the critical 20 minute window before the battery runs out…

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Emergency! Emergency!

davesplace — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:43:20 +0000

I have finsihed for the day and I find I am reflecting on an incredible day.

At 1.30 this morning, Police pursuing a car ended the chase in my street. The car the suspects where driving, crashed into a lamp post a few doors down before spinning at least 3 times, comming to a halt outside my house. one of the suspects ran down my drive, and across my back garden before being tackled by a police officer, through my garden fence. It was a pretty strange night. The Police had to retrieve evidence from the back garden.

When i read of stories of ‘have a go heroes’ I wonder what i would do if I where in a similar situation. Well now I know. I stumble around the house all befuddled , making sure everything is ok before stuggling to find a pair of shoes and and seeing whats going on. to be frank I would be a crap have a go hero which is kind of sad really. I would like to think that I was a moral , upstanding citizen who would not hesitate to do the right thing. but the reality is in a crunch i have all the quick-wittedness of a cheese sandwich. I couldnt even remember my postcode!!!

The plus side is that Have a go heroes types to get asaulted and/or stabbed by the irrational criminal type they are looking to apprehend and in the current climate of knife related crime, its not something i would welcome.

after that sleep was pretty much impossible for the next 3 hours. mainly because a bunch or workmen turned up to make the wrecked lamp post safe (and also I dont admit to being a little unnerverd)

fast forward to this afternoon, where there was a fire drill. So for the second time today I have been involved in an emergency services-related activity. and They say nothing ever happens n a bank holiday!

That said I am slightly nervous about leaving the office now incase i get hit by a bus or something and end up having to got to hospital in an ambulance!

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being organised…

davesplace — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:00:21 +0000

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…

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