GETTING FOCUSED

The popular website CG Focus has done a profile on me and my work here at Studio ArtFX. It consists of a good interview, a profile and even a gallery of some of my latest images. You might be surprised what kind of perspective doing something like this can give an artist.

Doing an interview may often raise a number of questions, back to back, that may have never crossed your mind on your own. In answering them you may find out things about what you do and why you do it, or have come to do it, that you didn't see clearly before. You may also find that the reasons that you began to do a thing, may not be the reasons you continue to do it. This is why it is good to consider these issues and refocus on occasion.

What am I after? This is the chief question of an effort to refocus. The time has come to look at the past the present and consider the future as the next great phase of my work begins.

In other news: I was recently introduced to an interesting 3D software called Piranesi from Informatix Software. It appears that it allows the user to take the most basic 3D render of a model, done in the package of your choice it seems, and using the depth information and perspective from it, allow you to texture it in 2D and create an overall painterly image as your final result. I can see on one hand how this could be very useful for what I do. On the other hand, I could also see trapping myself into doing more 3D that I ever wanted to. I still think it's worth checking out.

I have a number of different ways to do backgrounds now. Maybe I should spend some time talking about that on this blog in the future. What do you think?

Comments?

Ok, I haven't updated in a very long time, but you know how completing projects and holiday seasons can be. Well, I can at least say that everything is finished!

I completed the Daniel promo video and got burned to DVD and ready to get out. Of course, a video that size could never be put on this site, but the new scene which is inside the video can be. That will go up on the site sometime this week. I will talk about that bit later.

I am now at the point where actual production can begin. I guess that means it's back to the boards. Still, I will take a few days to ramp up into it. There are a couple of other things I want to get going too. :)

Promo Scene

The Daniel promo scene, not to be confused with the larger promo video in which it will appear, is complete. I just finished the voice over work and sound FX editing today and burned a test DVD to view on different screens. I am satisfied. So when will it be online? I am not sure.

Along with some other changes to this site, it will appear online later this week. I will probably finish the entire video first, which shouldn't be more than another day or two of voice recording and editing work. The promo video as a whole will not likely appear online. It will be too long. The new scene from Daniel, however, will be up soon.

I am getting very excited about the Daniel project. Seeing completed work can do that for you. I recommend to anyone working on a project, specially a long one, to break it up into bits which can be completed, sound music and all if possible, so that you can gain that boost of motivation which can only come from seeing progress go across a screen.

What is great about this method is that my first completed piece now contains a bit of everything necessary to realize the entire first episode. I have done a bit of everything. Now I only need do more of the same to complete the first episode. The first episode will then be a piece of what is needed to do the entire series. See how that motivation works?

I am going to change this site to focus more on the Daniel project which will be my principal endeavor for western audiences for some time. Aside from that, I will also continue to develop my projects for the east. More on that later...

Comments?

The music for the Daniel promo video has been completed and all that remains is the recording of the narration. In the promo scene there is a small amount of sound FX editing to be done as well. Unfortunately, there are noisy crews with big machines outside painting or doing something which might prevent me from getting a decent recording.

In fact, this has not been the greatest week in general. I had some mail problems earlier where I could neither send nor receive mail. Eventually receiving got fixed. Nice, huh? Finally after all was fixed, the permissions on my site were somehow changed such that I could not even update this blog, or anything else for that matter.

Anyway, all is back to normal and my plan is to wrap all things up this week and then move on to the next step.

The Problem With CGI

The biggest problem that I find with CGI in recent films is based on a single erroneous belief. That is the belief that anything is possible in CGI. That is simply not true. Because of this belief, however, anything is tried in CGI and the result is effects that look like they belong on the Playstation, or worse, in cartoons.

In a film like Jurassic Park, the CGI works so well because they didn't believe anything was possible in CGI. In fact, they didn't trust it. They were originally going to do the dinosaurs with Phil Tippett's "Go Motion" technique, an improved version on the stop motion animation mastered and made popular by Harryhausen. The CGI team had to prove it could be done. Even then, more shots than you think, in that film, are done with Stan Winston's practical or robot dinosaurs and not in CGI.

This mode of thought has been done away with in recent FX work. Now everything has be CGI simply because "it can". As a result, CGI continues to get worse and worse such that even old Sinbad films boast better effects than modern fare simply they worked within their means.

Don't get me wrong. I realize that a large part of the problem is that studios want more and bigger effects in half the time and on a third of the budget, but some great FX houses have done some things I would think they shouldn't dare to show on their demo reel. That is because those things really should not have been done. No one would have tried it in the pre-CGI days. Why do it now if it looks like something from Quake 2?

The Daniel promotional video is now all cut to temp music. Now all that remains is writing the original music to replace that and then doing the voice over work. I think it may be done in the next few days. The new scene which will be inside the video will be posted to this site soon.

Comments?

Well, the first pass on editing the Daniel: Visions and Dreams promotional video has been completed. Assuming there are no gross errors in it, the next step is music scoring for the video and then, when my voice returns to normal, finishing the narration. I suspect it will all come together early next week.

If I've learned anything from this, it's that I really need Premiere Pro. Having seen it in action, I know that some things would have been much much easier to tackle in it rather than in Premiere 6.0. I am not complaining mind you. Premiere 6.0 has served me well and will continue to do so for some time to come. Speaking of software...

I received my final release copy of modo in the mail today. Just in time too as I will soon begin full production on Daniel and move even into bigger projects for the far east. I have a lot ahead of me and need the tools to match the tasks. I can't wait to get deep into it and find all its secrets!

This new Daniel promotional video is far more than just the new scene which I have been working on. It will include a number of elements which I am currently in the process of gathering and editing together. If things go well enough, the editing can be done today, then will I return to music scoring for the piece at large.

I am learning a wide variety of interesting new things while working on this project. Not that I haven't done anything like this before. It bares many similarities to Chaos: Dream to Reality. Still there are some things that I remember bein ghard which seem shockingly easy this time around.

One example would be sound synch. There is an interview I shot in which the sound, because my camera microphone was not of adequate quality, was recorded onto DAT using my Rode microphone and a mixer. This allowed me to get the same crisp sound heard in ost any professionaly recording, but the sound was now separate from the video. We used a "clapper" of sorts to mark synch points, but I still remember having trouble getting it all to work. Not this time, though! In fact, I didn't even use the synch points we deliberately placed in the video. I just used the first word of each clip I was using and grabbed the sound to attach. I maybe had to slide it a frame or two and then that was it! Seems too easy, huh? Well, it worked.

Either way, I hope to wrap up this portion today and get back to scoring. When my voice is back to normal, I will then record the narration for not only the Daniel promotional scene, but the entire video. I suspect it will all wrap by Monday.

THE STATE

It's been quite some time since I updated so I guess I should write about the current state of things. I've been sick certain days but I also wanted to keep the modo logo and information around due to the press release that's been going around and the promotion they are doing on their site.

I haven't been totally inactive though. Cakewalk Music Creator has been fired up again and I have already written the music for the Daniel promotion scene. In fact, all that's left is to record the narration for it and that scene will be complete and ready to go online. I won't be doing that as soon as I might want to though.

That scene is part of a much larger promotional video which I must first edit together, write music for and record narration for as well. So I plan to edit the overall promotional video first, then finish music for the whole thing and finally record all voice work necessary.

It was good to be back in Music Creator. I seem to learn something new each time I use it. I wonder if I could ever truly exhaust all the power available in just having this software and the music library I use. I am also finding different ways to make doing music faster, with more freedom and more fun, but more on that later.