National Geographic have uploaded an image gallery from one of the dinosaur shows we worked on. Some of the compositions on the stills they have chosen are a bit unusual, and they seem to have upload everything twice, but they still look marvellous to me.
Two things coming up recently regarding powerful rich “artists” making kudos and money from the hard work of whom they can only consider to be lesser mortals.
First you should know that Richard Prince has been “re-photographing” since the 1970s. He takes pictures of photos in magazines, advertisements, books or actors’ headshots, then alters them to varying degrees. Often, they look nearly identical to the originals. This has of course, led to legal trouble. In 2008, French photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince aft..er he re-photographed Cariou’s images of Jamaica’s Rastafarian community. Although Cariou won at first, on appeal, the court ruled that Prince had not committed copyright infringement because his works were “transformative.”
– A reminder that your Instagram photos aren’t really yours: Someone else can sell them for $90,000
..and then Dan Clowes on that Shia Lebeouf thing:
“Speaking of grudges: Have you forgiven Shia LaBeouf?”
“I don’t know. No, not really. I mean, I don’t hold a grudge. I don’t think about it that much. But I don’t think what he did was really forgivable. I don’t know that it matters that much if he’s apologizing or whatever. I just hate the idea of anybody doing that to some young artist who couldn’t hire legal representation. I’m sort of the one guy who could deal with something like that, and it would be really possible for somebody with his amount of money and power to just crush some poor young artist if that happened to them, and I would hate to see that. So I don’t think it’s something that needs to be forgiven; I think it’s something that always needs to be thought of as just a horrible thing to do.”
– Comics Legend Daniel Clowes on Hate Mail, Jim Belushi, and Not Forgiving Shia LaBeouf
Difficult for me to comment on this without falling into ranting, which is how I am supposed to react.
Let’s cleanse ourselves by reading about the true artists who Lichenstein “homaged”, in Deconstructing Lichtenstein.
Finally an article addressing a parallel issue of the popular misconceptions around the creation of CGI for big budget features:
As the debate surrounding what visual effects are worth rages on, it is clear that the studios themselves have an interest in perpetuating the myth that VFX are the product of clinical assembly lines and the results are equally lifeless and mechanical. Blaming computers for the dumbing down of movies has become a journalistic trope that is bandied about to squeeze the one part of the Hollywood machine that has no union or organizational skill to push back.
This week we received the official nomination certificates for the BAFTA for Digital Creativity.
This was for the War of Words VR app that was made by the team at BDH from the some of the animations we made for the War Of Words: Soldier Poets of the Somme documentary I have talked about extensively here.
As far as I know the App is still available on iTunes and the Play store.
This also reminds me that we picked up two West of England RTS awards recently (during my “blog break”). One for Best Graphics for War of Words and the other for Best Short Animation for The Somme In Seven Poems. It was quite an evening as I wasn’t really sure we’d win anything, let alone two, and beating such greats as Arthur Cox and Aardman Animations.
So I had to do two speeches, which was interesting for everyone I think. Hopefully I kept it short and mumbly, because I actually remember nothing about being on stage except a sea of expectant faces and the overwhelming urge to run.
Here’s some pictures of us collecting and yes that’s me at the mic:
Quite an evening. Felt very lucky and blessed that what we worked so hard on was recognised in such a way.
That’s the end of the trumpets.
In other news I have fired up the old Facebook page to stream sketches and the like, because, even though I am a grown up I still have a problem zapping art in front of people who have friended me there, so it’s a separate place for that. Please follow along if you like Facebook.
I’m also trying to restart the daily sketching project, now the dust has settled, but it’s less “daily” more “regular”, I’m still keeping the 365 count as I would like to have some closure on that. They go on Instagram then get sent everywhere else. So probably best not follow me in more than one place because you’ll get repeats and no-one deserves that.
Until next time.
There is a interesting confluence that occurs in the brain when it’s been focused on a project so singularly and for such a long period of time, and then that project ends. After a space of quiet all the thoughts you didn’t have for the intervening months suddenly crash in from all angles. It’s a very fruitful and provides great perspective, but can be over very quickly.
I’ll will post something about the job in question when it gets released, but for now I would just say We had the good fortune to work with animator Rosie Ashforth who turned around several of the miracles we performed to get the job done on time.
So I’ve had a couple of days off to recover, and to remember what the outside looks like.
It looks like this:
There’s a lot of catching up to do here as I missed out so much time but that will come. As the country recovers from a pretty dark election result and a new compassion less Britain, and summer struggles to get itself into gear. But there’s no need to mourn.
Currently reading this book:
I’ll feedback on that in due course.
Some of the thought tsunami concerned comics, which is always troubling. I’m re-reading Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice:
Useful tools:
Paper
Pen
Life
…all else is vanity.
So we’ll see how that plays out.
The animation world lost the marvellous David Anderson, his film Deadsy was very intrinsic to the way I think about animation in general.
Check it out.
You’ve got until Monday 12pm to catch “The Somme in Seven Poems” (12 mins), and 10 days from today to catch the full length documentary “War of Words: Soldier Poets of the Somme”.
I’ll write a more comprehensive post about this project and how it went down at a later date, but due to recent events this is about as much as I can manage at the moment.
Take care.
One of the splendours of using After Effects and Maya together is being able to import cameras from one to the other.
I use this feature a lot and then the issue came with a scene I just working on. I tried many different things and eventually realised it was the scene that was triggering the problem. I wondered if it had picked up a glitch that AE didn’t like.
So my fix was, To make a new fresh scene, import the previously exported camera (the one AE refused) then to export it again from there. Then it worked.
EDIT: Ensure that the correct resolution is set in the render settings and the camera focal length also matches the original camera.
At BDH I was recently a small part of the awesomeness that was the CGI and graphics team on The new Professor Brian Cox series Human Universe.
It begins, with the first episode “Apeman-Spaceman” this evening (Tuesday 7th October) on BBC TWO.
We previously worked on the Wonders of the Universe and Wonders of Life with the same team.
Paul Greer 