New Front Page

I updated my front page with some GIFs, to jazz it up a bit, but also to simplify and to give people a better first impression of what I am about.

I’m a bit concerned the loading time might be affected by the heavy file size.

Any feed back would be greatly appreciated.

Comments open.

Mission Statement 08/02/2016

Hello.

My name is Paul Greer I work at BDH Design and Direction in Bristol making computer animation for the television and other formats. I live in the West of England. I am married with three children.

In my spare time (distant laughter) I draw, write and play with animation.

I started this blog nearly ten years ago as a mixture of a scrapbook of internet things, a log of my professional work, and an archive of my more personal art and drawings.

My main interests are animation and investigating different ways of telling stories with pictures. I also like to post about music, tech, film, friends, politics and comics.

This is a very exciting time with regards to story telling and the ways those stories are disseminated so I would like to connect with people who have a similar interest in radiant experiments with media, and who might like share what we can offer to that project.

As well as this I would like to use this blog as a research station and personal feedback loop to reinforce and encourage my creative life, hopefully providing a resource and point of encouragement to readers as well.

Here is a gallery of the some of work I have been part of or have been fortunate enough to make myself.

Fortune: “Done is better than perfect”.

Continue reading

Format shift news for RSS subscribers 

As anyone who follows me on RSS (haha!) will have noticed I have started making more microblog style posts on this feed on a daily basis. I have decided to do this so that some things I post on social media have a home here too. Somewhere between a backup and me having control of my own content. So you can get separate RSS feeds for this site, one to include the long read posts, ones categorised “macro”, and one for short posts titled “micro”. Frequency will on the macro will therefore be, at the very most, 2 or 3 times weekly.

Here they are:

From this site:

Microblog – miniposts, daybook, scrapbook.

Macroblog – News and longer posts,

Both – of the Above

Also:

LinkFeed – Everything I bookmark

Tumblr – (Proto-Scrapbook)

 

Adding a Secondary Microblog in WordPress

After a few days off at home I get to overthinking things, like how this website works for me and how it can improve the way I use the internet in general.

Background: Like many I often find myself spooling through web content, looking for I know not what. Now this has in the past actually added much to my life, new friends, unexpected ideas and new ways of doing things coming into my life because I discovered them in such a way.

However there is a balance and I would rather use more of the limited time I have on this good planet to make my own creative progress, still enjoying the benefits of the web, but to do that in a focused, limited and directed way once my affairs are in order.

This means, to me, spending and posting more here, on my internet home. I use and enjoy Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and love posting what I do in those places, but they are other peoples places not mine, and would rather I have those status updates, images, quotes and links posted here as well as there, so I have a record of them should any of those accounts become compromised and also so I have a searchable record of these things.

The Proposal: To create a secondary microblog within this website,  but also with the capability of separating it  in the rss subscription so friends who also follow me on social media won’t get the duplication and only receive macro/longread type posts they may not have already seen elsewhere.

Method: A greater organisation an delineation in posting. I have created two main categories. Firstly MACRO, which encompasses my news blog, and any update pertaining to what I have been up to, art I have made and things happening at BDH. There are 9 subcategories for this and they are:

  • 365 Drawing Project – A 365 daily drawing project begun in good faith, but thwarted by life, death, progress and other forces. I have since scaled it back to “regular” but I still aim to fulfil the 365 target.
  • Animated Journal  – “I had always liked the picture a day format, video diaries etc, and animation is, traditionally a long drawn out, painful process, so this was me trying to find a way to free it up and make it a bit more ephemeral. I should’ve just waited a few years for the smartphones to do it for me, but there you are.”
  • Event Diary – What’s happened. What’s happening. What may be happening in the future.
  • Notebook Pages  – “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
  • Personal Record – Diary, stories, personal updates, journal, histories.
  • Picture Stories – Comics, narrative images, story telling, sequential art.
  • Process Archive – How tos, Maya, CGI, work arounds, Ways of doing.
  • Smooth Criminals – Mastermind Group, heroes, mentors, friends.
  • Work Updates – Mainly things pertaining to my role as Head of CGI at BDH.

The second one is called MICRO, this will be a scrapbook of sorts, a research project, a gathering of links and artifact, juxtaposition of non sequiturs for future consideration, as much for my benefit as anyone elses. Within it there are 7 sub-categories as follows:

  • Note Taking – note taking method, master mind groups, daydreams, ticket stubs, daily pages, day books, sketch pads, tentative drawings, empty cities
  • Radiant Thinking – Creative logic, positive imaginings, brain food, associative machines, dynamic potentials, positive humanism, sexual politics, human rights
  • Story Mapping – Narrative method, mythical shapes, hysterical realism, literary maximalism, codified things, unauthentic representation.
  • Picture Literatures – Alternative Comics, Sequential visual narrative, photo stories, cave paintings. Little comics everywhere.
  • Imagined Spaces – Autodesk Maya, Arnold, Unity, virtual realities, 360 Video, computer graphics, rendering, augmented environments.
  • Broken Rhythms
  • Math – Number theory, abstract science, spacial quantities,
  • Flickery Lights – Unusual animation, things that move, experimental puppetry, stop motion, cinematographs.
  • Photo Ghosts – Real scans, photographic echoes, fictional memories, old fashioned film, compulsive transparencies, ethereal landscapes
  • Status Updates – notepad, blurtings, tweets, thoughts, discarded moments.

In addition to these will be the category of Daybook which is a home for longer form posts involving min and other peoples work, otherwise defying categorisation.

It is clear to me at this stage that many of the things I have posted here so far fall into these categories so I will be retrospectively allocating posts to the above for the help of navigating the archive.

 

A few words on the tumblr purchase.

A few words on the purchase.

Something was going to buy Tumblr at some point, we have just been waiting for the moment.

I certainly think the Tumblr Elves deserve a big payoff, they made a magical, wondrous place where we have met and made so many good friends.

Unfortunately Yahoo have such a poor reputation of buying beloved places and then letting them rot or actually running them into the ground.

But Tumblr is my internet home so I will continue to be here and see how it progresses.

The most important thing is the connections that have been made, and I don’t see why we should not capitalize on the sell off too.

The walls around the internet gardens are getting higher and stronger so it is important to find ways around this.

So if you’re into what I share, do or think about, you can generally find me on most internet things. Or you can send me an email, I’m thinking of starting a list, the address is on my Tumblr page.

It’s been emotional.

Always yours,

Burningfp (Scorpio)

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cross posted on tumblr

Five Years

This day five years ago I followed a link from Susannah Breslin went through the wardrobe and made my first Tumblr post.

I have written many times before how such a seemingly insignificant thing has had such a huge impact on me and my life, but it always worth giving thanks.

I very rarely felt as home here as anywhere before, the number of people discovered, friendships found, projects invented, things made from being here are too many to number.

I’m not sure how long Tumblr will last in this current state, it seems inevitable that it’ll get assimulated by a large corporate amoeba.  It’s still a bit clunky, inefficient, infuriating at times but for now it’s still working for me.

So thanks all.

This one’s for you.

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(cross posted on tumblr)

This is the Electronical Rattle Bag…

I’m Burningfp.

I work at BDH making CGI for television programmes, and in my spare time I play with animation.

There is a scrapbook where I collect interesting things I like from the internet, but there is some of my stuff here too.

There are some house rules.

The nature of what I do means there is often not much to show because I only finish a handful of things a year, therefore I tend to remain overly cagey about what I get up to. That is not deliberate, it’s just the way it turned out.

I intend to show a bit more of what I do here, personally and professionally, so for people following me for my excellent taste in people and art, be warned, there will be a substantial shift in quality of this feed.

I also tweet, Google+, and there is a Facebook page if you like that kind of thing.

If you need any work doing you can contact my employer.

Alternatively you can ask me questions here, or email me, if want to keep it secret (I don’t guarantee a response).

I wish all followers the very best for the next few weeks, I know late December can be unbearable for some people, for so many different reasons. Try to believe in yourself and don’t let people control how you feel. Do that and we should all get through it in one piece.

Kind Regards.

P
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