Tag: announcement

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Beat as in “tired”… or as in “rhythm”?

That’s been 26 February to 4 March 2017. And it is both tired and rhythm. One because the other.

On Wednesday, I made the decision to step away from “A moment in the sun” until I finish this heinously draining temporary internal transfer at Easter (mid-April). A narrative animated short film is the wrong project for me until the work stress eases off. Something little and time-boxed would be much better.

So it’s time again for a brief change of creative direction.

I took a couple of months at the beginning of last year to sculpt and do character animation and that refreshed me nicely. This time I’m going to learn Animation Nodes with the intent of making some groovy procedural animation.

The working title is RYGCBMK◯, though RYGCBMKO is fine too. You can probably guess what the letters R G B and C M Y K stand for. The circle is just a circle. The finished piece will be pleasing rhythms for the eyes and ears.

I’ll be working on it until Easter and I’m targeting an Easter Monday release. I’ve written a project brief and set particular limitations around creative methodology, but I’ll talk a bit more about those next week. 🙂

 

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A moment in the sun Journals Stuff I made

When fun turns to humdrum, add a robot

Roughly by the middle of 27 November to 3 December 2016, the project had reached a crisis point. After a month of rewriting, tinkering and procrastination on “Sombrero” since Blender Conference 2016, progress had ground to a halt. I’d completely lost confidence that I could deliver “Sombrero” next year – injuries, stress from the office job and family-related stuff are already pain points in my life, and I didn’t want Pointy and Gronky standing in the same queue bringing me down.

After about twelve months of development, I’ve shelved “Sombrero”.

2016-12-03-baai-hatI rethought things with the new central notion that this project is meant to be a fun and fulfilling use of my spare time. and I want a movie to show for it next year. So on Wednesday I downscoped the project to tell a shorter, funner and funnier story.

There’s a lot of fun to work with already. Gronky and his playful antics are already fun. The consequences of Pointy’s characteristic lack of forethought should also be fun. But that bloody hat just wasn’t bringing the fun.

So now there’s a robot. It’s a very helpful robot – at least, it’s trying to be helpful…

The new story is much shorter. I’m retaining the characters as is and snatching up fun ideas from previous rewrites and generally avoiding the foul Gordian Knot of character motivation and story logic that comes with sustaining a longer film, so AMITS is back to being short and sweet and weird and funny, like it should be.

So it’s a fond but possibly overdue goodbye to “A moment in the Sun: Sombrero”, and a warm hello to “A moment in the Sun: Robot”. 🙂

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This is a chuditch from the best citizen science initiative ever: the Western Shield camera watch. (Yes I’m a month late finding out about this. Shoosh.)

Western Shield is a concerted effort to prevent endemic animals of the southwest from going extinct. If you’re a long-term follower, you know a lot of their target animals from my photos: woylies, numbats, dibblers, tammar wallabies and of course lovely spotty chuditches,

Ninety trusty Reconyx camera traps have been deployed in the southwest to assess the success of the program and to survey different sites with or without invasive predator controls in place. This has left them with about 200,000 capture sets of wildlife to sort through.

And this is where you come in.

You can help out by heading over to Zooniverse, getting registered and telling the nice website what you see in the pictures. (Fair warning 1: it’s mostly grey kangaroos and black-gloved wallabies, though the traps have captured plenty of cute joeys and an epic fight or two.) You can give it a shot for yourself here.

Fair warning 2: It’s superlatively addictive. But it’s for a good cause!

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Krita’s animation branch just hit public beta. You should definitely check it out.

Krita is a free/open source bitmap paint program – think SAI or openCanvas, maybe even Photoshop. Recently the Krita guys did a crowdfund to add new features like the ability to animate on multiple layers. It’s already a super-capable painting program, but this new feature makes it something like the open source answer to TV Paint – not as spiffy or fully featured as TV Paint, but still.. 

The Krita devs very kindly helped me optimise
Krita’s settings for my particular setup so it runs noticeably
faster. Here are tips which apply to the beta:

  • For AMD CPUs, go to Settings > Configure Krita > Performance and make sure “Disable vector optimisations” is checked.
  • Certain
    NVidia graphics cards are slow to convert between float and int. If
    your card is affected, set your colour space to a float format (16 bit
    float or 32 bit float) and not an int format like 8-bit or 16-bit. You
    can use Image > Convert Color Space to go between colour spaces.
  • View > Instant Preview mode speeds up drawing to screen.

Hope you enjoy these two little loops of Pointy and Gronky. Gronky seems especially excited while Pointy appears to be doing the Hertzfeldt Wiggle. 🙂

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When brecht leaves blender institute

whoblend:

If you haven’t heard, Brecht is taking off to work on Arnold Renderer. Sadly, this means no moonlighting on competing products like Blender’s awesome Cycles pathtracer – Brecht has been the lead developer on Cycles since its inception.

All the best and good luck, Brecht!