I Don't Like Anime

When I grew up in the 70s, I didn't see any animation from Japan. I know there were some around, like Astro Boy, and Kimba The White Lion, but I don't recall any of it being broadcast in New Zealand. If it was, I overlooked it.

In the 80s it started to appear, but not in the forms most people think of Anime today. There was one about Peter Pan, another called The Yearling based on a book about a kid and his pet fawn, and one I think was falsely named Thunderbirds 2086, barely connected with the real Thunderbirds series. And even then, I looked at this crude animation, staccato frame rate, irritating drawing style, horrible english dubbing, weird inexplicable surrealism, and bizarre pacing, and thought it was inferior and a waste of my time.

I look at Anime and Manga and just can't connect with it. The Japanese sense of storytelling always seems to be either overacted melodrama, a childish (rather than juvenile) sense of humour, or unexplained oddness for the sake of oddness. And it has become so ingrained in their traditions that they don't think it requires development or exposition anymore, as their audiences already accept and "get" it.

It's a cultural divide that leaves me confused. I think I'd have to dedicate myself to sitting through a lot of their stuff before I'd start to get it, but I am not willing to subject myself to the torture of watching what I think of as ugly, unrefined, messy insanity.

When I first saw the lauded Akira, expecting to finally understand what all the fuss was about, I instead was left dazed and mystified on what the hell the ending was about. It started out well, as a dystopian fascist world is fought against by rebellious teens on whizzy motorcycles - but then mad scientists burst into humongous alien giant babies, and the city explodes. The End. I mean, what the holy fuck?

There are always exceptions to the rules, of course. Not all Anime has giant robots, huge explosions, and big doe-eyed spikey haired wide-shouldered smouldering heroes with unfeasibly big swords. But they do all seem to have toothless gasps, sweaty droplets, and long gaps in the conversation left unadjusted, making the pace of dialogue stop-start.

One exception is often argued to be Hayao Miyazaki, who has a more sedate and deeper approach to storytelling. I do enjoy the casual surrealism of Spirited Away, even though it is utterly weird in most places. The gentle quiet moments can be quite beautiful. However, I found Princess Mononoke to be pseudo-eco mysticism at its most maddening, and I gave up on it when I realised I didn't care about any of the characters, due to not understanding one whit of what was going on. It was just a lot of spirits swirling around in an attempt to save their environment, and an unrequited love story. I think.

As the 90s and 2000s passed, more and more Anime is being produced, seemingly catering to specific popular genres. Fantasy, science fiction, and sometimes superhero, ideas are thrown around with wild abandon. Things hardly touched upon in Western entertainment find a place where they are embraced and developed in huge expansive ways - Steampunk, hard SF, surreal dream imagery, alternative history, underwater and deep space travel - if you want to see it, Anime will provide numerous examples of it.

And that's so disappointing, I'd love to watch more genre stuff, but I can't stand watching anime for longer than five minutes before I want to gasp, sweatily, and tear my spiky hair out.

Death: Why Should I Care?

Here's a truth we cannot deny. Everybody dies.

There's not a single person on this planet who will not die, most within fifty years from now, some within 80 years from now, and for a few it will be closer to 100 years or so from now.

But then, some will die in a matter of months, weeks, or even days. Heck, just today there will be approximately 150,000 deaths. (However, there will also be about 200,000 births, just to even things up somewhat)

I may even die today, or tomorrow, or sometime within the next three months. Though statistics say that most people, barring those with predictive illnesses, have a 99.9% chance of living for another year.

Of the 150,000 deaths per day, we might hear about ten or fifteen of them in our local News. Usually all we hear about are the traffic accidents, plane crashes, natural disasters, and murders. And we also hear of when the famous die, however mundane the cause may be.

The rest of the deaths go unremarked upon, and yet we are supposed to care about the deaths that are reported in the News. The articles are written as though we should care, they play on our sympathies with photographs and comments from family members of the deceased, or worse, music montages. But I don't know these people! Why should I care one whit that a stranger died in a perfectly ordinary way, much like thousands of others have done before them?

Fair enough on reporting a spectacular incident, that may have resulted in deaths. The recent plane crash in Papua New Guinea is certainly an event worth reporting on.

But I don't care about the people who died! They are strangers to me! Don't try the sympathy angle, it's not going to work. And it was an accident! It's not like it will make any difference to anybody's travel plans, or that we have any power over preventing it from reoccurring!

Fair enough if it was a terrorist attack, or something like the bushfire deaths that occurred in February, that it should be reported on and analysed, where we ought to be warned. Undoubtedly that is significant News. But the people involved died just like any stranger dies; by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, circumstances having overwhelmed them. Telling me who they are and trying to play on my emotions is not going to help anyone involved in a similar situation in the future.

People die. If I don't have a tangential connection to them, I don't care a jot. Even if they had a very short innings in life, that still isn't enough of an excuse to try to get me to shed a tear.

Stalked In My Dreams

Some people have recurring dreams, or worse, recurring nightmares. Usually it's something like arriving at school, but naked, and not having done the homework that's due in five minutes. I've never had that particular dream.

But I have had recurring themes in my dreams. When I used to act on stage, at a poky little Repertory theatre in the middle of nowhere, I would have a nightmare just before the opening night of each play, where I'd be on stage and not be in the right costume, or would have forgotten my lines. It happened so regularly, and always before a run that went flawlessly, that I thought of it as a sort of good luck charm. In fact, once I didn't have the dream, and on opening night I forgot my first line.

Another recurring theme I have is driving.

I don't drive, I've never learned, and it's now so late in my life, I'm afraid to. Negotiating traffic scares the bejesus out of me, and in any case I'm not very good at paying attention to the hundred and one things I'd need to, to be a reasonably competent driver: signage, pedestrians, traffic, lights, radio, thinking, phone, cyclists, crazy unpredictability, weather, and all within very restrictive road rules. Operating a car doesn't bother me, I'm sure I could learn that very quickly, so if it was just me alone on the freeway, I'd be fine. But the thousands of obstacles constantly demanding my attention would send me into such a spin, I'd put others and myself at risk. Frankly it's best I stay away.

Having said that, unlike most people who dream of flying, instead I dream of driving. Usually it's me in control of a vehicle with passengers, taking them to some location and having an adventure on the way, often on the side of a hilltop climb. I usually have no problems with the driving in the dream, and I am even enjoying it. Usually anything bad that happens is caused by my leaving the vehicle and ending up in a crazy situation getting lost in suburbia.

But the scariest nightmares I have are ones with a very specific theme. I am usually alone, and aware that something is out there looking for someone - not specifically for me, but I am the closest likely victim - and I am trapped in a location, while this beast prowls around, just metres away. He can't see me, or sense me, but he is heading straight for where I am hiding.

Creeps me right out.

And the beast in these dreams is almost always a lioness. A big predatory cat stalking around looking for someone to leap on.

Last night I had the thematic dream again, this time in a different context. Instead of being alone, I was with a crowd of people. We were all forced out of our homes due to a natural disaster, and are in a compound bordered by chain-link fencing. And outside the fence is a pride of lions, prowling around, causing trouble.

Even though we were all safe behind the fence, the dream decided to manipulate my emotions into fear, and the limited options of getting out of the compound, in case of immediate death by lion, was forcing us into desperate acts. One of which was killing each other to reduce the impact on limited available resources.

The point is, the thematic repetition of my nightmares fascinates me, especially since there is a new narrative each time it reoccurs.

Dreams are weird.

By the way, I don't have a fear of lions, in a phobic or even genuine sense. But I wouldn't like to wander around anywhere where they're roaming.

To The Extreme

I don't know how common a viewpoint this is, but I have a particular dislike for graphic sex and violence in my entertainment. Except that's not always true, as it all stems from context.

I used to work for an Adult Website, so there was a lot of nudity and sex everywhere I turned. I had no moral or personal problem with this (except in very specific circumstances). To me, pornography has a purpose, and therefore a place, that works in as far as its intent fulfils a need in the marketplace. That is to say, if you want to see sex in explicit detail, for whatever reason, then porn is the place to see it.

However, I don't like to see sex or nudity in a TV show or movie.

This is not because I am prudish, but for a completely opposite reason. If they are trying to make the sex in the movie erotic, then the audience is going to be stimulated. And being stimulated sexually while viewing a drama in a public place like a cinema is neither appropriate nor comfortable. If stimulation is what you crave, do it privately, with material designed exclusively for that reason. Therefore, keep erotic displays of sex out of the movies.

After all, there are very rarely instances of a dramatic storyline where displays of nakedness and sex are necessary. Movie makers can tell the story without it, so why put it in? Imply it, refer to it, suggest it, or even excise it; there are alternatives that don't require its display.

Even worse, there are many times where they have sex displayed on screen, but aren't allowed to show nudity for ratings reasons, ending up with something so half-arsed and limp it's not worth the attempt. Writers, figure it out; just don't bother with your poorly written excuse for gratuitous exploitation.

Violence, on the other hand, I have a different view on. It can be argued, and often is, that violence in movies desensitises you to its impact in real life. I don't know if I agree with that entirely, I think people react to real life violence in exactly the same way they always have, and movies haven't changed that.

Currently, at least.

But we react reasonably to the results of violence, do we still react to the application of it? Is violence still enacted upon one another due to movies, and sports, showing it as a form of entertainment? I don't know, but it is my fear.

The problem I have with violence in movies is the three levels of display.

EXAGGERATED VIOLENCE AS ENTERTAINMENT:
I grew up on TV and movies that had a very sanitised approach to violence. Either they don't show it at all, and it happens off screen, or they showed the violent acts but with no resulting blood.

For example, a cowboy might shoot some enemy, but there'd be no visible wound or spurt of blood. Or a dramatic house fire would result in only a little soot on the victim's face. Very unrealistic, very safe, while still trying to imply the drama of the situation.

Later, in the 70s and 80s, violence started to get more graphic. Gore and blood were splashing around everywhere. It was ridiculously excessive, and so graphic as to be almost absurd. The acknowledgement of this absurdity helped reduce the impact of this "cartoon violence." The consequences were dismissed, but then the act of committing the violence was portrayed as equally over-the-top.

Arguably it was the wrong direction for entertainment to head in, but I don't have any real problem with its portrayal. It's now widely accepted as harmless, and I think this is probably true. Video games also usually take this approach to their violence, and for that reason I disagree on many people's views that video game violence is at unacceptable levels.

REALISTIC VIOLENCE AS DRAMA:
Sometimes the violence in a movie has to be portrayed to be real, so it may show something squeamishly graphic, but the reaction from the characters, and the point of the scene, will be about what that violence means in a genuine real life context. As much as I don't like seeing it myself, I have no issue with it existing in movies. It has a very important point to make, and it is well made when there is a subsequent reflection of reality.

REALISTIC VIOLENCE AS ENTERTAINMENT:
And then Quentin Tarantino came along, and fucked things up for everybody.

I hate Quentin Tarantino. I think he is a repulsive blight on the cinema landscape, and though I do not wish him ill, I know that if he was gone off this earth, I would not mourn him for a single second.

He has introduced and maintained sick, ugly, twisted, and repellent, displays of graphic, realistic, gratuitous violence, in every one of his so-called "iconic" movies, and used it solely for entertainment value.

He is morally repugnant, and should be stopped.

The violence that he portrays ought to have meaning, or real world level consequence, but it does not. It is used to get a laugh.

Fans argue that there is consequence, that we are supposed to dislike the people who are dishing out this violence. But I disagree - they are clearly anti-heroes who are the protagonists we are supposed to be rooting for. They are the main characters, the providers of entertainment in the stories, because there are no sympathetic lead characters in his films, but they are also the perpetrators of the most repellent levels of gratuitous cruelty.

It almost literally makes me sick. I refuse to watch Tarantino's films, so perhaps I'm missing out on some subtleties and growth in his abilities. But I doubt it very much.

Robert Rodriguez, who is something of a protégé of his, is almost as bad.

The problem is, that this level of gratuitous violent display makes me uncomfortable. When it is intended to make me uncomfortable, in a suitable dramatic way, then I reluctantly accept its place in entertainment. But when it is intended to make me laugh or whoop for joy, I am repulsed, and cannot enjoy any other aspect of the film.

I am concerned that the popularity of this kind of violence amongst modern audiences signifies a shift in what is acceptable in not just entertainment, but in real life, and things that used to shock and upset will soon be dismissed as blasé and push the bar of acceptability too high.

Virtual Environments

The main role for a digital matte painting is to create an entirely virtual environment, which is to say, a completely artificially assembled background for a shot.

They used to be made using paint, often on glass, which is then blended optically, that is practically, and re-photographed. But these days you can use photographs, blend them together seamlessly, and then apply them directly to 3D CG models to give them a small amount of dimensionality.

The art of putting all the elements together for the final shot is that of the compositor's. Though I have to be familiar with compositing as part of my job, it's not quite my forte; I am better at dimensional-related things than I am at colour matching and rotoscoping (clipping around edges). So the compositing for Checkpoint is being handed over to its Director, Rob. My job is just to create the background plates.

One of the pickup shots we filmed a few months ago contains possibly the most creative camera move of the entire shoot - a dolly and pan combination. The camera moves rightwards sideways along a track, simultaneously the camera pans left, while the actress runs up to camera, all in front of a greenscreen, which we set up in Rob's backyard.

The usefulness of a greenscreen is simple in effect, but it's not until I started actually doing all this work that I have come to realise just how wide the potential really can be. We can film anybody in any clothing and doing any activity, and then place them in any environment you can think of - in a French village, a Cafe, on a roof, off the side of a skyscraper, in a sewer, on the Moon... or on a country road near a UK airfield.

What do country roads near airfields look like? Well, almost anything we want it to look like. I decided on a stony road surface, a length of grassed verge, and then, 30m beyond, a line of pine trees. I figured I could put that together, using photographic elements, combined to look photoreal. Then I apply that onto 3D geometry, each plane representing a textured surface. Simple, but it has a limitation.

In my software, the only way for that to be useful is if the virtual camera stays static. The projected image is always oriented from the camera's point of view. That means if I move the camera, the image will move with it. This is no use, as I want the image to stay locked onto the geometry, not slide along in relation to the camera.

There is a solution, which is to check the box that fixes the image, relative to a specified frame of the camera motion. For example, if I set the camera up on frame 1 to point where the image best matches the geometry, and then set it to be fixed there, then, when I move the camera, the image will stay locked at that orientation, even though the camera is in a different place by frame 257. But what that means is the camera then leaves the image behind, it disappears out of view, and now you're pointing at blank geometry.

But there are solutions to that, too. One is to orient it to a different camera, perhaps one with a different frame scale, to give you more space to move your proper camera through.

Another solution is to use the tiling feature, which lets you repeat the image in any axis you wish. But that means your matte painting image has to be seamlessly tileable, and with its geographical features oriented in a parallel fashion to keep the tiling logical.

And this is what I did. I included four horizontal stripes - road, grass, trees, and sky - and blended the edges so they repeated seamlessly. Then, when the camera moved and panned sideways, the landscape continued horizontally along the geometry, and, though it repeated, it wasn't too glaringly obvious.

The repetition can't happen on all axes, so the top of the image, the sky, needed to be blended. I repeated its edge colour infinitely, so the "sky" continued up as a solid shade of blue.

And though that's the crux of this shot's makeup, it doesn't take into account the hand tracking of the three dimensional move (because the tracking software didn't fnd enough points to figure it out), the car model that is sitting on the roadside, the particle-created grass blades in the foreground, and all the other doodads that make up variation in the landscape.

I love creating something out of nothing.

Don't Say The "Z" Word.

It's fun to work on short films. I've managed to involve myself in all sorts of different sides to making a film, in pre-production, actual production, and post-production. I like to write, and draw storyboards; I have been a general dogsbody crew member, and even a co-director; and I have edited, and created visual effects.

But these things can take a lot of time and effort, sometimes to the point where you just don't want to do it anymore. Then you get over that feeling, and keep doing it anyway, like you've broken through the wall of exhaustion and doubt.

But one good solution to that exhaustion is to film, edit, and deliver the film all within a one day time limit.

15/15 is a short film festival that we entered last weekend. We had to put together a film in just fifteen hours. Rob came up with a simple story idea ten days before, and I wrote it up into a script. We tracked down one of our regular actors, and he liked the script. We got a few props together, and a location. The usual crew all agreed to take part. Then, in one single day, after being given the inherent limitation of the competition (a line of dialogue and an object that must be included), we filmed something called Fifteen Days.

The plot was simple, as it had to be to get everything done in time: A young guy puts together a video blog, and describes a few events that are going on in his neighbourhood, that turn out to be an infestation of the Undead. He is trapped inside his home, and rapidly the situation devolves.

The actor, James, was brilliant. He took my dialogue and added some of his own humour to it to make it his own, and it just made the whole thing so much better. Dave, our DoP (camera man) did his usual wonderful job at framing and taking care of the camera. This time we had a lot less discomfort for him to endure. And Dags managed to edit the sound effects in the allotted time with great skill, which made the film zing. And actually, enhance the frightening nature of our little horror story.

It was a lot of fun to see something come together so quickly, and very satisfying to see such a rushed assembly work as well as it did. We managed to submit the film within the time limit (with literally ten minutes to spare) and now we just have to wait and see if they liked it and if it will become a finalist.

But that doesn't really matter. We did it to see if we could (and we could) and to have another film under our belt (and it's a good one, too). We learned that when we knuckle down and put our shoulders to the wheel, our ear to the ground, our nose to the grindstone, and our feet on the floor... well, we'd be circus contortionists, I suppose. But we also can put together a wonderful piece of entertainment.

Hopefully it will motivate us to make more.

Does Nobody Understand The Apostrophe?

Apostrophes are certainly tricky, but they do adhere to strict principles. There is no need to guess, or stray, from consistent usage rules.

Missing Letters:
When letters are removed while contracting two words into one, mark the missing letters with an apostrophe.

• Can not = Can't
  
• Should have = should've (oh, don't get me started on this one)
  
• Are not = Aren't
  

Exceptions include "Ain't," which is arguably not a real word (though I maintain it's short for "Am not"), and "Won't," which is short for "Will not" but the "i" changes to an "o" for some wacky reason.

This rule also applies to names like "D'Angelo," short for "De Angelo," which, when contracted, ought to be pronounced as a single word ("Dangelo"). However, some people choose to pronounce it as though the apostrophe is a pause or accent ("De-Angelo"). This is a hard one to rule on, as names are very much personal choice for the owner.

Plural Possessives:
When a described object "belongs" to someone, then the apostrophe denotes that relationship.

• The dog's bowl. The bowl belongs to the dog.
  
• My friend's car. The car belongs to my friend.
  
• John's house. The house belongs to John.
  

If it's a plural, i.e. there are more than one of something, then an apostrophe is not used.

• Dog bowls. There are many bowls for the singular dog.
  
• My friend's cars. One friend, who has many cars.
  
• John's houses. John is a wealthy man and owns several houses.
  

As an aside, there is the case of "its" versus "it's".

"It's" is a contraction of "it is". The apostrophe denotes the missing letters. But "its" is a possessive, and does not use the apostrophe. This appears to be in contradiction of the rule, but it actually adheres to the rule of "his" and "hers". If you can orient your mind to that way of thinking, you should be able to figure it out and make the mistake less often.

Anyway, back to the rules.

If it's a group of people who possess many things, it is a plural possessive, and an apostrophe must be used in a unique way. After the plural "s".

• The dogs' bowls. Many dogs have a bowl each.
  
• My friends' cars. Several friends each have their own car.
  
• John's houses' lawns. The lawns of each house John owns.
  

And this is the key - you do NOT do this for every word that ends in "s", but ONLY for those that, because it is a plural, ends in the "s".

DO NOT DO THE FOLLOWING:

• The walrus' tusk.
  
• My dress' colour.
  
• Jess' house.
  

Instead do this:

• The walrus's tusk.
  
• My dress's colour.
  
• Jess's house.
  

Three of the same letters in a row may look strange, but that doesn't make it wrong by default. It adheres to the rule, therefore it is right.

Now, there are some official sources, such as the Chicago Manual of Style, that say the former is actually acceptable, but I call shenanigans, and maintain they are wrong.

Unfortunately, because that and similar manuals are used by a lot of modern journalists, we are being overwhelmed by this incorrect usage, and it is fast becoming a widely accepted standard.

I despair.

Sweet Tooth

I have blogged before how I should cut down on eating lollies, because of my constant teeth problems. But I rarely take any notice of such nonsense. I have been keeping my teeth cleaner than ever before, though, so that's something.

Australian lollies are decidedly bland, and extremely low in variety. All the jelly-based lollies taste the same, they only vary in shape. All the marshmallow or chocolate lollies are too sweet and sickly. Every shop you go into has the exact same range of lollies, across the country.

I miss New Zealand lollies. Jet Planes, Giant Wine Gums, Glo-Harts, "Ice Creams", Chocolate Chippie biscuits. None of these can be found here, outside of specialty shops. And until recently, there were no such specialty NZ shops in Melbourne (they're everywhere else in AU, including tons of them in Brisbane, for some reason). In order to get NZ lollies here I have to ship them down from Brisbane, or in from NZ, or occasionally I get my Mum to bring them when she visits. I'm sure this is far from unusual for immigrants like myself.

But finally a few NZ shops are starting to open in Melbourne, and I decided today to go visit one that is relatively nearby. It was a bit of a trek to get there, for I possess no vehicle and had to go by train. And then the place had only a small selection, which were quite expensive. Disappointing, but I splurged anyway, just for nostalgia's sake.

With luck, a more reasonably priced (and better located) option will make itself known sometime soon.

I Have The Key

Here's a handy tip. When you leave your house, make sure you have your keys with you before you close your door.

This may seem like an obvious tip, and one that many of you have suffered the brunt of before now, perhaps many times. But for me, this was my first time I had ever actually locked my keys inside anything.

At my previous home, the deadlock on the (only) door was one that could only be locked from the outside by using a key. This meant I always had my keys with me when locking the door.

At my new home, I have the lesser deadlock that has only one setting - always locked no matter where the keys may be located.

I don't know whose stupid idea it was to invent such a system, or why it's so prevalent, because it seems to me to be the stupidest method you could possibly choose. It makes no sense.

I have four keys on my keyring, and all of them are the same, as every lock in my place matches. But as I couldn't think of a place to secrete one of the spares outside without it being glaringly obvious to any nefarious evildoer who should happen to find themselves wandering around my back yard, I had not hidden any of the keys anywhere outdoors. I had hoped to have figured out a good alternative idea some day, but hadn't gotten around to doing so before I found myself in the stupidest of positions, that of being stuck outside my house with no way to get back in.

Luckily I was with my mate Rob when I discovered this foolishness, and I stayed at his place overnight, and next morning he drove me down to the Estate Agent's to grab a spare key. I am eternally grateful for his help.

I have now solved the issue of spare keys. I will have one on me most times I go out, as I almost always have at least some extra doodads hanging off me which can contain a spare key.

With luck, this particularly embarrassing situation won't happen again any time soon.

What I Did During My Summer Holidays

In the industry I am hoping to be involved with professionally, that of Visual Effects, you don't apply for jobs in the standard fashion, where you send in a simple Word doc that lists your past places of employment. Though you still do that, it's less a list of places and more a list of achievements, skills, and software. And hopefully a little bit of name-dropping. My friend Cameron can name-drop a hell of a lot of cool movie names and Directors on his resumé.

But what you also must add is what's known as a Showreel, or a Demo Reel, which is a series of video clips and sequences that show off examples of your actual achievements. And before I can show up at an interview for an Effects job, I need to put one of those together first.

Until recently, I have not had a lot of stuff to show, unfortunately. Most of what I have done in the past has been small potatoes, and not especially amazing. They show some amount of competence, but not really anything dazzling. So for the last two years, while working on more original and spectacular films, I have managed to slowly accrue quite a few examples of more applicable Visual Effects work.

At first I thought I didn't have much to show, but then as I was looking back on what I had handed in recently, it started to dawn on me just how much I had actually completed and was viewable. And when I assembled them together, I was surprised at how much variety there was, and, dare I say it, how good some of it looked.

So I have assembled them into my Showreel, and I am probably not too far away from starting to put it out there for the Studios to look at, should an opportunity arise. Or maybe I'll just push it towards them all without a request required.

What Is Lacking In Aussie Drama

I don't watch any Australian Drama series. I do, however, watch a lot of US and UK Drama serieseses. Here's why.

Australia tries very hard to do realistic and significant drama, that has a unique Australian voice. But they really don't know how to do it without it falling into a soap operatic melodrama. Australia, you see, excels at soap opera. They have had worldwide success with all their shows which have melodrama and overwrought plotlines and "serious" acting moments in it.

For example: Neighbours and Home and Away are cheap, and easy to make. They have almost no requirement for skill in either writing or acting talent. They're really good for learning how to organise the production of a TV show, though. These shows are very popular in overseas market who like soap opera cheese.

Macleod's Daughters is an excellent example of being uniquely Australian in its theme, being set in a rural Cattle Station. But it is a relationship drama. It has no real action or adventure elements, except in that typical plot-driven way to push two characters closer together, or further apart. It's entirely about people, and not situations.

Similar concepts are central to shows like Water Rats, A Country Practice, The Flying Doctors, All Saints, Blue Heelers, Seachange, Packed To The Rafters, Stingers, RPA, Young Lions, and pretty much everything else you can think of.

When they try to be a little less melodramatic, and try to emulate the successful American shows, they do what ostensibly ought to work. They take ideas and inspiration from what they perceive to be the successful factors, twist them to fit Australia, then add in some of their own originality.

But the problem is, without fail, they inevitably take the wrong elements from the US shows, then add in either unnecessary "sexy" elements, or melodramatic cliché storylines. It's heartbreaking to see they still haven't learned anything.

What they don't put in is humour. Yeah, some of the characters joke around occasionally, but that's not what I mean. I mean the concept itself has to have a central comedic element to it. The ideas have to be super-real, and stylised, to make it fun, to make the adventure over-the-top just enough to be a rollicking joyride. Instead they lay it thick with realism and drama, sucking the fun out of it, until it's just a bland standard Australian drama, exactly alike to all that has gone before.

Their latest adventure action dramas are Sea Patrol, which is one of the stupidest titles for a show ever, like it was something made up by a twelve year old in 1967, and Rush, which doesn't seem to mean anything, and is just an exciting word they randomly picked from a thesaurus.

Sea Patrol is set on a Navy Frigate, and appears to be about border patrols and stopping the criminals from getting into or out of the country. But, inevitably, what it's really about is who is sleeping with whom on board the ship.

Rush is trying desperately to be an action packed Police Rescue show, so it has tons of people abseiling down buildings, or being stuck in cars precariously sliding over clifftops, or helicopter rescues in floodwaters. Except it's really about who is sleeping with whom back at the Station.

Even the most celebrated mini-series of recent times, Underbelly, based on real events in Australia's history, and widely lauded, is still more notable for how many nudey sex scenes it could cram in.

The UK is great at dramas that are realistic and yet not cloying or melodramatic. America is amazing at coming up with heightened reality, adventure with a sprinkling of self-awareness to make it zing and sparkle off the screen.

Get over it, Australia! Do we have any fantasy adventure shows for adults here? Not one. Do we have any action adventure shows with a stylised plot, and a range of quirky funny characters? Nothing. Do we have any drama at all that doesn't fall back into the "Who is sleeping with whom" premise? God forbid we try something original in this country.

Save us!

No Other News?

Gosh, have you heard? Michael Jackson died!

Gee, you'd think somebody might mention it on the News.

Look! Up In The Sky!

When I was a teenager, I was not as sceptical as I am today. I assumed that what people said was happening, really was what was happening.

I was fascinated by mysterious goings on, like Bigfoots and Yetis, Loch Ness Monsters, Ghosts, and UFOs. I devoured any book I stumbled upon with this subject matter, though I didn't really seek any of them out otherwise. If they were there waiting, I'd pick them up and read them. And believe them.

That is, until I was about 14, when things started to sort themselves out in my head, and I began to realise that the niggling inconsistencies of these tales of supernatural wonders did not actually stand up to any further scrutiny than a cursory glance.

Most of the best "sightings" had photographs. Many of those photographs truly were amazing - but some were just absurdly clearly obviously fake. This picture below, for example, purportedly showing a ghostly figure in a photograph, is obviously a double-exposure of a man dressed in a sheet. How can anybody take that seriously?



This image below, the best ever of the Loch Ness Monster, which was fully accepted as genuine for such a long time, and was the one that all other sightings were basing themselves from, turned out to be completely faked. And, in retrospect, obviously so; you can see the part where the neck meets the body is shaped like a submarine conning tower. And that is what it was; a plasticine moulded neck and head, stuck to a toy submarine.



And the most famous Bigfoot film ever, showing the beast walking through the woods, has long been doubted. It's certainly very convincing, but there are many unofficial stories behind its origins, usually speaking about the special effects technician who built and wore the suit. It's clearly just a fat guy in a costume.



UFOs are the most persistent, mostly because you don't need to be in a specific situation to see them - you just have to look upwards and sort of catch something out of the corner of your eye that you can't at first explain, and it's enough to claim it's a sighting, and it only takes a little bit of imagination to convince yourself it was a flying saucer from Beta Centauri.

When I read about a lot of these UFO sightings, a consistent description was of a "cigar shaped craft, with windows and coloured flashing lights". Now, as that stands, you can imagine something like a cylinder, with flattened ends, a bulge in the middle, big round windows, and rows of blinking lights flashing off and on down its side.



Except that's not what they actually described. Imagine a cylindrical shape, with a rounded front, and a pointed end. A row of small squarish windows, thirty of them, down either of the cylinder's sides. And suspended off from the sides of the cylinder, and positioned at the front and the end, are tiny lights, alternating a blink every few seconds. And, most importantly of all, if the cylinder was to tilt to the side just slightly, coming into view would be... two wings.

Yes, what they are all consistently describing is a standard jumbo jet.



I realised that's what they had been describing all this time, after watching planes fly overhead here at my new place, as I am right under the flight path for the airport.

It's all about perception. If you are already conditioned to believe the possibility of something exotic and supernatural, it is very tempting and very difficult to stop yourself, to choose to believe that's the explanation for what you saw.

But if you are already a skeptic, and regularly question everything, then more often than not you are more likely to figure out a logical and realistic explanation.

Ejecting The Plasma Core

My telly was broken. It had a dirty great line through it. Big thick and black. If it had been somewhere to the side of the screen, that probably wouldn't be so bad and wouldn't interfere with my viewing too much. Tolerable.

But it didn't decide to be at the side of my screen - noooo, it had to be right smack dab through the very centre of the screen, top to bottom.

It's surprising to me how many shows frame their shots to have a character's face right in the centre of the screen.

Luckily, this particular issue was not unusual - there are plenty of other examples of this irritating fault developing on plasma TVs around the world. It is apparently caused by basic physics - a loose connection exacerbated by age and temperature.

I therefore had three options available to me: chuck it out and get a whole new TV; take it to a professional to fix, who would charge excessively and force me to buy new electronics that they'd replace inside the TV; or find out how to fix the fault online, and get a mate who knows his way around electronics to come round and repair it for me.

I did seriously consider all the different options. A new TV would be great, I could get a proper HD screen, but that is really seriously big money I don't have to throw around anymore. Ah, to be back in the era when I was overflowing with cash. And I considered the practicality of getting it down to the TV fix-it people, and if that was my only option I would have taken that step.

But I in fact do have a mate who knows his way around electronics, and he did come round, and we took the back off my TV. That was a bit of a potential nightmare, as there were around fifty screws, a whole lot of circuit boards and mysterious sockets, and a few very hard to reach doodads that had to be negotiated around. In fact if the fault had been in a different location on the screen, it's possible we wouldn't have been able to reach the bits that were the root cause, as some were buried under layers of electronics and cables.

But we found the right bit, we figured out what needed doing, and my wonderful mate Adam soldered up the fiddly part that was causing the whole trouble. With fingers and toes crossed, we screwed the back on again, hooked up the cables, and let it rip.

So far, so good. Three hours have passed as I write this, and so far the black line has not returned. This is a very good sign that we have fixed the right bits.

Though I suppose it's possible just jiggling things in the back may have been what really fixed it. If so, that'd be awfully disappointing.

Time will tell if it's really fixed. But I am optimistic.

Shiver

It's bloody cold.

Australia is not known for it's freezing temperatures. Dunedin, New Zealand, however, is famous for it. So when I moved here I thought those cold miserable days were behind me.

For the most part I was right. Winters are not exactly tropical, down in the southern parts of Australia, but they at least don't get snowy and icy. In fact, I sort of miss the frozen puddles and snowy fields. But I don't miss the shivering and shaking, the suffering the cold temperatures each day.

An unexpected development in Melbourne's winter this year, is that it started early with quite a sharp, biting cold snap. I don't have efficient heating in my new home, there's not a jot of insulation in this, rather shoddily built, cottage, and the heater built into the air conditioning is, undoubtedly, sucking up electricity that is going to hit my bank account hard.

So I have had to just sit and tolerate it, so far, which is not very pleasant. I have found a couple of warm blankets I like to sit under, all toasty, while watching TV, but I can't really wear them when I'm at the computer, so my extremities are a bit exposed for most of the day, which is quite the discomfort indeed.

I have always preferred the warmth to the cold, that's one of the reasons I moved here and don't miss being back home, but the four months of winter chill is unavoidable, and I guess all I can do is grin and bear it.

From There To Here

I am not from around these parts.

I lived in New Zealand until 1999. I love New Zealand as an entity, as a country, and its people are delightful. I do miss it. But it has a fundamental flaw that it cannot do anything about, and so is forever going to lose out, in my estimation.

It's too bloody small. And by being small, and, worst luck, at the arse end of the world, relative to the development of civilisation, nothing really happens there of any note. It gets ignored, dismissed, and generally loses out on any benefits other countries might get.

Now, NZ is hardly alone in this. There are bunches of countries where I hear their names and I don't have a clue where they are, what they are known for, or sometimes even that they existed. I don't know where Pago Pago is, or what happens in Guam, or who lives in Andorra. Spanish people, I suppose, though I only discovered Andorra's whereabouts recently, when it was a question on a quiz show.

But NZ is considered a force to be reckoned with above those countries, because of its association with Australia, its participation in World Wars I and II and beyond, and because it's vocal in its attempts to be noticed.

1998 was a weird year for me. I had a small group of wonderful friends who I loved to hang out with, were the funniest people I have ever known, and had creative ideas out the wazoo. However, we had no resources to speak of so it was a bit of thrashing around with no real action. But then, one by one, each of my friends disappeared out of my life. They all either moved away, or in one case died, in a very short space of time. And then I looked around me and saw that I had no ties anymore. And worse than that, I was in a rut that was very bad for me.

How do I deal with a situation like that? I was tempted to keep going as I was, in the hope things might change. But I also looked at my home town, and what I saw was a ghost town. Shops were closing, familiar landmarks were being covered over, and everything I knew growing up was, I realised, already gone.

I decided the best way to get out of my rut was to move away. And not just to a new town, where I ould end up in the same rut only with different buildings around me, but to a whole different country. Admittedly Australia is not that different to NZ, hence its attractive nature to ease the culture shock, but what it also had was convenience, proximity, and a "no Visa required" immigration policy between it and NZ.

And most importantly, it would force me to have to find a way to take care of myself, and not fall into a rut anymore.

It was a little bit hard to start with, as I had never visited Australia before, but having learned some skills as a website designer, and having a few friends I met online to help me, I soon found my feet, and things have turned out very well, for the most part.

That was exactly ten years ago, and I haven't regretted it one moment. I love it here, it feels like where I always was supposed to be. Melbourne, especially, is just perfect. I lived in Sydney for about a year, and didn't like it there at all, but here in Melbourne - well, I expect I'll be here for the rest of my life, barring unforeseen developments.

There are some things I miss about home - the beautiful landscape, the short distances to get anywhere, some distinct foodstuffs, and my family (though I visit often enough to get my fill on them when I can) - but Australia has so much more than NZ will ever have, so I can't complain really.

I am a little disappointed that I left NZ right at the point of its renaissance, when Peter Jackson single-handedly put it on the map and attracted all the big names to work there with him (even as we speak, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Guillermo Del Toro, and Neill Blomkamp, amongst others, are all working at Weta Studios for their next productions), and changing the face of the industry in the process, let alone the local identity of NZ. Oh well, I probably wouldn't have ended up working there anyway - I hate Wellington, and was already blacklisted from Weta, so it was out of reach.

So things are good here in Australia. Not perfect, but it seems to me I'm on the cusp of taking the next step, and if I'm careful and optimistic, I should be well on my way to a new stage of my life here in Melbourne.

The Opel Blitz

I was supposed to be doing some other kind of work this weekend, I promised someone I'd finish something up for them.

But though I did do a little bit on it, I instead got carried away with something else that I wasn't even supposed to do for weeks yet.

And why have I blogged this admission to slack off proper promised work, and instead to bugger about unnecessarily? Because this is the fastest CG model I've ever built. In only two days, technically around 8 or 10 hours work, off an on, I made this model of a German WWII Truck, the Opel Blitz.

I've always been fast, mostly because I cut corners. People are often surprised that I can come up with something to show them in only a few hours from when we spoke of it.

Though then when I promise to finish something, I start, then rapidly tail off, and then very slackly never get things finished. Unless I am paid to, and there's a specified timeframe.

Anyway, back to the CG model I made:


It's still incomplete, and has no textures yet, but the broad details are all there. I am really happy with it so far. It's arguably the best model I've ever done, especially as vehicles can be so fiddly.

This one will be going on my showreel, that's for sure.



EDIT:

A couple of days have passed, and I've applied textures. I think it's all done now, except for a driver, but I've rigged the wheels to steer, and now all I need to do is the actual final animation and composite that it was built for.



ANOTHER EDIT:

Here's a lighting test, in the actual location (matte painting) that the truck will be driving down in the finished shot.

Pigs May Flu

I do not have the Flu. I have never had influenza, as far as I can recall. The worst I've had is a severe feverish cold for a couple of days. Some people call that level of affliction "flu" but it's not consistent with the symptoms of true influenza, so I don't believe that it was.

Many people get a dose of flu shots, which I believe are free, in the impression that will help them not catch the flu. Maybe that's true, though they often seem to suffer a week of squirty aches and pains each year anyway, so I'm not so certain it really helps them. As far as I can tell the shots only cover the "current strain" of the flu, so if it has mutated by the time it hits you, you're out of luck.

People can die of influenza. Tens of thousands do so every year, even in first world countries. This isn't a rare and exotic, tropically based, racially targeted, ancient disease that has a 100% cure rate; it's still a serious danger to our lives. But you very rarely hear much about that, unlike cancer, or HIV, or Parkinson's Disease, it seems to be a quiet killer. Mostly that's because it's not the influenza itself that kills you, but the resultant effect it has on other weaknesses of the body you may already suffer from, such as pneumonia, heart troubles, or asthma.

Until, that is, the scientific and medical world goes a little bit bananas and causes a worldwide panic over something that really shouldn't be a big deal, by crying wolf over a Swine Flu pandemic.

If we were never told about Swine Flu, which is equally as curable as any other flu virus, and people just figured they were experiencing regular influenza, then life would go on as normal. There is no logical reason for the specifics, or the word "pandemic", to confuse and worry the population at large.

Causing worldwide panic is not helping. Raising the level of "severity" of the pandemic has particularly confused people. Firstly, do you know what the difference is between a pandemic, and an epidemic? An epidemic is spread through a smaller populated area, while a pandemic is spread across the world. The "severity" of a pandemic is not because the disease is getting any worse, it's because it has spread wider across the world.

Here's the thing: If you are unwell, don't panic. Visit your local Doctor or Emergency Room, and they will prescribe a treatment. It doesn't matter what exotic strain of influenza it turns out to be, there will be a vaccine made available, and it will more than likely successfully treat the illness.

Now will you please shut up about it so I can go back to ignoring the daily News.

Geeks Rule TV

The general principle you should expect the world of TV to run by is if it's your favourite show of the new season, it will be cancelled after half a season, and never tie up the loose ends.

Mostly because the current crop of TV Execs and Producers are of my generation, the first to have been brought up with Star Wars as a primary influence, and with fond memories of the action and SF shows and movies of the 70s and 80s, there has been a neverending onslaught of geek concept shows.

Star Trek: The Next Generation and X-Files found the formula for success in the 90s, and they've been trying to re-create that magic bullet ever since. The first to achieve that for a while was the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica, a show nobody expected to work at all, and yet was a runaway hit and a fantastic adventure. It completed its four season run earlier this year, and was quite an influence on many other attempts at re-imagining.

Lost, and Heroes, are SF concept shows with an epic outlook. Lost has managed to secure itself a definite ending, which has increased the pace of the story, and heightened its energy.

Whereas Heroes is floundering. After one of its better writers left the show to create his own, it immediately lost focus, and now he's back it may be too late to find its feet again. They do have at least one more season to come, so if they can figure things out and get back on track, it may be worth continuing to watch, but right now I wouldn't miss it if it ended.

Then there are the myriad of smaller geek shows, like Eureka (a new season is imminent), Reaper, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Life On Mars (all recently cancelled), and the UK shows like Primeval, Ashes To Ashes, and Doctor Who (all are going well, but are lower budget and much shorter than any US show).

And then there's the action shows with no significant SF element: Numb3rs, Castle, NCIS, The Mentalist, Lie To Me, Fringe, Eleventh Hour, which are cop shows but with rather unlikely methodology or technologies, therefore stretching credibility, unless you accept that TV always has a sprinkling of fantasy by definition. They all seem to be healthy, especially The Mentalist which has rapidly become one of the highest rating new shows of the year.

I am not an obsessive fan of any show, and never really have been, but my favourite new show of the last couple of years is Chuck, a great show about a geek who has a supercomputer implanted into his brain, which he uses to help the CIA in their spy missions. The problem is it's really popular amongst the geeks, but not actually getting the ratings. They're downloading it and swapping it, or watching it online or on DVR and Tivo, instead of actually watching it live, so the ratings are being hit.

But I'm lucky, as it's been renewed despite this. The only reason it's been saved each year is because the Execs seem to love it, the same aforementioned Execs who are of my generation and were brought up on shows just like it.

Chuck was renewed today. It will be some time before it returns to our screens, as the cast will be all off doing their own thing for a while (Yvonne Strahovski, for example, is here in Melbourne making a comedy movie), then they have to go back into production sometime in July, ready for the new season debut in September.

I can't wait.

Star Trekkin' Across The Universe

I am not a Trekker. Or a Trekkie. Or a particular fan of Star Trek. I don't really like the original TV series from the 60s because the dated production values just bother me too much. I'm a bit of a snob about that kind of thing, to my detriment, cf. Doctor Who.

I enjoyed a few of the movies. And Star Trek: The Next Generation was really quite fun, now that the production values and effects technology had caught up with the stories. Deep Space Nine was great, but I thought Voyager was awful. Enterprise completely missed the boat and failed to live up to its considerable potential.

However, the trailers for the new movie, simply called Star Trek, a reboot by TV show creator JJ Abrams, excited me. It managed to take the familiar elements and reinvent them without losing their essence, and it was obvious he'd found the perfect middle ground. The fans just hoped that the movie would follow through with the promise.

I saw the movie on cheapo Tuesday. And it was outstanding fun!

The plot is a time travel romp, which explains the change in actors, and sets up a whole new potential future to develop new stories that can ride rampant over the established canon, effectively allowing it to invent new canon of its own. And more than that, it has the single most epic and dramatic disaster in Trek's televised history.

The key was to accept the new actors playing familiar roles. For the most part their skills outweighed any need for doing an impression of the original actors. Karl Urban's is the closest attempt at copying DeForest Kelly's intonations, but even then he didn't do a complete copy. And Zachary Quinto had a tough job when he was playing against Leonard Nimoy directly, and yet didn't do a Nimoy impression in any way. However, I did think that Chris Pine slipped into a Shatner-esque pattern of speech when he was being casually dismissive with his apple during the Kobayashi Maru test.

The main problem with the original movies and TV series is they wanted to be hugely epic and impressive, but had a budget of $2.50, and cardboard and string technology. The budget for this new film was a somewhat excessive $150,000,000, and every dollar of it is on the screen.

As an effects aficionado, sometimes I'll wince at an otherwise wonderful movie when a poorly completed effects shot comes on screen. This still happens, even on the biggest budget films. I could rant about those instances for days, it's so disappointing. But there wasn't a single instance of that in this film. I didn't notice a poorly executed effect once, they were all perfect, seamless, and spectacular.

I can't say I was enamoured by the shaky camera and the constant lens flares as a stylistic choice, though. They were distracting and brought me out of the movie on occasion. And some of the plot and set pieces strained credulity, and wouldn't have taken much work to pull into a more believable shape, but that's just action movie shorthand, I guess.

A great movie. A lot of fun, a lot of clever in-jokes and references back to familiar canon, and a lot of spectacle and adventure. If this is the future of Star Trek, indeed the future of movies, then it's going to be a wild ride.

Can't Say No

There have been times in my life when I have no work to do. My free time is left wide open, and I am a little bit lost for some way to occupy myself.

But to be honest, I cannot remember the last time that occurred.

I've always had arty, creative friends throughout my life, but the current crop are the most creative, energised bunch I've ever known. There's always some new project bubbling under, or actively happening, and I am happy to see it so. I also love to be involved.

I'm lucky enough to have a skill that is sought after. Though there have been others with my skills in our team's past, those people have mostly moved onto other things, leaving the way open for me to muscle in where they once trod.

I think I've made an impact, though, as now they won't leave me alone.

I am loving doing the work for Rob's film, Checkpoint. It's one I've chronicled a lot on my Blog, and hopefully it's come across as enthusiastic, because there's so much new and different stuff to do on it. I'm learning new skills at every turn, and if the challenges weren't there I'd not be having half as much fun. And it's typical of us to see that we've almost completed the work involved only to subsequently pile on more. But it's getting there - even now as I write this, my other computer is rendering out a sequence of frames.

I also need money coming in, so I have committed myself to doing a website for my friend Anna. She's a musician, and she wants a site up showcasing her music and gigs. We've figured out a nice, clean, simple design for it, and if all went to plan she will have taken a load of promotional photos over the weekend, which will be used on the site. The actual assembly of the site won't take too long to do, once I get back into it, and it will net me some extra money and future work, so I can't complain, but I must say that at times my heart isn't in it, and I'm finding it hard to engender any enthusiasm for it. I expect that will change once I have more stuff to actually work with, but until then it's a struggle.

Anna also suggested an amazing idea, that she would like to publish some of the stories she has written, as a series of children's books, and she needs an illustrator, and she asked if I'd be interested. Well, I would indeed! Especially if I could use 3D characters to do it. I think it could look really amazing!

This may never eventuate, but it's something that continues to bubble under in my brain, nevertheless.

And now another friend has asked me, once again, to re-design his characters for the superhero TV show, the one he's been almost starting to make for five or six years now. It's a complex tale he has wrought, one that requires an enormous budget and a raft of talented people, neither of which we currently have (we are a small, highly talented crew, of limited skill and no money).

And though making these character models doesn't take too much time, I'd feel better if this production had an end goal in sight. But it's something that's always been at the earliest stages, with the goalposts constantly shifting, and I don't think will ever get past step one.

And of course, there are my own projects, the most visible one being writing the Viking movie script. For the last fortnight I've been concentrating so much on all these other projects, I've not written a word on it. But I hope to get back onto that very soon, as I was thinking about it today, and made a plot decision that I need to write down. I expect that once I do that I'll probably go off on a burst of scriptwriting again.

So there's where I'm at. I'm happy doing Checkpoint and I'm happy doing the web site design paid work, and I am very happy writing. But what I really should learn to do is say "No" to things that clearly have no future or money in it.

Blurring The Motion

I use Lightwave for my 3D graphics. It's not a very popular program in the Professional Industry, unfortunately, except in certain branches. It's used a lot in commercials, children's animation, and previsualisation (which is rough animatics for movies, like 3D storyboarding). But it's rare for the movie industry to use it in their visual effects (instead they use apps like Maya or Softimage), or the video game industry to use it for their cut-scenes or in-game models (they use Maya and 3D Studio Max).

So what that means for Lightwave is that it's not developed at quite the level it needs to be to keep up with the Pro applications, and some of the features are less than perfectly optimised, and often the plug-ins are not updated from their first versions. It's quite a shame.

And also what it means for me as a 3D artist is I can't apply for Pro jobs if they're looking for people experienced in Maya. I am fine for a startup company with no preferences, though. Probably.

Anyhoo, I am putting together the backgrounds for the pickup shots for Checkpoint. Rather optimistically, and somewhat foolishly, I suggested we have shots of the characters interacting with the trains, running between them and planting a bomb. I figured that as I already had made the model, it wouldn't be too hard for me to adapt the shots to suit. I was fairly certain I had the skills, and the methodology.

Surprisingly I was right, and I did know how to do it. So far everything I've tried has worked wonderfully, sometimes incredibly well. It's almost seamlessly realistic, if I do say so myself.

But I have encountered a problem.

Render times for these scenes for just one frame, with HDR lighting and fresnel reflections switched on, is around 45 minutes per frame (two trains next to each other mean lots of back-and-forth reflections to calculate). That means a 150-frame sequence is several days worth of render time.

But then there's the motion blur. To get that looking as realistic as possible, each frame is rendered five times and then blended together into one. Five times! That makes four hours per frame! A month of render time, just for one sequence! And I have several sequences requiring this method.

If Lightwave was just that little bit more optimised and better built, it would have alternatives or better rendering speeds, I'm sure. But I'm stuck with its limitations. I had to find some kind of shortcut to solve my problem.

I tried a few new ways of applying textures to avoid some of the heaviest hits, like faking the reflections, or removing them altogether, but they weren't very successful at all.

However, as I was experimenting with a ridiculous idea that I thought would never work, I finally figured it out. If I first render the sequence without motion blur, then apply that sequence as a front-projected texture on the model, I can then render the motion blur on what has become a less complex scene, saving myself a ton of render time!

Front-projection is when you apply a texture from the point of view of the camera, as opposed to the X- Y- or Z-axis of the model (or the scene). That means you can create a 2D image, perhaps from photographs, and apply it to a 3D model, and then do a small amount of movement, and it will 3d-ify the photograph. In this case I will be reapplying an already rendered sequence back onto the same model, using the same motion, all matched frame-to-frame, so the blend will be seamless, only this time I'll be rendering the motion blur along with it. The end result is a much faster render, but the exact same result as if I had done it with every setting switched on.

I am a genius.

Spiced Ham

The internet should be exclusively an information and entertainment resource. Unfortunately, that's an unrealistic hope. Not only does it cost money for upkeep and maintenance, but there are too many opportunities for advertising to expect them not to be tapped. And now that the internet is starting to supersede magazines and newspapers, advertising needs to abandon them and swamp the Web.

But Spam, on the other hand, is nothing but useless irritating wastes of bandwidth. Every so often, as I am not averse to buying items online occasionally, I have clicked on a banner ad to see where it led, and even subsequently purchased something. But I have never received a spam email that contained a trustworthy word. Every one of them is not only a poorly spelled irritation, but they are selling dodgy, possibly illegal, crap, that nobody in their right mind could or should ever need, let alone purchase via such an intrusive and questionable method.

The perpetrators of Spam are solely responsible for ruining what could have been a fine and convenient way to purchase genuine and trustworthy products and services. Instead they have soiled themselves with the Viagra, cheap watches, diplomas, and other illegal and dangerous nonsense.

And who the hell is buying all this stuff that keeps them in business? How can they fall for this blatant and obvious lying, cheating, stealing criminals? And when are we going to find a way to stop it all so my email bandwidth can get some peace?

Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease

I have a problem, and it's starting to interfere with my life.

About six or seven years ago, I started to have this issue that mystified and annoyed me. I don't eat a lot of stuff, especially healthy stuff, but I adore chicken. But when I ate chicken, it started to feel like it was stuck in my throat. In fact, I thought that was actually what was happening and I'd have to wait some moments, or even minutes, for the feeling to subside.

But soon it started to happen more frequently, and yet almost exclusively with chicken. I eventually got so frustrated with this, that I went to the Doctor to see what's up, in case it was a sign of throat cancer or something. I had a Barium Swallow X-Ray, where I took a dose of this thick creamy substance that tastes like plaster of paris, and which shows up on the X-Ray, giving them a clear view of my throat in action.

They found nothing wrong.

Years pass, and my chicken intake has been reduced to about once a month, and I am still suffering this problem. I look the symptoms up online, but there has rarely been help. GERD, or Gastroesophogeal Reflux Disease, has the closest match, but it's not quite right either. GERD's symptoms include heartburn and indigestion, which I don't get, but I do get a feeling of something stuck in the throat, an inability to burp, and a gurgling in the throat. That's enough to convince me it's my problem.

Here's what I think has actually been happening. Something about chicken, possibly its dry nature if it's overcooked, or maybe even from a full fledged allergy, causes muscles in my throat to constrict. I think the chicken as the common factor has to be relevant. I don't have a problem with other meats, or indeed any other food item at all. It's only been with chicken.

Usually I have suffered this in private, and I just need to wait a while (sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes, and on many occasions it's been hours), or in extreme discomfort cases go to the bathroom and induce vomiting, to sort my throat out. But today, for the first time, I felt the discomfort in the presence of my mate Rob, and it was a trifle embarrassing, as well as just being inconvenient, to have to abandon my meal in front of him.

By the way, I think the vomiting just spasms or expands the throat back to its normal state, rather than expelling any obstruction. Though to be perfectly honest I haven't a clue what's going on.

I am most disappointed in my stupid digestive system rebelling on me this way.

Railroaded On The Information Super-Highway

The last internet plan I had with my last ISP before I moved was very nice, and suited me well. I probably abused it by using it to capacity, but if you've got it, then why not? It was 25GB download during peak times, and another 40GB download during off-peak times. On top of that, my uploading was not metered.

Since moving to my new place, I no longer have access to ADSL, so cannot remain on that plan. Instead I have to use Cable Internet. But not anybody's Cable (and there are only two companies that provide Cable in Australia) because Bigpond Cable uses an underground cable that is not available in my suburb, but only Optus Cable, which uses an overhead cable system, connected to the power lines throughout the area.

That means I am forced to use one of the Optus plans. I have no choice whatsoever to go with the competition, it's simply not available to me. The closest plan I have to match my previous one, cost-wise, is 20GB download (including metered uploads), considerably less than the 65GB I am used to having at my disposal.

This is absurd - if one company can offer such a high rate of download, why can't they all? Why aren't they being realistically competitive?

And here's the thing - though I was a high user, relatively, with the 65GB downloading each month, I am now just using the internet in a very low key way, and I'm already going over my daily limit (which adds up to around 600Mb a day) just by browsing around, watching a couple of YouTube videos, and not doing too much. Admittedly I am probably over indulging right now to make up for my lack of connectivity last month, but even so I don't think I'm behaving unrealistically for casual use.

I am just frustrated by this imposed limit that I cannot control as a consumer. It's considerably unfair that my choice of living arrangements would put me in such a limited position.

This whinge is brought to you by the Whiny Privileged Who Don't Appreciate How Good They Actually Have It Society.

The Madness Of Internet Connectivity

Though some parts of our day to day life are necessarily complex, some parts ought to be so much easier.

Here's the comedy of errors that has been my efforts to connect to the internet in April 2009.

Before I made the big move, I anticipated a few hiccups, but tried my best to be completely organised so that a minimum of things would go wrong, and if they did, I could cope with it within my limited means. So I organised my electricity, gas, phone, and internet to be switched over on the day I moved. Organising the internet ahead of time is a waste of effort, it seems, because they don't do anything about it until after the phone is fully connected anyway. I also arranged for the movers to arrive, and the steam cleaners to come in the next day for the final clean.

I was afraid it would all fall apart.

On the day of the move, the movers arrived on time, did their thing quickly and efficiently, and were all done in a few hours. Unfortunately it ended up costing more than I hoped due to traffic dragging out their hourly rate, so that sort of sucked, but never mind, they did their job.

The electricity and gas were on when I arrived and settled in, but the phone was dead.

The next day I went back to the old place for a final clean, and waited two hours for the steam cleaners. They never showed up. Damn them. Made my final clean look a bit shoddy, unfortunately. That's a count against me, I fear.

Back home, I familiarised myself with the new place. Apart from creaky floorboards, light switches in stupid places, and no knobs on the kitchen cupboard doors, it's a pretty decent place.

I then set my TV up, only to discover that the connector to the antenna was installed by some cowboy, as it dangles by a loose wire, and if you nudge the cable or switch the light or aircon on, it affects the TV reception, which, for a constant on-off thing like an aircon, is very irritating. I had to find a way to fix that up, somehow. After some experimentation, I swapped the coaxial cable to another, which, as far as I can tell, solved the issue. So it appears the old cable left here was worn and poorly shielded.

The phone, however, was still dead.

On the next day, after realising I had moved into the wrong bedroom, because that one was dark and cold, while the other one was sunny and bright, I spent the day shifting things from one to the other, but I also checked the phone line and, yes, it was still dead. Well, that's just going too far, and is completely unacceptable.

So the next day, after checking it one more time, I headed down to a public phone, a rare commodity these days, and asked the ISP what was up. They said it was, in fact, successfully connected the previous day (two days later than promised, but okay...) whereas I was sure the line was still dead. They asked me to return home and check all the connections with multiple cables and phones, just to make sure. I did go and do that, and came back to the public phone to tell them it was definitely all dead.

So they said they'd lodge a fault. Do I have an alternative phone number, in case I need to be contacted? Well, no I don't. I'm not working, so I can't use a work phone, I hate mobile phones and do not have one, and I had only just moved in and didn't know my neighbours yet. Well, they cannot lodge a fault without an alternative phone number.

Argh!

So the next day I go into the nearby shopping centre (which is pretty decent, luckily) and bought a pre-paid mobile phone. I set it up, and lodged a fault with my phone.

By now, this was Friday, so I didn't expect a technician to come out on the weekend. However, surprisingly, he turned up on Sunday. Though, naturally, he did not use the alternative phone number, and instead he just knocked on my door. I just *knew* that would happen.

There are three sockets in the house, and it appears the problem was that they were all previously connected to a different phone company, Optus, and that's why my Telstra connectivity wasn't coming through. So the technician had to switch that over. Then he discovered a technical fault at the points, and so fixed that up too. However, he could only switch over one of the sockets, the "point of entry", which instead of being in a logical place like the living room, was in one of the bedrooms. So my phone is hooked up in the bedroom that I use as my DVD library, instead of in somehwere socially logical like the living room.

I called the ISP, from a proper phone, to get my ADSL connected. But they said the fault is still marked as being open, so I should call the next morning.

Fine.

I call the next morning. It's now an entire week after moving in. The ISP closes the fault, and checks my line for ADSL suitability.

And it's not suitable for ADSL.

What?

I live too far from the Exchange, and cannot get ADSL.

WHAT??

Do I have Telstra cable? Nope. My only option, then, is Wireless Internet. Which costs three times too much for an unreliable connection and a crappy and pathetic download limit. Well, bugger that for a game of soldiers.

So that was that. I can't get ADSL. I have to abandon my ISP, who had the coolest plans I could ever hope for, all because I moved to a home that was too far from the Exchange. But what does "too far from the Exchange" mean, exactly?

Imagine, if you will, a circle representing the limits of the Heidelberg Exchange. The Exchange building itself is near the southern border of that circle, whereas my new place is on the northernmost tip of the circle. Quite literally on the borders, as one block north they're on a different Exchange. That puts me around 5km away, which is too far for ADSL to work. Instead of the building being central and within reach of all, it is completely lopsided and only within reach of a few lucky souls.

The next Exchange over, the Greensborough Exchange, is a lot closer to me, and well within reach, but it technically doesn't service my area. Can I connect with that one? They tested the line to check, but apparently I cannot - the ports are all full, and really I'd be buggering about with their system too much anyway.

Fuck their stupid system.

I need ADSL. It is my life. It is my work. It has already driven me a bit nuts to go this long without it. It's amazing to me how much I rely on it, and how many times a day I think "Oh, I'll just check this online" and frustratingly realise I can't do it.

So I considered all my options. And then realised that there may have been a good reason why the last tenant used Optus for their phoneline. There is a cable that stretches from the building to the street, not a Telstra cable (they go underground) but an overhead one. Perhaps Optus can help me out.

I check out a brochure, but there's no mention of Optus still using cable for internet so I'm not certain if it's even possible. So I call them up, and they say it's fine (hurrah!), they can do cable internet. The plan I'll be on will be considerably less than what I was used to, but it's still decent-ish, has ADSL speeds (theoretically), and is a permanent online presence, so I sign up. At last.

And then, not twenty minutes after hanging up the phone with Optus, a Telstra sales guy turns up at my door, who is surprised to learn that ADSL isn't possible where I live. After all, he was assigned this route to sign people up to ADSL, and if it's not possible why even bother with the job at all?

He tells me that he will get back to me on the truth of the matter. I have my doubts that this guy will have any better luck than me, because I talked to a pretty specific subsection of Telstra, the guys who truly know what's what, and they said it wasn't possible.

The next day he calls me back to say "Certainly it's possible." I express my doubts again, but his supervisor assures him, and he assures me, that it is possible.

He turns up with forms to sign, and during the "I agree to the terms and conditions" part I have to do over the phone, the support person on the other end tells me that my line is flagged as incapable of getting ADSL. I tell her that I know that, but their representative has constantly assured me that it's possible. She says he's wrong, but goes through with the rigmarole anyway. (Later it turns out to be confirmed as an impossibility, so I cancelled everything before they began work on it, I haven't lost anything but my time, and a little bit of hope).

After that was signed and sealed, I got a text message on my mobile (that I hate and will not be keeping beyond its pre-paidedness) informing me that my Optus cable tech will be here on the 27th of April. Three entire weeks from then, and a whole month after my moving date.

Three weeks?? But it's supposed to be ten working days!!!!

Oh, that doesn't count weekends, of course, that's an extra 6 days onto the 10 day promise. And then there's the Easter holiday break, an extra 5 days, which ends up as... the 27th.

In the meantime, I am going slightly mad, and am struggling with finding ways to occupy my time. Stupidly, I have become so reliant on the Internet to entertain me in various ways, I can't remember how to do other things anymore.

I have written a lot on my newest screenplay, and have rewatched a lot of DVDs and torrents, and of course have tried to set up everything at my new place, but that is a lot less fun than even it sounds, and it's making me go a little bit potty.

Why can't things be simple? What ever happened to the idea of plugging things in, and they work first time?

I want my internet.

Days pass...

It occurred to me that if it was possible to swap my phone to another exchange, then maybe iiNet can do that for me, and I can then remain with them and use their super-duper plans as I am accustomed.

So I call them up, and as luck would have it I stumble upon the best Tech Support guy in the entire universe, because not only is he helpful and friendly, but he has all the answers: He knows all the techy stuff; all the secrets; and has the raw facts of my situation. I grill him for details.

The sad truth of the matter is I cannot get ADSL on my line at all. Not only am I too far from the Exchange, but the cables within my new residence are lowest quality. If they were a couple of steps up, then the distance would be counteracted and I could have ADSL. Not top speed, but better than nothing at all.

I asked if I could swap to another Exchange, as I know that the Greensborough Exchange is considerably nearer. But apparently I am right in the exact zone where I am out of reach of every Exchange in my area. If I was three blocks west, then I'd have more chance. If I was two blocks north, I'd be in the Greensborough range.

Almost everything about my new place is wonderful, the community most of all, but damn it, the lack of internet just sucks.

Today, after a bit of cable madness, my internet came back online. It is much less than anything I have had with my previous ISP, but I have no choice. It's all I can have.

Roll on the Fibre To The Home project, that's all I can say.