As Far As The Eye Can See

There is a disproportionate number of Australian blokes called Lachlan.

I mean, what's up with that?

I'm Watching Big Brother

My older brother is well known amongst his peers. He was the head of an organisation significant amongst the Maori population, known as Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu, and was the visible face and spokesperson whenever there was a need for comment on Maori issues. In that role, he had opportunities to meet dignitaries and visiting celebrities, and interacted directly with political figures. It was quite impressive to have a family member so prominent in the news, especially for such good reasons.

He doesn't have that job anymore, but after leaving for a brief semi-retirement, has returned to that same organisation in a less prominent position. He now represents the Maori people just for the localised region of Otago, and he figured he needed to communicate to the people he represents, so wanted a website, where he can update folks on Tribal matters, as well as air a few of his personal thoughts.

As I am a website designer (and always looking for new work) he asked me to build the site for him. I put together a few design samples, which he liked, and I found a good CMS software to host it in. ExpressionEngine is easy to figure out (after a bit of head-meets-keyboard bashing to distinguish the various levels of hierarchy involved) and gives ultimate power to the designer, not rigidly adhering to template structure for the HTML.

After working for a couple of weeks within the original design idea I had put forward, I realised it just wasn't working. It didn't look as good as most modern websites, and there wasn't enough room set aside for expansion, so I sat back and rethought it. Over a couple of days I figured out a complete redesign, which gave the text more space to breathe. And I've also dripfed new features in, every couple of days.

In the end, I am very pleased with how it came together. My brother seems to like it, too, and he's shown it around to some people and they've given positive feedback.

I think there's a likelihood I will be getting some more work out of this, fingers crossed. And you can't hope for better than that.

Wallpaper-palooza

I'm an arty sort. Kind of. Well, people think I am. I just bugger about clumsily until something starts to come together. It's not very efficient or a display of a particular amount of talent, really.

So what I like to do is dress my computer monitor with a nice desktop wallpaper background, and change them regularly every week or so. I troll around online for either ready-made wallpapers from movies or comic books or video games or just nice photography, or just cool images that I can adapt into wallpaper-sized images.

My desktop is fairly high-res, at 1680x1050 pixels. It's a common ratio, so most newer wallpapers are available at that scale, but the older ones are still at maximum 1280x960, or more likely 1024x768. These can often be wonderful images, but you can't scale them up without distorting them, Standard Def ratio doesn't work for a Widescreen monitor.

The other problem with a lot of amateur made wallpapers is the very low quality work that's gone into them; either the original image is poorly matched to its background, or there is horrible "artefacting" (speckling caused by high compression), or it's just an ugly mess of styles and bad composition.

As I am very grateful for the work others have put into some of my favourite wallpapers, I thought it was past time for me to put up my own work, all adaptations of images, with a lot of effort gone in to make them look sharp and nicely composed.

This bunch is an eclectic collection, with no specific theme. Except maybe attractive women, which, in my experience, is quite a popular subject amongst a certain crowd.

And as I say, these are all at 1680x1050.


First up is a pic of actress Sandra Bullock. I didn't do too much to this pic - I straightened it, rescaled it to fit, then added a bit of white space to follow the rule of thirds. It's also a good idea to put the main image slightly to one side to make way for the crazy way people stack their icons.



Next up is Selma Blair, as her character Liz Sherman in the Hellboy films. This is a promotional photo, used in posters and the like, but the only one I could find even closely resembling a wallpaper sized pic was badly cropped and with messy artefacting. So I found a larger scale of the original pic, and made my own.



Anne Hathaway, who is something of a star du jour recently, is next up. This image was already used on somebody else's wallpaer in full scale, but it was badly blended into their white background, and I also didn't like the composition they chose. So I moved her over to the right, and then tidied up the ragged edge of where the photo met the background. Then I added in her name, just to fill in the blank space.



The most recent one I made is of Josie Davis. Who's that, then? She was an actress who started out as a kid in the show Charles in Charge back in the 80s, and has worked steadily into adult life. And though she played the nerdy character in that sitcom, she sure didn't maintain that image into adulthood. I was looking through her images after she appeared on my favourite TV show, Chuck.

The original picture was taken in a room with a dirty wall and floor, so I eliminated most of that and gave her a new white background. I added her name, because otherwise you wouldn't have a clue who she was. I really like the colours in this pic, especially her blue top, so I maintained that colour with the gradient and text.



Beginning to move away from the hot chicks motif, but following on tangentially from the previous pic, is a promo pic of Yvonne Strahovski and Zachary Levi from Chuck that I adapted into a wallpaper. I decided to add the red strip behind the characters, which I think works well. I may have overdone the saturation, though; they look like they've just come out of a tanning salon.



One of my favourite video games series is Myst. It started out so uniquely and cleverly, then as the series went on just got better, then it tailed off disappointingly. I couldn't play the last game at all, my computer wasn't powerful enough to handle even the lowest settings.

In Myst IV, which was made by a different team to the other games, the opening of the story occurs in Atrus's home, which is a fantastic steampunk-like series of buildings, clinging to rocks surrounding a pool and waterfall. This image, which I found available online in a huuuuge resolution, has just been scaled and cropped to fit the desktop.



Last up is an adaptation of an Alex Ross painting of the Joker and Harley Quinn, from Batman. I didn't do much, apart from sweetening of the image and adding enough black background to fit the screen. That's the beauty of working with astonishing artwork like that of Alex Ross. I experience similar perfection with Adam Hughes's work.

I was sure I had more than this to upload, but I think I must have lost some of them over the years in various crashes. But I'll put up some more in a few months time, once I have gathered them together.

Anatomy 101

Whenever I model something in 3D that I've never done before, it's an education.

When I first modelled a building in any level of detail, I had to look at the structure of it as though it was real, and piece together all the elements in much the same way you would to build it in the real world. But without the heavy lifting.

So I was acutely aware of how walls meet the roof, and what makes up the details of window frames, or how the door latch works. And now whenever I look at a house, I have a new appreciation of how buildings look and what went into its design and construction.

The same for modelling a car. I learned a lot about how the steering works on front wheels, and how the suspension attaches to the chassis. Even the curve of the windshield is a complicated feature that you don't really appreciate until you see how neatly it has to fit into a very specifically curved slot, unique to each and every make of car.

I have found the same newly discovered fascination with big complicated things like aircraft, right down to small domestic items like computer keyboards, and organic stuff, like trees and birds, which have a whole other level of sophistication.

For the past few days, for a Pick Up And Go production, I have begun modelling a human skeleton, which will eventually be animated as a sword-wielding skeletal warrior and composited into the footage we shot a few weeks ago.

The human skeleton is something we're all very familiar with, but few of us will have had an opportunity to look at one closely. There are 206 bones in the human body, and I have to model each one of them (though some are fused together, and some, like ribs and fingers, are very repetitious) and then piece them into place, at the right scale and proportion to not only look exactly right, but also to be able to move in a way that looks cinematically appealing.

And it's amazing to me how cleverly the bones interact with each other, how the range of movement is so wide, but with limits that suit our needs so well. Admittedly, we push them right to the edge sometimes, and occasionally wish we had more flexibility, or the ability to adjust them, or had a couple of extra limbs (even wings), but what we do have is a miracle of evolutionary engineering, and it was fascinating to see that, as I am putting the skeleton together piece by piece.

So far I've been quite happy with how it's looking. I have been building most of the parts individually, from memory, then comparing it with an image of the real thing including the joint assembly, so I can adjust my model to match closer. However, I haven't yet compared it as a whole to an image of a complete skeleton; I expect I may have to slide the knees or elbows around a bit to get them right.

Though, of course, no two skeletons are the same. It's part of what makes we humans distinct from each other, and the differences go as deep as the bones themselves. Therefore, as long as I have all the bits approximately correct, that will likely be close enough to be acceptably believable.

Cinematic Catch Up

I have not had a lot of money to spend on frivolities lately, so have not splurged on DVDs on days of release for a long time, instead waiting for them to halve their prices later in the year. But last week, I decided I wanted to finally catch up on movies I had missed, movies that had been praised at their cinema release, so I bought three movies to watch: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, G.I.Joe, and District 9.

Goodness me, what an entertaining week I've had watching them.

G.I Joe was first. I missed out on most of the toys that were turned into cartoons, during the 80s. Partly because I was just a little too old for the toys themselves, and partly because the cartoons were such poorly animated, badly acted, horrendously written dreck, I just stayed away for my own sanity's sake.

G.I. Joe is a very old toy franchise, however, and inspired the UK equivalent of Action Man, which was more popular when I was a kid, even though none of my friends or I had an Action Man toy either. But I was aware of the storyline, generally, that was used as the basis for the TV series. It amounts to nothing much more than good guy US military vs bad guy Foreign military, with fancy weapons and vehicles that did lots of flashy foldy shooty stuff. Basically, standard violence-based boy's toys.

Movies based on toys and games and video games are, as a rule, awful. The main problem seems to be the interactive and single-player nature of a game is impossible to translate into a story that really encapsulates the experience each person has with it. It's hard enough to adapt a book and fulfil the imagination of the author, let alone the imagery concocted by the reader, but to re-create the individual experience of a kid who plays with his toys in a particular way peculiar to their own approach, is not universal enough to work properly. Couple that with the inherent ridiculous and fantastical nature of something like G.I. Joe, and any attempt to take it seriously is a waste of everyone's time.

So how do you deal with those issues and still make an entertaining and successful movie?

Imagine you're an eight year old boy, and you have four or five of the G.I. Joe (and the enemy C.O.B.R.A's) action figures and vehicles. How do you play with them? Do you slowly drive the car along, and watch as you characters exit the vehicle and wander along to a house where they sit on the couch and watch TV? Do they have tea parties with your sister's teddy and dolls? Do they sit on a shelf gathering dust as a potential collector's item?

No, they do not.

"And then Joe runs to the helicopter, and they fly over a cliff and go RRRRRRRGGGGHHHH, and then the tank comes up over the dunes and it goes BBBKKKKHHH POW POW POW AKAKAKAKAKAK!!! And then the helicopter goes WEEEEEEEEEE BAAAABOOOOMMMM!!! And then COBRA arrive in their submarine, and attack all the divers in the boat POW SPLASH! CRASH! AAAAAARRRGGHH You got me, Commander!!! AAAARRRKKKKHHH. But they don't know that Joe's got an army of jet fighters, WWWHHHOOOOOOSSSSSHHHH!!!!! POW!!! BAAABOOOOMMMM!!!!"

And that, in a nutshell, is how they made the G.I. Joe movie.

And because it re-created the way kids played with the toys in precisely the right way, the movie works. Against all odds, and despite its absurdities throughout, it knew what it was, what it was trying to be, and it achieved success. If you want to see a completely over the top mind blowing blast of a movie, G.I. Joe is worth a look.

The next movie I saw was District 9.

I had seen the trailer, and when I had ever seen the reviews the implication was always "Don't read this review, because what you think the movie is about, it's so much more, and not at all what you are expecting." So I kept away from as much promotion for it as possible, until now when I finally saw it on DVD.

Also, I love visual effects, and the things I had seen for District 9, the casual approach, where whole sequences had a dismissive feeling of the effects being not "special" at all, just accepted as real, it so intrigued and impressed me I was completely drawn to it, even if the movie turned out to be bad.

Luckily the consensus has been that it's a wonderful film, of great impact and handled with astonishing, seemingly effortless, dexterity.

And I agree.

It starts out as a documentary, following a dorky Government official in South Africa, where Aliens had arrived in their spaceship, twenty years earlier, and now he has to convince them to relocate to a new location outside of the city. Cleaner, but smaller, but more importantly...

Click for spoilers

...far away from a buried spacecraft, which only needs fuel to allow the Aliens the opportunity to go back to the Mother Ship and head home again.

But when the Official accidentally sprays himself with the fuel so carefully collected and distilled, he begins to go through a metamorphosis that completely turns the story around into something new. And not even that is what you might expect.

It truly is an amazing film, and may even be up for an Academy Award, if reviews are anything to go by. I urge anyone who hasn't seen it to not read my spoilers, and just go and get the DVD and watch it as soon as you can, because you will be at turns revolted, amazed, thrilled, energised, and inspired, by what unfolds.

And the visual effects are really cool, too.

The last one I watched this week was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

I started reading the Harry Potter books way back before they were a phenomenon. Well, maybe right on the cusp of its beginning. And though I've never felt they were great literature, or particularly worthy of the praise and crazed mania that they ended up in amongst, they are nevertheless entertaining reads, with a great grasp of character, and with very well woven plot threads that leads to an ending that fits all that had come before.

Half-Blood Prince, as a book, comes at a difficult point in the over arcing plot. The main characters are fleshed out, the main plot threads are in play, and the end game is yet to begin. But the main bad guy and his motivations are left as something of a mystery up to this point, and so Jo Rowling set aside this book to finally tell Voldemort's tale, and provide the final clues to his reign, his return, and his motivations to kill Harry.

But there has to be more to the story than that, and both Rowling, and director David Yates, managed to find a good backbone to carry the characters along. Yates has exploited it in a better way for the film than was portrayed in the book, even though all the beats matched. As he was the director for the previous film, he had set up a few threads that carried through, and that continuity, coupled with the unexpectedly subtle performances, brought it a sincerity that resonated throughout the length of the film.

Basically the kids have grown up. They're teenagers with raging hormones, and are making stupid decisions based on instincts obscured by unimportant things they think are crucial.

The actors have likewise grown up, their acting has improved in every way, but they still have an amateur performance element, which sort of gets on my nerves. But that's being picky, because it's drowned out by spectacle, wonderful relationship moments, and a stylish flourish that bodes well for the next movie.

Which, incidentally, covers one book, but will be split into two films, because it's so long and can't be easily trimmed back.

So I definitely recommend all three of these films for a great evening's entertainment. They are fun, provocative, and spectacular. What more can you hope for?

Doctor Who: The End Of Time is The End Of An Era

A two part episode to end the year, also ended the reign of the Tenth Doctor, as David Tennant bows out of the iconic role he has so assuredly made his own.

It was, of course, an epic load of silly pseudo-science-fiction, an over-abundance of drama and melodrama, and a healthy dose of unnecessarily tortuous story call-backs. Couple that with celebrity cameos, enigmatic character cameos, and more cliffhangers you can shake a plunger at, and you have a typical Russell T Davies television feast.

It was as entertaining as you can hope for. Yes, it went over the top rather too many times, but that's no different than the original series, which any fan will tell you was an embarrassment as often as it was a triumph. Russell persists in thinking of Doctor Who as a show intended for kids, which though is true, doesn't mean you should be too patronising (like the Sarah Jane Adventures) or you should ignore the adult fans and the Whovians who obsess over it.

Which is why I love to listen to the episode commentaries that Russell participates in, where you get an insight into his intent, and why he makes some of his seemingly sillier story decisions. Really, he knows what his audience wants, and who they are. He is masterfully in control, of so many difficult aspects of writing and Producing scripts, and all he has to reign in is the absurdly over-the-top edge-of-your-seat disastrous cliffhangers. End of the world? End of Reality? End of Time? Who would want to wreak such havoc, realistically? What is the point of ending everything so you have nothing left to rule over?

Anyways, it was an excellent production, wonderfully acted, quite moving, and the appearance right at the end of the Eleventh Doctor was written by the new showrunner and head writer, Steven Moffat, and even those scant few lines of dialogue was marvellously entertaining. It bodes well for its future.

Which is only weeks away, as it is scheduled to return sometime around March or April.

I can't wait.

End Of The Decade

So. That was 2009. And, indeed, that was the first 10% of the 21st century.

It wasn't quite the successful year I had hoped it would be for me. But neither was it utter failure and despair. However, I am not in a very comfortable state at this point, and I need to ramp up the change and get my life sorted out.

2009 started out pretty well, with a lot of possibility. I had been organising my first short film, Horizon, and was figuring out how I was going to pay for the cockpit prop, and get permission for all the locations I wanted. But for every step forward, something caused me to go two steps back. I lost a lot of confidence in how I was dealing with it, and after a tough decision, gave up on the whole shebang.

However, something else took its place. After a great job at editing Checkpoint, we realised something was missing, and now the booked camera gave us an opportunity. We decided to add in a whole bunch of new shots to the opening sequence, to show some of the detail that we had originally planned on only implying. This meant calling in our main actor, and a few mates to be wranglers and extras, and some equipment and costume hire. We bought a greenscreen, set it up outdoors in the sun, and set to filming around forty shots that would be almost entirely reliant on CG effects and digital compositing to work. I knew it was a lot of work to take on, requiring the creation of all new CG models, and some learning of new techniques, but that was the point, and where the fun would lie. It took the rest of the year, with a lot of interruption and distraction, but I recently completed the last of the shots I was assigned, which I will hand in soon.

Then, not being able to stop ourselves, we came up with a new idea to make films with very little preparation and hassle, to avoid the stress and nightmare of organising things, but would give us an opportunity to learn new visual effects techniques and skills. For example, we might run out to a forest, and film a couple of friends having a sword fight, and we'd edit it together to make it as exciting as we could. Or we'd film an empty road and then I'd model and animate a science fiction hoverbike race. We called it Pick Up & Go and so far we've muddled along with it quite well.

I also moved house, rather unexpectedly. It came at a very inconvenient time, but it led me to a place I like a lot, where I have peace and quiet and a real feeling of independence I've not experienced before. It is a long way from a lot of things I wish it was closer to, but at the same time it's closer to a lot of things I used to be far away from. So that evens out.

I completed my first script in late 2008, and by the beginning of the year I tried to locate people who could give me general and broad feedback on it. I didn't manage to find too many who seemed willing to read it, and the few who did gave only a tiny and incomplete amount of feedback, if they even remembered to reply. That was disappointing. I lost a little bit of enthusiasm and encouragement because of that, but I have attempted to write more scripts all year. None of them have really come together as well as the first one, with huge gaps staring at me in the face, that I am struggling to fill in.

I have no illusions that my first screenplay is a thrill ride that would be a box office smash hit and win awards, if it were ever to be made. I'm really just looking to learn how to improve. There are professionals that will read screenplays and give advice of varying levels of detail, but you have to pay them a sum of money, which I don't have to spare, so that route is currently closed to me. I can, however, get an Agent to represent me. Or so I thought. In fact, the real arrangement is the Agent has to find me, which means I need to already know people who know people in the right side of the Industry, and I can't see how I can manage that magic trick from the arse end of the world where I live. I am quite disillusioned.

I was hoping that after I put together my showreel, I would be in a good position to find work in the visual effects industry. After sending it out, though, I have gotten no response at all (I did get one single acknowledgement of receipt). I can't tell if that's because I wasn't good enough, they weren't looking for anyone at the moment, or some other reason. It is very frustrating to be in the dark, when I was expecting at least a ripple of something to point me in the right direction.

I think I'm being too passive. I think that's what has to change for me. I have to be more proactive in 2010.

Hmm. Is it "twenty-ten" or "two thousand and ten"?

Darn. I have no idea.

The Most Spectacular Movie I Have Ever Seen

There is a new bar for visual effects, and it is Avatar.

I don't see movies in the cinema very often anymore - it's expensive, a hassle to get there, and the viewing experience is usually a lot less pleasant than watching a DVD at home. To counter the drain of theatregoers to their own home cinemas, they have reintroduced a superior version of 3D to films, which are widely accepted and are, against my expectation, going gangbusters at the box office.

I personally don't see that 3D adds anything to the experience, and I have only seen two 3D movies. One was Pixar's UP, and the other was Avatar. I decided that they were both worth the expense and inconvenience because of their expected entertainment value for money. I was not disappointed, both times.

There's no doubt the 3D works well, and is a pleasing added dimension, to use an obvious pun, to the movies, even if it is wholly unnecessary to get the same amount of pleasure from the film. It's much improved over earlier versions, and as long as the film doesn't have in-your-face nonsense all the way through it, it just adds depth and a degree of realism that 2D doesn't already offer.

But Avatar is more than just a 3D experience. Widely dismissed by many nerdy geeky types who have seen the trailer and disregarded it as merely a retread of Dances With Wolves or Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, but with blue fake-looking CGI aliens, they have unfairly cast judgement on something that has much more to offer than just that.

For one thing, the Ferngully plot is only a backdrop to a wonderful journey of discovery of a completely alien, yet familiar, world. Filled to overflowing with unique creatures that really feel like they genuinely could really exist, rather than as mere nightmarish monsters, and lush with new foliage that borrows much from familiar tropical (and ocean bed) plants but have an all new twist (sometimes literally a twist), it is a dazzling tour de force, a visual symphony, of glorious vivid colour. At moments I genuinely believed it was all real, and I wished I could have visited it.

The biggest leap in CGI technology wasn't the landscape, though there were leaps and bounds made in the believability and interactive nature of that too. No, instead we saw the best motion capture, both for the bodies and especially the face, than anything we have ever witnessed. It's made leaps and bounds even since Gollum and Kong. Robert Zemeckis will be tearing his hair out at what James Cameron has managed to develop, and I'm sure we'll see it reflected in his next epic (rumoured to be, incidentally, a new Roger Rabbit film).

Apparently, the biggest, and yet simplest leap in motion capture was that the facial capture happened at the same time as the body capture, so they moved in tandem, rather than needing to be married together from separate performances. That, and an improvement in smoothness and accuracy, has finally abolished the flaws that marred the technology for so long, and opened up a more reliable way for actors to inhabit CGI bodies.

I came away from Avatar absolutely breathlessly stunned. Though the movie is long in minutes, it feels exactly the right length because there's just so much to see. Perhaps repeated viewings, and familiarity after watching on DVD, will make it seem a tad long, but for now it felt just perfect.

The characters you're supposed to hate I really hated, the characters you're supposed to cheer for I loved, and the characters that could've gone either way were nicely nuanced and were handled just right.

It's not the most original story, and borrows a lot of its ideas, both visual and narrative, from many sources, but as a whole, it is a spectacle like you have never seen, and sets the bar for epic adventure fantasy that won't be matched for a long time.

The End Of The World Is Nigh

I don't know much about science. I didn't pay much attention to it at school, preferring to joke around with my mates instead. I was very good at Maths, English, and Art, though, so was sort of allowed to drop the ball on other subjects as a kind of balance.

Looking back on it, I wish I had paid attention, because nowadays a lot of scientific advancements and discoveries fascinate me. Not to the point where I might have sought a career in it, but it would be good if I understood the principles or the theory behind it a little better than I do. The truth is, too much scientific gobbledegook bores me very quickly, and my brain just shuts down, pushing me away, preventing me from grasping the finer details I really feel I ought to know better than I do.

Climate Change is the biggest scientific issue that currently concerns us. It potentially could signal the death of the human race, if we mess it up. Or at least change the world to an unrecognisable state.

I was a skeptic about it for a long time, and still have some lingering doubts. When the Global Warming theory first emerged into the public consciousness, sometime in the early 90s, the computer model predicting it appeared to be only one of many possible outcomes that had been calculated, the rest not really foretelling anything too bad was happening. But the Media got a hold of the worst one, and made a meal of it, releasing the term "Global Warming" into popular culture, putting forth all sorts of misinterpreted statistics into the agenda, and generally causing a widespread panic.

Scientists were of two minds. A great number of them were skeptical, and many remain so. But there were some, most at the heart of the issue, who maintained that it fit the evidence thus far, and was worth investigating just in case.

To me, it was rather too convenient that the hippies of the previous decades who were saying "We've got to look after our world, man, it's the only one we have. Bad karma, dude. It's going to happen!" and what do you know, a decade later everything the hippies predicted, based on whatever drug-induced tree-hugging uneducated madness they were spouting, appeared to be coming true. All a bit suspicious, if you ask me.

But as time has passed, the evidence appears to be mounting, and the science seems to bear it out. Something bad is happening, and it appears to be the humans at fault.

The Earth has existed for millennia, with billions of different creatures living on it over that time, variously dominating and going extinct. The dinosaurs, in various evolved groups, were around for 250 million years, then died out for an indeterminate reason possibly related to an asteroid impact. Then 65 million years passed while mammals and birds appeared amongst the ecosystem, eventually getting to the point where Man appears on the scene. 1.5 million years later they reach a state that we would recognise as "intelligent". And 100,000 years later they decide the planet was created for them, that it was served to them on a plate, that they are the dominant force in the universe, and can therefore take everything and misuse it for their own selfish gain, while fighting off all other living beasts to the point of destruction, just to maintain their dominant position.

Humans suck.

Frankly, we deserve to die by our own hand, after our abuse of the natural world that created us. If any species deserved karma heaped upon them, it is us. And Climate Change is that karma, almost as a textbook example.

But we may be able to save ourselves. Apparently, through desperation, they think we can change some of our behaviours, and fix things. They'll never return back to the way they were before we messed everything up, but it can at least keep us, and everything else, alive for longer if we're careful and really try hard.

How do we do this monumental task?

By changing our light bulbs, and having shorter showers.

Hmm. That doesn't really sound like it would be enough.

Okay, we can also drive hybrid, or even fully electric, cars.

That sounds a little better.

Except the amount of pollution that is caused when the electricity is generated, or hydrogen cells are produced, or the cars are manufactured, outweighs any immediate benefits from the less emissions the cars produce.

It seems to me that our domestic carbon footprint is so minuscule compared to industry carbon emissions that anything we do as an individual at our home isn't going to make an impact that matters. It would take decades, possibly centuries, before we'd be in a position where what we were doing at home actually mattered in this huge issue.

But the world of Industry, which creates collectively about a bazillion times as much carbon as the whole of human domestic pollution, will not change their methodology without a fight. In order for them to do so they have to invest money, which they don't want to spend, on new technologies to develop and perfect. And their production will, in itself, create carbon emissions.

We have to make pollution to reduce pollution.

On top of that madness, the Governments have to start the ball rolling, by signing agreements, with strict rules for Industry to follow, but they're still arguing over fine details, over whether it's actually really happening, how much money they can get out of the under-the-table backroom deals, and thus watering down all the agreements. Meanwhile they continue to burn the skies with military action, greedily maintain oil-based profiteering, and relentlessly attempt to wrest control so the world can be run their way (instead of by those idiot foreign buggers).

It's a huge steaming pile of nonsense, and it will kill us all.

But perhaps that's a good thing. Perhaps we deserve it.

Bad Timing

The whole morning was wonderfully sunny and quiet.

The early afternoon, similarly warm and pleasant.

But the very minute I sit outside in my yard to quietly read a book, what happens? Next door's lawn mower starts up, which then sets the opposite house's dog barking.

Bloody typical.

Fallout

My hair has always been unworkable. From as early as five years old, I can remember the struggles I had with being able to do anything with it.

For a start, it parts on the opposite side to most other people, which made it look lopsided. It was very thick and dark, which gave it no shape, and no control. It just did whatever it wanted, which was always the same thing - fluff up and sit like it was somehow separated from my scalp. Hairspray and gel don't work on my hair; thus far they have been unable to tame it. If it's cut too short, it spikes up, so it needs some amount of length at all times to look even remotely acceptable.

Whenever some new trendy haircut was in style, I'd go to the hairdresser's and ask for something resembling it. They'd immediately say "Sure! No problem!" and get to work. After five minutes they'd start to hesitate, and go "Hmmm..." until eventually they gave up. "Sorry, I can't really do what you want. But I tell you what, I can make you look like a dork for the rest of your life. How about that?"

End result, the exact same haircut I have always had, forever.

I started losing my hair when I was in my mid-20s. It was a slow, but incessant, loss, which wasn't really visible to others for a while, but by age 30 it was much more evident. I also started going grey at about the same time, and though I wish it had gone shock white instead, it remains patchy and haphazard.

So. Uncontrollable, lopsided, dorky, patchwork, potentially spikey and flyaway, and rapidly falling out. What a disaster.

The common approach to such situations is to shave it all off. But that would mean having to constantly keep it close cropped a lot more often than regular haircut frequency, which sounds far too much like hard work to me. And anyway, it would just spike at the earliest opportunity, which I hate. Plus, I suspect my head is a funny shape.

Genetically I have to blame my Granddad on my mother's side; I have the exact same pattern of hair loss that he did. Whereas my brother is not losing his hair at all, and has something resembling our Dad's curly frizz.

There's not much to do about it. It's not like I have enough vanity that I care about my appearance in any way. I'll just continue to slob along looking like a scruff, as always.

Still, it does suck.

One Way Out

I'm not very good at video games. I don't play them very often, certainly not as much as I once did, but even back then it was an infrequent pastime, as I was universally crap at almost all of them. Much like board games, and sport, and most other similar activities.

I do still occasionally open a video game up and give them a burst of effort, but it's half-hearted and brief before I get frustrated, or bored, or more likely killed eight times in a row, and so give up and move on to something else.

There are a couple of game types I like more than most of the others. When I was a kid, text adventure games were my favourite. Espionage Island is a title that leaps to mind. I was continually frustrated by them, though, as the aim wasn't to solve the game, but figure out what the right word commands were. Was it "pick up rock"? Or "get rock"? Or "throw rock"? And then it would crash and you'd have to reload it.

Then graphical adventures started to appear. Same idea, but with cool pictures to go along with it, sometimes even animated in a limited way. This gave rise to such classics as King's Quest, The Secret Of Monkey Island, and Myst.

I did play other games, platform or shoot-em-ups or whatever, but generally I found them less satisfying, especially as death was the usual and frequent outcome, whereas with the LucasArts and Myst games you couldn't die or lose the game, you'd just get stuck for a while, desperately clicking on every option until you'd stumble upon the answer that was, in retrospect, obvious.

Then along came 3D when Doom appeared on the scene (okay, there were precursors, like Wolfenstein, but I believe Doom was the true turning point). I liked that game, but even better was the appearance of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. That game was perfect for me! It had all the elements of adventure I liked, i.e. the exploration, the puzzles, the discovery; coupled with the action adventure that was just at the right level to be challenging, but, if you were prepared, easily overcome and never overwhelming.

As the Tomb Raider games developed, I followed along with them, but the most recent versions have changed their control system to the standard gamepad method, which I find inexact and confusing, so I have lost interest. I still go back to my favourite in the series, Tomb Raider II, which in my opinion had the best locations to explore, including: the canals of Venice, a huge Opera Theatre, an Oil Rig, an enormous sunken Ocean Liner, and a Monastery in the snowy Himalayas, each of which were split up into multiple Levels. Unfortunately the graphics are so outdated now it's a little disappointing to revisit, but the gameplay and controls still stand up and are just at my level.

The most common games are still the 3D shoot-em-up alien, soldier, zombie type, where it's wholesale slaughter from start to finish. Or it's the colourful kiddie platform games where you bounce around collecting stars and rainbows to free the princess from the evil genie. Or it's the weird Wii games where you have to do... something with the... weird thing to... save the... whatever (see Mirror's Edge, Spore, Portal, Flower, etc).

And there are numerous other genres, like Strategy, Management, Driving, Simulation, Role Playing (MMORPG's especially), Sports, etc. Most of which I have no interest in (except for Driving games. I can get into them sometimes, even though I don't drive in real life).

It occurs to me that there ought to be a perfect game to suit my interests. Surely I'm not the only one who would be into this particular idea I am about to suggest.

We are all familiar with mazes. You start at one end, and you try to get to the other end, by following a route, and getting distracted and lost down dead ends. A very simple concept that has been around for thousands of years, still popular today. There have been numerous maze-like video games, from the obvious and simple like PacMan, which are more like obstacles than puzzles, to the complex labyrinthine 3D tangles that you find in Doom or Tomb Raider. Most other shoot-em-up or 3D games tend to have complicated multi-level locations, but not really a true maze (some even lead you all the way with flashing arrows and on-screen maps).

What I want to see is an epic 3D Maze game, where there are multiple Levels, each of a different distinct location. For example: an office building; an oil refinery; an Egyptian pyramid; a shopping centre; a cinema complex; a multi-story car park; a mediaeval castle; a city block; a sewer system; etc. Each place would be fully complete and accurate, with every room, alcove, corner, elevator, fire escape, and floor in place. Everything would be interactive, from desk drawers, to cash registers, to food items, to bedsheets, to tools.

But the key would be, there is only one route to get from your start point to the end point, with lots of dead ends and red herrings to distract and confuse you. There would be no other characters seen in the entire game, though there would be evidence of their existence. There would be puzzles that require items you need to pick up, found in logical locations. There would be clues, such as notes and phone messages, that would help you if you got stuck. There would be certain routes that would be a struggle to get through, where you would not be able to go back the same way. There would be some back-tracking required to get missed clues or items. You would only be able to carry a limited number of items at once, so you may need to drop one useful tool to access another, then drop that one again to pick up the previous.

Nobody shoots at you, nothing leaps out and tries to eat you, no deadly traps or dangerous risks. It's just a maze.

So it may go like this:

You begin in the foyer of an office building. The front doors are blocked by fallen masonry, and the outside is chaos. You need to get to the roof to be rescued by helicopter. There are two elevators. Neither call button is working on this floor. You can access the stairs, but the only way clear is down. You head to the basement, where there is a maintenance room full of useful tools. You select a crowbar and a wrench.

You keep heading down, until you get to the underground carpark. There are four or five cars, but the rest of the spots are empty. You check your pockets and discover you have a car alarm lock, which opens your own car. Inside you find your mobile phone, but the battery is flat.

You head back up the stairs where you use the crowbar to dislodge some of the debris blocking the way up, and manage to get to the next floor. This is where a small finance company work, but the floor is scattered with debris. You can get into some of the offices, where all the desk drawers can be opened, and some useful items, and notes in diaries, contain clues useful for later in the game. The computers are all down. But you can pick up a whiteboard pen.

One of the elevator buttons works here, but it can only travel two floors up on this eight storey building. These floors are for the cafeteria and a mobile phone company that has chargers lined up. Though there is no power, there are charged batteries, and you find one that matches your phone.

And so it goes. You can climb out onto the fire escape to get to the next floor, where the second elevator works up to the top floor, where the Penthouse suite is which has luxurious places to explore and fancy items to use, etc etc etc.

And imagine that kind of scenario at an airport, or a science lab, or a prison, or even a jungle setting.

It seems to me that this is an untapped idea that could really sell. Sometimes you just want a game where nobody is trying to kill you, or infect you, or invade your world, that you can spend twenty minutes making your way through the attic of a cathedral to get to the bell tower. It uses existing game technology, or "engine", and therefore would be mostly pretty easy to put together, without requiring huge complexity or fancy new weapons that blast away at things in ever more spectacular ways.

Somebody should make this.

Hidden Gems

Every so often, to waste time and go for a fun drive, Rob will call up and say "It's a nice day, let's go looking for possible locations we can film at". A few weeks ago we travelled out to Mt Buffalo, which when it's out of ski season is a fantastic mountain covered in uniquely beautiful rock formations and fresh waterfalls.

And yesterday we headed out to Heathcote, and a spot called Pink Cliffs. A previous film had been shot there, so Rob was familiar with it. It seemed like a great place to set something like a miniature Indiana Jones, with its low set clay hills. It's a unique look, but limited in its possibilities; most angles show distinctive Australian trees on the horizon.


One of the things we are constantly fighting against is finding places we can film that don't feel like Australia. If we want to set a movie in the past, in a different country, such as a generic mediaeval era, we are not exactly spoilt for choice, like those who live in Europe or even New Zealand. Instead we have gum trees and desert. The best we can hope for is Tasmania, not unlike NZ in many respects, but even that isn't enough and is severely limited.

We headed back home, but it was early in the day yet, so we took a random detour down a side road. As we turned the corner, I thought to myself "wouldn't it be weird if we happened to find exactly what we were looking for after this completely random decision?".

And, naturally, we did find exactly that.


Emu Flat is a rural area full of farmland that is peppered with amazing rolling hills topped by enormous exposed boulders. They look like weathered castle ruins, or a giant's teeth emerging from the ground. Weathered over millennia, they are left with the appearance of boulders precariously balanced on top of each other, as though a little tap will cause them to tip over and roll down the hill.

We looked around for public access to these fields, but there appeared to be none. They were all on farmland. We will probably have to seek permission of a Farmer to film in his paddocks, which I hope won't be a big problem, if we so choose.

When I visited a local Milk Bar to ask the owners if any of the rocky fields were accessible to the public, they looked at me funny. They didn't quite understand what it was I was talking about, because to them those rocks are what they see every day, and if anything are an inconvenience the Farmers have to avoid when they cultivate their fields.

What an amazing and beautiful discovery it was, and one that so many people manage to miss out on or, at least, don't appreciate when they do see it.

Checkpoint: Soothing The Savage Breast

I don't know much about music. I don't even listen to it as often as most other people do. I prefer working and relaxing in silence.

But I do have a small music collection, which I unearth and play every once in a while, and a lot of it tends to be movie soundtracks. I used to buy quite a lot of it, but recently it's died down somewhat, as not a lot of movie music takes my fancy as being particularly pleasant to hear outside of the context of the visuals.

Movie soundtracks (or "scores" as they are often called, to differentiate them from the myriad of pop song collections that have marred the soundtrack racks in recent times) used to spirit you away back into the story of the film, or allow you to visualise something even more exciting of your own making. But these days the editing of a good action movie can be so erratic that the score has to match that effect, making for something quite unpleasant and jarring.

Rob and I have been churning through the final digital visual effects shots for Checkpoint, and we are almost nearing the end of it all. After the main CG work is done, there are a few composites of bullet hits and similar, followed by the colour grade, and the title and credits captions. We can handle all those ourselves, but there is one side we don't have the talents for, and that's the audio: sound effects and music.

The sound effects will be started soon, as the edit is only a couple of effects shots short of the final cut, so that just leaves the music.

In the past, our team has not had a local composer. There is a guy that Dags uses for his films, but though he has visited Australia frequently, he actually lives in the US someplace, which is not the ideal way to get a soundtrack fine tuned. Dags seems happy using this method, but for us it would not have worked very well, we felt we needed to be able to sit down and go through each part of the film piece by piece.

Unbeknownst to us, one of our general dogsbody and anonymous background extras we use frequently, Andy Scott, has a talent that had been hidden from us. He's a pianist. Coupled with his interest in movies, and his willingness to always be a part of the team in whatever capacity that's going, he was an ideal choice. If we could organise a keyboard and a suitable piece of software, we thought we could probably get something that would sound pretty decent out of him, if we sat with him all the way through it.

There are lots of different kinds of music creation software, both simple and elaborate. One that has been around for a long time, and has become quite sophisticated, is Cubase, which allows for MIDI keyboard input to be translated into full realistic orchestral sound samples. A friend of Rob's, Troy, had a copy of this software and a little bit of experience in using it (though not as MIDI, instead for offline track mixing). We corralled him in, and this week we all sat down together to nut out our soundtrack.

At first we struggled, as you might expect for newcomers to this branch of movie making. Partly it was due to learning the software, which had a couple of fundamental bugs we had to work around. But also it was because Andy's piano experience doesn't exactly mirror what is required to get a correctly arranged orchestra. Luckily Troy is a talented violinist, and is familiar enough with orchestras he could provide his own input into what was required.

After searching online and fixing the bugs in the software, and learning the basics of how the software operated, I took over from Troy on the days he wasn't available, and after four days of work, we managed to create six or seven pieces of music, including a few incidental moments, for throughout the film, and though we were muddling along in an unfamiliar environment, I think we came up trumps. There's a consistent style to the music, and it has some evocative melodies. We are justifiably proud of what we've achieved so far.

Troy will now take the MIDI tracks away and mix them into a full sounding orchestra, and hopefully it won't be too long before we'll have our completed soundtrack.

It has been very interesting to have to deal with this part of our movie. Though Rob seemed a little bit daunted by our lack of experience, I was nevertheless quite excited. Rob provided suggestions of what he wanted, I was able to relate it in terms that Andy could (almost) understand, while Troy filled in the terminology blanks, and together we made a great team.

I hope that one day soon we can do this again. Perhaps, dare I say it, even for a feature length film.

The Future Of Entertainment

I have not succumbed to all the latest home entertainment gadgetry. I resist, not just because I don't have the money to throw around anymore, but also because I am not yet convinced of its necessity. As a geek, I am atypical in my reluctance to participate in the technology-fest.

Having said that, my current set up is not too bad. A 42-inch plasma TV, 5.1 surround, and a 2000 piece DVD collection is not to be sniffed at. But it's a Standard Definition TV, six years old, with limited and outdated inputs, and of an age that will increase its unreliability.

I have mentioned before that I have not been taken in by the hype of 3D movies, a blatant and oft-repeated gimmick that is surprisingly popular, both with filmmakers and audiences. A shame, as it adds nothing to enjoying the film. It is merely cruft.

But there are bigger and better TVs, High Definition plasma, digital projectors, LCD, 200hz, DVR, 7.1 surround sound, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, X-Box, iPhones, Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Google Chrome, Google Wave, more, more, more, more......

But I don't have any of those.

What? What? How can that be, why would a geek such as myself resist such enticements?

Because they have no added value. They aren't really an improvement on how I already live my life, so much as a distraction and often a serious inconvenience.

Of course, that's not a particularly good reason, I have many things in my life that don't contribute anything of real substantial value. But as I have gotten older, I tend to evaluate things differently, and I have found I can resist indulging in things that I predict ultimately will have no future, or at least I will not utilise.

The only things that may change in the aforementioned list, when circumstances inevitably demand it, is when I have to get a mobile phone for some work-related reason, so I'll probably get an iPhone. I see great potential usefulness in a mobile computer, more than I do an unreliable wireless telephone.

And I will also have to upgrade my TV and DVD player to HD/Blu-Ray when my current setup finally gives up the ghost. My recent scare with my TV may very well be a sign of impending death.

These things also cost money, something I am no longer flush with. I am very careful with my cash these days, trying hard not to spend it frivolously. I'm not as good at that as I used to be, but I am still hesitant before committing to certain things.

I hope that the tide will shift soon. There is a taste in the air that suggests it might.

Smouldering

There is an interesting trend in cop shows right now, that I sort of like, even if it's blatantly unoriginal.

In the serieseses Bones, The Mentalist, and Castle, they each have a female senior Detective who has a mysterious dark past, and all have similar big-eyed smouldering looks.

They are played, respectively, by Emily Deschanel, Robin Tunney, and Stana Katic. They don't really look alike, you can easily tell them apart, but if you were to flick through the channels and stumble on one of them, you may be confused as to which of the shows you've fallen on.

The relationships with the male leads are also similar to each other, but that's just standard TV/movie writing, and even if the characters were played by completely different actors, you'd still have the will-they-won't-they element layed on thick, as they have done.

Despite this, I can't deny that each of these female Detective characters are most pleasantly distracting.

Thar She Blows!

When it rains, it pours.

I was sitting doing ordinary regular computer stuff the other night, when the screen suddenly went *plink*. I assumed it was a power surge crash, as has happened before, though it only affected the one computer, and my clocks weren't blinking "12:00" so wasn't sure.

I rebooted the computer, only to get a blank screen, and my monitor's power light to be blinking a regular pattern at me.

It turns out, for no reason whatsoever, my monitor just died. Gone. Kaput-ski. I have no idea why, or if it can be fixed, but for now that's that.

I have a second computer with a similar monitor, so I swapped them over, and set up an older monitor for the second machine, so I'm still capable of using both, but it sucks that I will have to buy a new monitor.

And then my external hard drive, that I keep all my creative files on (movie trailers, writing, mp3s, video files, that kind of stuff, mostly) started whining in a high pitched "I'm about to die" way. I left it going for a while, trying to copy over the files to spare space on my other HDD, but I switched it off overnight, and this morning it was totally dead.

I have a spare hard drive, so put that in to the external enclosure, but that didn't work either. That means it wasn't a hard drive death at all, but a failed external enclosure.

Buggery bollocks.

After some crazy fiddling around, I hooked the HDD to my other computer, and it worked fine, all the files are there. But it's not a practical method for me, I need a new hard drive, and may as well get a hefty big one, a terabyte or so, as that seems to be the default these days.

These are two expenses I could've lived without having to sort out. I am not pleased.

Over The Hill

Apparently I am officially old. How annoyingly inevitable.

I think 40 is a good age to look back on your life, look ahead at your future, and do a little analysis.

I certainly know I haven't achieved as much as I had hoped. But I have fulfilled a lot of my dreams, weird and unlikely as they occasionally seemed, and not a lot of people can say that.

I also have many dreams yet unfulfilled, ones that are quite achievable and yet strangely out of reach. If statistics are on my side, I have a good few decades left to sort that out.

Currently my life is in a state of flux, as it has been for a couple of years. What was originally my own idea, to reorganise my potential future, has now reached a point where I no longer have that control or freedom, and that's a frightening thought. I am at a point where I have to actually do something, and not just amble along, as I have been.

I really am not comfortable with being proactive. I am a wallflower who likes things to slowly formulate so I can sidle my way in and firmly root myself where I become indispensable, but yet remain invisible. To be in a situation now where I have to actively show off and put myself out there, visibly, is a vulnerable position that I do not like at all. I don't think I'm alone in that feeling, and though that is slightly comforting, it doesn't really help me much.

I still live in hope for something to fall into my lap from out of the sky. Surprisingly, it's worked a few times before, so there is a small possibility that it could happen again.

Now would be a good time.

Pegasus Regent

I probably shouldn't be doing this.

I have two other screenplays I want to write, but both of those have struck problems. One has a plot that needs to be completely re-configured, and the other has a huge stumbling block I can't figure out and is spinning me in circles.

But Rob and I were chatting the other day, and he said "I am just waiting for you to write the sequel to Pegasus Rampant." Well, I told him I don't really have a complete story for that one yet, and anyway I want to have it read by people who really count first, to boost my confidence and set me on the right path, before I start writing sequels to it.

But as I was stuck on the aforementioned two other screenplays, I have been thinking some more about what little story I had already formulated for this sequel. For one thing, I had already come up with a title - Pegasus Trampled. At first I thought that was a decent title (the next sequel is called Pegasus Triumphant, which I think is perfect) but thinking back on it, it's actually awkward and cheesy. So I looked up a rhyming dictionary, and narrowed it down to a few other options, eventually choosing to change the title to Pegasus Regent.

That change just sparked more ideas, which allowed me to fill in most of the blanks for the storyline. And I have that sitting there, looking up at me with those big brown sad eyes... I can't stop myself.

I really ought to be working on some other stuff entirely, but... I guess sticking with what I know best (Fantasy, and characters I'm already familiar with) and a complete storyline mapped out ready, is a better plan. Really.

At least, that's what I'm telling myself.

Hard Day's Knight: Vincent and Wally

Progress.

These are the first steps for A Hard Day's Knight, the animated short film which may never be made.

I've jiggled Wally's textures a bit, and shortened his arms a tad. Then, not being able to stop myself, I grabbed the layers for his body and armour, and whacked them onto the head of the other character (which I had also previously modelled earlier this year), rearranged most of the points to make him skinny and tall, and so Wally and Vincent, the two stars of our little animation, are fully rounded and, almost, complete.

As a character, Vincent is a much tidier person than Wally, he takes a pride in his appearance that Wally chooses not to emulate. Also, he likes to think of himself as being more intelligent than his friend, but really he only barely qualifies as such. And, compared to Wally's comfortably rotund and squat appearance, Vincent's posture is quite lanky and awkward, so he's not as graceful as he would like to think.

I struggled a little bit with getting Vincent looking just right. The bulk of the chainmail armour and steel breastplate unfortunately hid his skinny physique. I had to work on it quite a while, but I eventually figured out how to make him look thin while still covering up his chest with bulky armour.

The trick was: lengthen his legs considerably; comically shorten his pant legs; and give him a short upper body. This allowed for the armour to remain tiny and narrow, emphasising his skinny chest, and giving it just the right balance to look in proportion, but still exaggerated.

This is a key factor to caricature. You can't just enlarge anything you want, and put them where you want. There has to be a balance, a perfect ratio, that works.

Jim Henson, mastermind behind the Muppets, knew of this trick, that there's a magic triangle of eye-position to nose-position that is always pleasing to look at. If the eyes are too high, or too far apart, or tilted the wrong angle, they just don't work so well. You'll see evidence of that when you look at some of his earliest Muppet characters, or in some puppets that aren't Muppets, where they haven't managed to achieve that golden ratio. But all of Henson's most successful Muppets had it, worked out during the design and building phase.

That same kind of ratio and proportional balance applies to other caricatures, like in cartoons and 3D characters, where whole body proportion, like limb length, body shape, forehead-to-chin, ear-to-nose, shoulder-to-waist, arm-to-leg, etc etc etc, needs to fit. If you can't get that balance just right, it will feel off-kilter, or wrong somehow. Unfortunately, it can be hard to pin down where exactly it is failing. It can take quite a lot of experimentation with adjustments before you start to recognise the subtle things, those that work, and those that don't.

I like to think that I am pretty good at it. Now if only Pixar would come knocking.