Joelecdote

Well… I’ve bought Edius Neo… and I have a new short film coming soon!!

“Project Treborth”

Me, Huw and Laurence went out to do some test/pre-production/teaser trailer filming the weekend before last and it was really quite an awesome filmage sesh. We actually managed to get quite a few really good shots, although we made the mistake of not planning them first again which has made the trailer editing a bit difficult, but still it’s ok… All in all it was a really inspiring sesh and gave me plenty ideas for the rest of the Project Treborth storyline.

I couldn’t get the trailer quite right before, so I decided to edit together a behind the scenes type of video thingy (warning: ultra cheesy music!)…

Project Treborth: Behind the Scenes from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

I’ve also uploaded The Deadly Diamond to stage6, and someone made a comment which just really made my day:

I agree with comments posted aboce, you kids got talent.

Simple, but really encouraging aye… shame about the spelling mistake!

Anyway… there should be a teaser trailer coming online soon (probably tommorow)…

Wow it’s 2008 already! Seems like I’ve neglected updating this blog for a while :P, well this should make up for all the missed posts!

During a revision-sesh (read: a revision session) I noticed what an awesome clear sky ’twas outside. So I decided I’d do a time-lapse gradually getting darker to reveal some stars. Anyway it was already pretty dark by the time I got it all set up, so it ended up being just an ace video of a constellation moving across the sky. Obviously seeing as it was only a 4 second video, I had to add some titles, and an “extra sharp” version of the video where the stars are more visible.

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Sixth-formage is ok. You would’ve thought it’d be awesome having loads of free lessons, but in reality it’s quite boring…

I’m studying four subjects: Physics, Maths, Chemistry and Art.

Art’s going pretty well and after doing several self-portraits I’m currently drawing this lithograph by M.C. Escher, called “Reptiles”, where a reptilian creature seems to crawl out of a book. It’s a pretty complex piece to draw, but I think I’m slowly getting there!

Anyway all posts REQUIRE a picture, so here’s a random sunset on the campsite we stayed on, in Pembrokeshire:

Just done yet another sketch today, based on one of the illustrations by Chris Riddell in a book called, “Muddle Earth”:

I think it turned out pretty good actually… I’ve also started reading “The Fundamentals of Drawing”, so in theory my drawings should improve more!! There are some pretty interesting exercises in there for me to practise doing, e.g. drawing straight lines (without a ruler) and circles…

The other day I also did a sketch from my imagination!!! Which is quite an achievment I think… I think I started by drawing the nose(s) and then went on from there. It’s ended up looking like a Chavlien (Chav Alien):

Anyway, you may or may not have noticed that I’ve added another page to the site, finally edited the “About” page, and updated the portfolio page with my latest editing job with the Anglesey Youth Theatre.

This brings me onto the next bit of news - the Anglesey Youth Theatre was so impressed by my editing on those 4 clips that they’ve asked me to edit a video they’re making about the dangers of over-drinking (I can’t think of the proper translation of ‘goryfed’ at the moment), called “Ffwl Gwirion” (Stupid Fool).

Just a quick doodle type of thing I did t’other day, I think it’s pretty cool:

I’m rendering a 141 frame (5.64s) fluid simulation at the moment - it’s taking aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages!! On average it’s taking like 4 minutes per frame! Anyway I’ll probably post that up by tommorow.

As I mentioned before I’ve been trying to get this optical flow effect to work in Blender using the displace composite node. I tried it out on some real ‘live action’ footage (as opposed to the cube I used before). It didn’t really work that well - mainly because the shot contained some very dark spots where you couldn’t really make the effect out. Also I think the clip was too short, so you barely noticed the effect at all. I think I might try and make it work by looping some fire footage and duplicating it a lot of times. Another possibility is to use a development version of Blender, which has enhanced particle effect features (see the progress here), to use a technique called billboards, which means that you use particles to control a certain video, which in this case would be the looping fire footage. This would mean that I could have a controlled randomness to the fire footage. Unfortunately I’m having trouble getting the billboards to work without crashing Blender! Anyway, hopefully I should have a nice optical flow effect to show by… the end of the year!