Anecdote

This year was my first “real” Greenbelt experience although I did go in 2006, I was primarily there as part of a Videoschool course (see the post about it here) and only saw two bands perform (Note for a Child, and Numinous).

Before going I was quite excited at the prospect of ‘discovering’ some new music, because my music collection was getting quite limited and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. The drive down to Cheltenham Racecourse along the A5 was quite scenic and uneventful and we arrived after just over 4 hours on Friday. After getting our tickets and driving to the youth campsite (which we didn’t actually realise - no wonder it was so noisy!) we (mainly me!) managed to set up the tent quite quickly thanks to the soft ground (which got even softer after the rain!).

The first artist we went to see was on the “Mainstage” that night. Emmanuel Jal. What an absolutely awesomely amazingly brilliant experience (yeh it was good)! The energy he put into the live set was amazing - just everything about it was perfect (apart from some sound problems at the start… ). There was even one part where he got pretty much the entire crowd (and a few people from the crowd on the stage) to join him in doing a (as he called it) “devil stomper” dance! Emmanuel Jal is a former child soldier from Sudan, and through his music (mainly hip-hop/rap) he tells his story. I think this adds an unusal level of authenticity behind the words he speaks(/raps).

Seeing as one of my top tags on last.fm was singer-songwriter, I spent a lot of time in the Performance Cafe listening to all the singer-songwriters there. So who are we going to see today? Foreign Slippers. Who’s that? A singer-songwriter. Oh not another one!

One of the first singer-songwriters I saw was Kinzli - the first thing that struck me about her was how unique her voice sounded. I missed the start of her set, but from what I did hear the lyrics didn’t sound particularly groundbreaking. Good voice though!

Now Edwina Hayes played a really awesome set (I also missed the start!) complete with some hilarious stories from her past that any good set is lost without… Unfortunately most of her songs are quite sad, but I guess her humour counteracted the sadness in the songs

Jim Jones (former lead singer for Carbon-14 and current frontman of Smalltown Mentality) was quite good, especially one song had very clever lyrics (I think it was called One Step Away).

I did go and see Beth Rowley at the mainstage for a few minutes, but I must say I don’t really like her style of music much (and it was waaaaay too loud!). She reminded me of a non-druggie version of Amy Winehouse, and less dark…

I missed Miriam Jones‘ (yeah another singer-songwriter!) main set at the Performance Café (incidently I could have gone to see this set, seeing as my car tyres were slashed, so I couldn’t go home that night!), but I managed to catch her at the g-music shop. She had a great voice and her lyrics were quite clever too (as it turns out one of her songs was a finalist in the International Songwriting Competition).

That pretty much sums up my Greenbelt 2008…

Found out about this great resource recently…

The Animator’s Survival Kit: ANIMATED - a 16 DVD box-set by Richard Williams, triple Oscar winner and Director of Animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

It’s based on his (apparently) amazing book of the same title (minus the ANIMATED bit at the end!) and from the previews on the official site, it looks like it’s got a wealth of usefull information. Quite apart from the fact that Richard is hilarious and incredibly animated (forgive the pun!), so it’s good entertainment just to watch

Downside… £596 (incl. VAT) seems a bit steep even for 16 DVDs, but I guess it’s quite a good investment… I think for now I’ll just be getting the book

Just watching the previews for the DVDs has inspired me to get back into tradition animation - which I started getting into a while ago (1,2,3,4).

That’s it for now!

I was inspired by a post over at the BlenderArtists forum about matte painting, to give camera mapping (a technique employed in the modern matte painter’s toolbox) a try. I remember a while ago following this tutorial, but it was very “hacky” and complicated, now there is a much easier/simplified way of doing it.

I partially followed this tutorial over at the Blender Wiki, but I decided I wanted to try something more organic, and found this picture:

The first thing to do, was to isolate the foreground hill in the image, by cutting out the original reference image in GIMP:

Then I roughly modelled the hill in Blender, before using a “UVProject” modifier, which (as the name implies) projects the isolated image onto the 3D geometry.

The next thing to do was to prepare the background. Using the clone tool in GIMP, I repainted the parts of the background that the foreground hill were covering to produce a background image.

Admittedly the cloning was a bit rushed, so it’s not a very good result!

Anyway, all I needed to do now was to map this image to a plane (for even more realistic results, I could have roughly modelled the background mountain, and made a second projection), and make a simple camera move.

The result was quite good, but just to had some of the errors in my model, and to add “real-world” camera properties, I also added some motion blur (or Vector Blur, as it’s called in blender).

OK, so after all that, here’s the result:

Camera Mapping Test (AVI, h264)

Camera Mapping test from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

Another editing job!!

My latest editing project was for Caernarfon based “Cwmni Cofis Bach”, and their opera, “Trwbl yn y Gwynt” (Trouble in the wind). Read more at this Daily Post article.

Basically I got 5 DVDs of archive (newsreel) and stock footage, that I had to edit down into 3 specific clips that were to be projected during the production.

It was a pretty short deadline, and was surprisingly a lot of work even though each clip was only roughly 2-3 minutes long. I was briefed to make it “not look like it’s a newsreel” and instead to make it more cinematic or artistic. I decided to crop the footage into a typical film aspect-ratio. This involved resizing each clip individually, but unfortunately the newsreel footage had different aspect ratios throughout, so it wasn’t a “quick-fix”.

I was also going to try and do some vigorous colour-correction to make the footage more cinematic, but didn’t have the time, plus a large portion of the footage was black and white anyway.

It was quite good to have a short deadline, because I learnt how hard it is to edit under pressure…

One last piece of news, I now have some fairly decent headphones, yay!!

This is a bit late, but the Project Treborth teaser trailer is now online…

Project Treborth: Teaser Trailer from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

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