the funklab

Here is the new showreel I worked on for Proeye Visual Productions.

Proeye Showreel

Details on apps and other stuff in the link

Here is a little video I made of my son, Ford.

The thought bubbles are real, held up by my wife, and the text inside them were comp’ed in. The motion tracking wasn’t too hot. I rushed it out and DV isn’t the best format to get a track off.

Anyways, enjoy.

Music by the Polyphonic Spree.

Now. I’m going to be the first to say that in the media industry, having a degree or a diploma pretty much means squat. Zilch. Nothing. What talks is your work, if you can work to a brief, on budget and on time. But having training does teach you the necessary steps to achieve to become faster and more reliable.

Being a self-learner is vital to working in production. No one is going to ask you to take a course in visual effects, match moving, or anything. It normally lands in you lap as “Yeah, we want a new promo for Company X. It has to look like the ID’s on Foxtel. You’ve got 2 weeks”. Then it’s up to you to make it happen.

There are several places to get a bit of a helping hand. Here are a few that I’ve come across.

Full on 2+ year TAFE

A few years ago I went Northern Metropolitan Institue of TAFE (NMIT) and attended their TV training course.

It was a great course and definitely one I would wholeheartedly recommend. The facilities are amazing (full 4 camera HD studio, 4 Final Cut suites, 3 Avid suites, real kick ass). The course is heavily hands on. You work in teams and in the second year, all we did was produce content for external clients. The teachers there are fantastic, and soon you begin to think of them as mentors. I still catch up with them and talk through things.

It is great for those starting out, or who are running a smallish business and want the opportunity to get up to speed on a HD setup.

the Pixel Corps

The Pixel Corps are a guild of media developers producing a heap of content. Being a member gives you access to a wealth of information in a great community. The guys (and girls) are all willing to share information, and having the opportunity to work on a group project or tackle an exercise is invaluable.

The video training is fantastic. There is much more than can be absorbed in a year, and you get access to some pretty awesome industry standard software packages.

Libraries and Text books

Textbooks are always tricky, especially in anything tech related. As soon as the book is out, it seems that the new version of the software is out. However, there are some great books detailing the theories and processes behind the applications. A couple I can recommend are the DV Rebel’s Guide, Digital Compositing for Film and Video and a bit more app specific, but a great help was the Essential Blender

Using a library is a great way to get access to some pretty hefty textbooks. If you can’t find what you need there, normally you can ask and they’ll either get it from another library, or order it in. It’s you’re rates and taxes, so it’s worth making the most of it.

Community forums

Every software package has at least one forum dedicated to it. Creative Cow is a great place to start. They have a forum for everything I’ve ever used, and really helpful. There are the Apple forums, the Blender Artists and a host of others. Always search before asking a question, and try not to be an ass, cause then no one will help you.

Google the sucka

Yes. Do not underestimate Google when you’re stuck. I’ve found thousands of answers to my questions just by Googleing around. Most of the time you just need to put the right keywords in. Try the program, then a couple of words describing what you’re trying to do.
Like “shake track improve interlaced”. Refine it a few times, and drill a couple of pages down.

We’ve just started a blog at Proeye. We’ll go into stuff that we’ve been doing, showcase some of the clients we work with.

Keep your eye on it for cool stuff.

www.proeye.tv/blog

My wife and I have just finished writing a pretty comprehensive script for a client. I thought this would be a good opportunity to do a post on pre-production.

I find this stage of media creation the most important. Whenever I have brushed over, or thought that I haven’t had enough time for planning, I have regretted it. Projects become messy. Shots get missed. And worst of all, you end up in a place that is far, far away from the client’s original brief.

So, try to make the planning as comprehensive as possible.

Get familiar with the content.

Sometimes I wonder how people did anything before the Internet. After the initial meeting with the client, the company website is an invaluable tool to become familiar with the content. Product lines, sales methods, corporate look and feel. All this is there on a website. Most companies have a Corporate Identity booklet. It goes into incredible depth on how they want to be portrayed. Memorise that sucker. It should be your first port of call when crafting anything for them. You need to become an expert on the client. You should know as much about them and what they do as one of their employees.

Get inspired

I find that I write better after I watch an episode of the West Wing. I dunno why. It might have something to do with them constantly writing speeches and wot-not. Anyway, find out what inspires you, and indulge yourself before you start, or when you get stuck. But don’t let it become a source of procrastination, cause that happens to me too,

Do it

You get stuck a lot. That’s cool, because so do I. But when I do, I just write. Just put anything down. Most of the time it will be utter rubbish, but you’re still forming ideas, making things clearer in your head. And then leave it alone. For a day. Don’t look at it or think about it. Plan something else, like getting shooting locations, or write up the editing workflow. When you look at it again, you’ll think, man, what the hey was I tripping on. And then it gets better, because the more times you go over it, the tighter it gets, the more focused it gets and the clearer you become.

Keep it arms length

Remember the first time you give the finished script to the client, it’s going to be ripped apart. Don’t be too protective of it. As great a writer you are, it’s ridiculously difficult to get it right in one shot. But that’s cool. The more the language gets pulled and cut and twisted, the more it will be shaped into what it should be. They will still know things, like stats, case studies and examples that you might not have uncovered in your research. Hopefully you’re both on the same page, trying to make it as good as it can be.

Just uploaded a new clip, a short intro to a camp I participated in.

It was my first foray into 3D compositing. The spaceship was created in Blender, the open source 3D app. It featured as one of my recommendations on the Mustard Flava Podcast.

The composting was done in Shake. I really love the workflow in Shake. Coming from a Photoshop and After Effects background, nodal-based compositing is a really refreshing change.

nodal-based compositing

So, the idea is a spaceship heading towards the Jovian moon Io. I think i nearly pulled it off.

Just finished setting up a show-reel page here. Alternatively you can get to it from the sidebar under ‘pages’.

There’s a time in all blogs’ life when a redesign is mandated. This past week was spent delving into the murky depth of CSS and php calls, until finally through the heavy canopy light came shining through- in the form of my own wordpress template.

This is been a bit of an experiment by we to see how to go about designing something for the web, and it is a little trickier than I thought. The tutorial over at urbangiraffe helped a whole lot.

Between posts, you can catch up with me on the mustard flava podcast.

In a very bold move, my wife has decided to try her hand at full-time blogging.

mr wrigglebot is where she details her experiences as a mum dealing with our little wrigglebot.

So if you’re a parent, or looking for reasons not to become a parent, check it out (she updates it way more frequently than mine).

Or even just pass it on to someone who might enjoy.

Today at NAB, Apple announced Final Cut Studio 2.

It includes; the updates Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Compressor 3, a new application called Color, and DVD Studio Pro 4.

Being a long term Studio user, I’m really excited about the updates. My 3D compositing experience has mainly been from using After Effects, and so having the capability integrated in the suite with Motion is fantastic. I’m very interested in Color also (well, not the American spelling, but there is nothing we can do about that) and it looks like an app that I will be spending a lot of time enjoying.

We’re getting a copy in the office pretty much as soon as it ships here in Australia, so stay tuned for pros and cons, hypes and gripes, and things that I’ll go ape over.