Backyard Bandits

I found this dandilion head in my backyard today having somehow survived yesterday's mowing and the wind with all seeds intact. The head of the flower must have been cut off and then puffed out into this overnight. I thought that I'd take the opportunity to photograph it in a controlled environment and prevent the seeds from spreading out over my already over-run backyard lawn. I was happy with how the photos turned out so I thought that I'd share the best of them with everyone.

All images were shot with my Canon Rebel XTi/400D

EF 17-40mm f/4L @ 40mm, aperture f4, ISO 400, shutter 1/60 second

EF 50mm f/1.8 II, aperture f/5, ISO 100, shutter 1/2 second

EF 50mm f/1.8 II, aperture f/1.8, ISO 100, shutter 1/15 second

EF 50mm f/1.8 II, aperture f/5, ISO 100, shutter 1/30 second

EF 50mm f/1.8 II, aperture f/5, ISO 100, shutter 1/30 second

No Mess Art

I like to draw digitally. It's clean. I don't get graphite, charcoal, or oil based paint all over myself and ruin clothes and best of all there is no mess to clean up afterwords. In my classes that involved painting and the option to go with digital or traditional mediums those who had opted to go traditional could end up taking as much as thirty minutes after the session to clean their brushes gather all their tools, and put class tools away. Then they would have to deal with the awkward, wet canvases and bulky art boxes.

It's also safe. There are no stinky and potentially harmful fumes to deal with or fine powders that become airborne and get into eyes, sinuses and wont get breathed into the lungs. One of my mentors developed allergies to many of the traditional mediums he made his career working with starting with oil based paints, then oil based pastels, and even basic charcoal. Now he gets real sick from these things, among others after just a few minutes of exposure to them. When I first had him for my character design course he would wear medical gloves when handling these materials but it was clear at the end of the three hour class that he was not feeling to well. The last time I had him for a figure drawing class just three years later he couldn't even teach in a studio environment that those materials were used and it was an all digital course.

Another benefit to digital is the ability to not only erase mistakes but to undo a mistake altogether. Storage and preservation is also a benefit to digital as there are no sheets of paper or cloth or wood boards that have to be treated and stored in a manner that not only preserves the applied mediums but that surface as well. And you need to have a place for it which could mean having to find a gallery that will display it and sell it for you. With digital you can display it online for the whole world to see and sell it to anyone in the world from the same place.

There are a number of digital art tools available, many free for exploring one's creative side but my favorite has always been Corel's Painter application. It's not cheep but not the most expensive either and when you realise how much is saved on traditional materials it ends up being well worth the cost. The best thing about Painter is that it was designed to simulate the look and feel of traditional media like those messy, stinky oil paints. To date there are no other programs that do this job as well or naturally. While you can get similar results from other applications like Adobe's Photoshop, the process and hoops that you have to jump through to get them can be difficult and time consuming until you've commited the processes to muscle memory. Painter uses an organic process of creating art with digital tools that react to your chosen paper surface and other tools very much like the real things would.

There has however, always been a few things it lacked for me and that is how many of the dry media "brushes" worked. A pencil in painter would look like a real pencil stroke but it didn't fully behave like one. Since pencils had been invented people have been not only using the tip of the pencil to write and draw with but also the edge of the tip for broader, flat strokes to speed up the process of shading and filling in areas. It's the one area of drawing that would always have me going back to drawing with a real pencil on paper so that I could get the lines that I wanted and then scan that image in and finish it in Painter and/or Photoshop afterword.

While my Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet can sense the angle of tilt that I am holding the stylus at, and some of Painter's tools would be able to react with that information like the airbrush, none of the dry media tools that I prefer to use would use it and realise that the pencil is now on it's side. It would mean that I would have to either adjust the settings of my digital pencil or switch to a different one altogether, or do as I had already mentioned, go use the real thing and scan it in.

These issues are now a thing of the past and I can finally work the way I want to digitally with Corel's new Painter version 11. They have finally added "real" versions of many dry tools like pencils, pens, and semi-dry tools like markers, which has been my favorite method of applying color to my traditional work. In addition to adding new tools that simulate real dry media, many of the other brushes had been overhauled as well, working much better for me and a lot more fun for me to use. It's been real exciteing and fun going through and testing all the new brushes and seeing how some of the old ones now behave.

I've been using Painer since it's eighth version was just first released and I always had to spend hours customizing every brush I used to fit my needs and methods. I brought all those brushes that I had establiehed into this new version expecting that I would need them to eliminate how much time I spent in the brush editor fixing the brushes I needed to use. I've since thrown them out and started fresh with a whole new list of brushes that are nearly at their defaut settings and they work better than I could have hoped for.

Now I have doubled the amount of tools that I have at the ready to use and must experiment with them further to find out which one's I prefer to use most often to save the screen space but I keep finding new brushes to add to it! If it weren't so fun I'd be really frustrated. So I'm trying to separate frequently used "sketching" tools from "drawing" and "painting" tools.

I should soon be updating a bit more often with new sketches and drawings that I have made while experimenting and praticing. Starting with this one.

A Review Turned Rant About The New Iron Man TV Show

The movie was awesome, made a ton of money and sold a ton of DVD/Blu-ray disks, so it makes sense that Marvel would want to expand the franchise beyond comic books, and movies, which can only come out once every two years at best. Enter the Iron Man animated television show.

Like the previous, and I might add, short lived Spider Man: The New Animated Series (there's already a new show which points how badly it was named) it is computer 3D animation rendered with "cell shading" techniques that are designed to make it look like it was hand drawn animation. There is a reason Spider Man: The New Animated Series didn't last past it's first season, it sucked. The writing was on par with the literary bile that a high school english failure would come up with and it looked terrible. Which brings me back to Iron Man.

It. Looks. Terrible. Most of the environments that the characters find themselves in are bland and empty with less detail then you'd find in even the simplest of 2D animation shows. There are a few instances where the producers made sure things looked good with lots of detail but those scenes only end up looking out of place because most of the show looks like wide empty space. This goes to the point that neither TV or film animation should be done with cell shaded 3D. There's just no point in trying to make 3D animation look 2D, and with a TV show that has significantly smaller budgets to work with it only causes more problems.

For instance, the animation appears stiff and lifeless. Another problem with their chosen production methods is that many of the visual effects that are simple to pull off quickly and cheaply are very difficult to achieve in 3D. Iron Man is an action franchise that requires a lot of explosions, smoke, dust and sparks. All of which need complex particle methods to do even remotely well in 3D while the 2D animator can grab a pencil and have a lot of fun with it. So what does all this mean for the Iron Man show? It means that these sort of effects were either badly made or missing altogether. So when Tony Stark in his heavy metal suit gets thrown hundreds of feet back, hits the dirt ground and slides to a stop, he doesn't kick up dust. At all. There were a few sparks but they looked kind of stupid.

So the new animated Iron Man show looks awful, in almost every conceivable way. But looks aren't everything. I loved the movie Hoodwinked which was also less than eye candy and had less than stellar animation. What made it a great film was that it was very well written and performed by the voice actors. I've already mentioned how bad the writing was in that similarly produced Spider Man show. Iron Man is not that bad. But...

It still isn't going to win any writing awards. In fact, it's still pretty bad but it's not horrible. Unfortunately it's just not enough to save the show. Tony Stark is a high school teenager in this show and this creates a lot of problems. For one, he's still a super genius kid that has managed to put is super genius father to shame on occasion. That may not sound like a problem provided you are open minded to re-envisioning a property for different mediums. I am open minded in this way. The market for cartoon shows is largely teenagers and younger in North America so it makes sense. The problem is, why the hell is he still in high school?!

His intellect is established as well beyond college level so why is he going to high school? It make no sense at all. None. Whatsoever. There is a scene at school where a dumb jock mentions the term "A.I." to which Tony asks if he even knows what that means. The dumb jock of can't answer the question of course which poses the question, why the hell is Tony Stark in high school?! If I were to continue to watch the series then I'd have to continue to ask this question until the writers realize that it is not necessary to have teenaged Tony Stark in high school in order for him to have age appropriate friends. But I'll stop asking it, and watching the show.

Before I conclude this review/rant on the animated, if you can call it that, Iron Man show I have to bring up the other aspect to motion picture production that is also of great importance and that is the sound. I would love to just mention that the voice acting is bad and leave it at that but you know I just can't do that. No, on second thought I can. It's bad. But voice acting isn't all there is to audio. It's an action show and as previously mentioned this means explosions and all sorts of sound effects. The sound pallet used is very limited but for the most part it's good enough for a television production. Of course they can use a sound library so much of their work is done for them so that's probably the easiest part of the shows creation. So sound effects are okay. Too bad everything else about the show isn't.

There's the saying "anything worth doing is worth doing well." I really like this saying because it states that if we are going to do something then we should put in some real effort. Also, it doesn't say that it should end up being "good" or even "great" but that it should be done "well." Generally if something is done well then it will be good but not necessarily. Maybe it will end up being just okay and that's fine. Iron Man is clearly not done well and so it is not even okay, it's crap and that's really sad because the franchise has far greater potential. This show should be really cool and in a way pay homage to the film that rejuvenated the franchise paving the way for a television production. This show may not last long.

Here is a commercial for the Show:



And because you all deserve some truly magnificent entertainment after all that here's a commercial for the Japanese Spider-Man. If only what we got was this good:

What's that smell?

Is that, fresh air?

In the spirit of my cousin Taryn's most recent blog entry and my very long borderline hypocritical comment I took the time to clean the house today. I set out with the intent to merely make the place presentable, ignoring the little details but I ended up doing them as well. Oh, and I showered too.

Big Thunder Burst

Here is a quick moving slide show video I made. It consists of 105 still photos taken in three burst shot intervals while on the famous Disneyland ride.

Social Networking Woes

Okay, I've just set up a Twitter account for no good reason. I do like that I can keep track of things as well as update posts using Firefox extensions and Adobe's TweetDeck rather than opening a tab to the site it self. I've not been fully satisfied with how Facebook functions, which I absolutely hate, or MySpace, which I can never take seriously although I do like it considerably more than the aformentioned social network. We'll see how long I'm able to keep up with posting information to it. I like it's simplicity but I'd like it a bit more if we could double the character count on posts. I don't expect more than a few posts per week as I would only share something that I think has some relevance to my life and those in it.

So I ask those of you who may be reading this, are you using Twitter and if so, what do you think about it? I know a number of people who are more or less addicted to it but I'm not entirely like them. Thus far the only thing like this that I've managed to use on a regular basis is MySpace simply because I don't feel like I need to take anything I do or say there seriously. Granted, that goes without saying for any similar social networking service including blogs and such but I feel like those others are less conducive to my sarcastic nature opting to share have truths that are more entertaining rather than share how boring my daily life really is.

One thing I wont do is share something private on any of these sites and I personally feel that making one's social network page private and unable to be viewed by the general public completely defeats the purpose of having it. For example, I was searching for an old high school friend on MySpace and all I had was there name to go off of. It's been more than ten years since we had graduated so I have no way of knowing where they are or anything else beside there name so that is what I type into the search. I end up with several hundred people with the same name as it's a big world out there despite what Disneyland would have you believe and I've got no real info from the results page to go off of beside their very small ID image which may not even be of them but possibly their children, significant other, or a group shot that leaves all who are in it unidentifiable. So I click on the links which leads me to their page marked private. Now I receive little more info other than a somewhat larger ID image that may still be useless and if I want to figure out who they are I have to send them a message saying who I am and are they the person I knew way back when? But finding random people from my past isn't that important to me so I never bother to spam people with "do you know me?" mail. I don't want anyone from my past to have to go through that either so I leave all my info open to the public so that I am readily identifiable to anyone who may know me. It's worked too. An old friend from before high school contacted me through MySpace a little over a year ago. He may not have found me if I had my page set to private.

If I want or need to share something private then there is that social network that has been around far longer than MySpace, Facebook or any other such service and that is email. This is the thing that bothers me the most with these networks, Facebook in particular. It seems everyone has their profile set to private and I get random friend and group requests from people I'm not remotely acquainted with. I'm not going to add someone that is a complete stranger to me, no way in hell so I click on the link to their profile and guess what? It's private. So I have no idea who they are and no clear way to find out so I ignore their request.

If you want to protect yourself on a network, be it Facebook, MySpace, or any other such networking sites then go through the account configurations and pay attention to all the available options. It is possible to protect yourselves from the majority of spamers and random people out their without making your entire profile private. My Facebook, which I never use unless contacted by someone, can be found the same way my MySpace and Twitter accounts can be found, by typing my username into Google or the network's own search bar. It's thefilminator just so you don't have to look up from this long, dull bulletin turned semi-rant. If you feel like adding me then go right ahead, just let me know who you are so I can go, "Oh, yeah! They're cool!" -ADD-. I don't discriminate against cool people, and if you actually read this than you are cool in my book, and probably already know me and are already on my friend lists.

I'm just sick of trying to find and get reacquainted with old friends and acquaintances only to be hampered by their ignorance and/or paranoia. Private accounts do not equal safe accounts, just inaccessible ones. Contrary to popular belief, someone that intends to hack into your account will not be stopped or even slowed down by an account that is set to private. All they need to figure out is your username and password, that doesn't change if a profile is set to private and the way such things are discovered or hacked is not necessarily obtained through your page. I imagine most utilize a self written software program designed to go through any number of possibilities given a number of preset variables.

If you want to protect your pages from hacking the first step is to have a sign in username that is different from what you go by on the site. Use a longer password that includes numbers and if the site suports font case sensitivity, capitol and lower case letters, and not something that could be obtained from even a private page like birthdates, names that are familiar to you, or even favorite foods. Try to be as random as can be, like Stone Temple Pilots. Three random words/numbers drawn from a hat that when put together mean nothing but stand out enough to be remebered by you. Mine is Fried Wombat Dew 83vs794life, now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to change my password, again. Oh, and I dare you to figure out what that last part means.

If Money Were No Object

Here's how much of a geek I am. I think that this is one of the coolest things ever. Running 24 256GB solid state hard drives, very large, very fast drives built on the same technology as your USB and camera memory cards for those of you who may be unfamiliar with what a solid state drive is, in tandem so that they are working as one. Each drive costs around $700 not to mention the very expensive high end computer components that also went into their little test. It all comes together to make one very fast system.

Another sketch/drawing to explore the visual style for my story. Thought I'd go with a female character this time around. The great thing about women in film noir is that you can never tell if they are the damsel in distress or a cold blooded femme fatale. A great rule of thumb with women in noir, never trust them. A great rule of thumb with women in real life, never trust them but sometimes you can give them the benefit of the doubt.

This is the rough sketch and starting point.

And the finished drawing. I'm not entirley happy with it but it'll do for now. I'm also not sure about the grey tones in the dress. I'd prefer it stayed pure black and white but I didn't know what else to do with it. It's just an exploratory drawing anyway but I can always go back and try something else if ever I come up with a better idea.

New Tricks

I've been playing at being a photographer for a few years now. I've considered myself an "advanced amateur" photographer, capable of/making money with my photos but not making a living off them. An advanced amateur should know their way around a camera and most of it's custom settings and functions and can take consistently good photos. I have a strong knowledge of what my camera is capable of and how to adjust it's various settings to get the image I am after but there have always been a few settings that I haven't looked into yet with much detail.

Tonight I decided to play around with some of them and have learned a few new things and set some custom functions that will help me make the adjustments to the settings I need to capture the image I want. I've also began to experiment with the long exposure going beyond the shutter speed settings of my camera, which go from 1/4000 of a second to 30 seconds. In the "Bulb" mode (I don't know why it's called that at the moment) you can make an exposure as long as you need manually by pressing the shutter release once to start the exposure and then a second time to end it after the desired length of time has passed. With this you can leave the shutter open indefinitely but you need to know a few things in order to get the image you desire without wasting hours experimenting until you find the right settings.

To practice I brought out my Alien sculpture and played around with some lighting to get the desired look that I envisioned. While it took more work than I would have liked to get the lighting set up just right what with my limited resources for custom lighting, I did get a photo that is fairly close to what I was after. The only thing that was disappointing with the outcome was that the long exposure brought out the fatal flaws with my low end SLR. I had to remove a lot of bad pixels to get a clean image I wanted. So now I know that there will be a lot more touch up work to be done on any long exposure I take with my current camera body but at least I'm prepared for it now.

So I've learned some new tricks and have really gotten to that "advanced" level as I have finally learned everything my camera can do and have experimented with those settings and functions. Although I've never used any of the preset auto modes that give up full control to the camera.

Canon Digital XTi with EF 17-40mm f/4L USM lens
Settings:
Focal length - 35mm, Aperture - f/14, ISO 100, Shutter Speed 275/1 sec. (4.5 minutes),
Light Metering - Evaluative, Format - RAW
Touched up with Apple Aperture 2 and Adobe Photoshop CS3

A Professional Look

Another quick update. This is a photo I took last week to use as my portfolio ID. Don't I look like I know what I'm doing?

Film Noir

**Caution: Excessively long explanation ahead**

Those of you who know me well, know that I'm a big fan of film noir and that I've been wanting to do something in this genre for a long time. I've come up with and subsequently thrown out one idea after another for the last ten years. There have been a few seed ideas that I had held onto feeling that they could work if I could just figure out how to make them grow properly but always had trouble with getting the idea to germinate.

I held onto those ideas knowing that someday I'd be able to make them grow into a good story. Last week I sat down with renewed determination to bring one of those few ideas into a full fledged concept with a clear direction and enough information to begin proper research.

One seed idea I had is a neo-noir set in the not so distant future with a detective on the trail of a faceless assassin. Another idea I had was less a story and more a scene set in a more traditional 1930s noir period. That scene was actually a dream I had and it was pretty intense considering it had only two characters and one of them was a bloody dead mess. It was vivid enough that I was able to write it out in detail immediately upon waking. It was that idea that I started to work on after all, I already had a strong opening scene loaded with story potential.

The problem was that it was an introductory scene and usually the best place to begin writing any story, especially a mystery is with the ending. You need to know where you're going before you can get there otherwise you're just wandering in the dark and will end up with nothing more than a disheveled mess and you will lose your audience before the second act has had a chance to get started.

So I had some questions to answer before I could go anywhere with the story. Number one being, How does this end. But in my scene I already had all the dialog, in voice over of what was running through the protagonists head at the gruesome scene before him. His dialog was very detailed, dramatic and revealed a lot of information about his state of mind and relationship with the victim but it posed more questions than three seasons of Lost and they all needed to be addressed.

When I started working I was in the mind set that the protagonist was a private investigator who found himself on a case that was far bigger than he could have imagined. That idea alone kept me from being able to answer most of the questions posed by his dialog. Some of the things that ran through his mind didn't quite fit with the small time, strait arrow P.I.

So hitting a road block I decided that rather than throw out what I had managed to develop like I had previously done, that I would instead step back away from it for a moment and look at the bigger picture as I would an illustration. I looked back at my other seed ideas and came across the neo-noir with a detective on the trail of a faceless killer and then it hit me. The man isn't a P.I. or detective but a man out for revenge and not for the death of the victim from the opening scene, that was an unfortunate casualty of his personal war.

Along with that I learned exactly how the story ends, while it will end as I had first determined I now knew much more of the details. I also learned that this story leads directly into that detective story with the faceless assassin which is great because it answers a lot of questions related to that story.

Now I'm very excited because I can finally start some serious research on a story in a genre that I've wanted to work in for a very long time. In addition to research I can also start sketching up ideas which is where the accompanied art comes in. It's more a scene from the second story which begins where the first ends.

Oh, yeah. I drew it in Corel Painter X with a custom calligraphy pen.

Nothing Hurts Like My Back

If you like vampires raise your hands. If you like music raise your hands. If you like vampire music videos raise your hands. I personally don't care one way or the other but I did have the opportunity to work on a vampire themed music video last week with Oh Rio! Productions. I worked as a production artist putting the set together and moving things around as needed for the shoot and I was also the stills photographer. It was a lot of fun but a lot of work that had to be done in a very limited time frame.

The song is called "Nothing Hurts Like Love" sung by Jimmy Demers and written by Diane Warren. The video also stars in addition to Jimmy, former supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, and Hollywood actress Amy Smart. I don't know how long it will be before the video is completed and available for viewing so don't bother asking me, I'll share that info as soon as I find out. The song is about three minutes long and we recorded hours of footage so the editing process could take a while.

While I took hundreds of photos I will only be able to share a handfull with you at the moment but I will share lots more eventually.

Mac Attack

I used to think that I knew what I was doing when I turned on my MacBook Pro. I've always been the guy that my family and friends go to for tech advice and questions like "how do I...?" especially in regards to Mac computers. Since I had first become a Mac user (that sounds like I'm on drugs and in a way...) five years ago I have become very familiar with how the system works and how I can do things quickly and easily with shortcut keys. Its been years since I've drag and dropped files to the trash can, had any hard drive/disk images on my desktop for file navigation and for the most part I try to keep my desktop free of all files and folders. I had even started using new features introduced in OS X.5 Leopard like dock stacks to locate multiple programs into one small location in an attempt to keep my dock uncluttered and organized.

There was one time when a friend of mine and fellow Mac user had an issue with his MacBook that I couldn't fix for him. I tried everything I could think of to alleviate his problem aside from reinstalling the operating system. I thought that there may have been something else that could be done that I was unaware of so we took it into the local Apple store to have a "Mac Genius" diagnose the problem for us. We'd get it fixed and I thought that I might gain some new Mac knowledge. As it turned out all that could be done was to reinstall the operating system and I in fact knew more than the "Mac Genius." So I went home afterward with the impression that I was something of a "Mac Genius" myself and have been living under that assumption ever since, that is until I randomly came across a YouTube video of a fourteen year old kid.

I was so impressed with how much he knew (surprisingly more than what I knew) that I watched all of his tutorial/tip videos and followed many of the links to websites with useful free software to improve my computing experience. I also learned of some tools that would change user interface elements like program and system icons, the dock, and certain applications. So I spent a lot of free time learning new tricks and modifying my software aesthetics. Now I have a clean new interface and a pathetically empty dock, in fact the dock has become almost obsolete now.

While some of the new software I got is very useful and increases productivity quite a lot it's the shortcut/action modifier keys that I am the most pleased with learning. They are all built into the operating system and have always been there to use, so learning a new one that is extremely useful is both exciting for me (so what if that makes me a geek) and very disappointing because I should have already known it. So for those of you that use Apple computers I will be sharing some of the more useful shortcuts for the most common actions later on.


For now I'll show you a screenshot of my current system set up. You may notice that on the desktop there are icons for the hard drive titled Rose (the computer's named Rose, don't ask), a connected server titled mac, and a connected USB flash drive titled Flasher. Normally those icons are not visible on my desktop but I included them so you can see that more than the generic folders have been changed to have a wood finish. Most of the system icons have been changed to a wooden theme. You may also notice the selected program Flock which a web browser built on the same engine as Firefox and has become my new default and the Mega Man icon next to it which is the most awesome application ever. It's called MegaManEffect and if you use a Mac and have ever played a Mega Man game then google it, and download it. That's it for the moment.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Bonfire of the Insanities

It all started innocently enough. We were young and stupid. Well, more stupid than we currently are anyway and attending Allan Hancock College in an attempt to become less stupid. Brett, who welcomes everyone he meets into his fold like a blind retarded sheep invited me to join he and his friends at Oceano Beach for a little bonfire. He said it starts at 5p.m. so I arrive a little early just to be safe. Around six someone else showed up and things got going. Next thing I knew I was one of the gang and we were having bonfires as often as we could.

Then, one by one, we all (well almost all) moved away for school, work, or school and we ended up in Southern California. Since the great migration we hadn't had a true beach bonfire experience but we always talked about getting around to doing it again as soon as possible. Five years later we did.

Over the Winter break we would all be close enough to the legendary Oceano Beach. So we began to plot the flaming end of any number of wood and wood-like substances along with the consumption of carbonated yellow snow, more commonly known as Mountain Dew. We set a date for Dec. 26, the day after Christmas and a start time of 12 noon. One by one we all began to show up, maybe just a little bit late.

And so it begins. Burn baby burn!

A little 007 homage.

A little chicken dancing.

The Mike.

The Mike went for a little swim. Apparently, the ocean is a powerful force.

From light to dark.

As things cooled down we all began to curl up around the fire.