Too much Film, not enough celluloid

This last week Troy and I have accomplished several large recording sessions for a sound effects catalog project I've been putting together for some time now.  We're still very early in the project, but while I've been working on that I've also managed to finish the 11 video reels to run at this martial arts event in Los Gatos on the 28th that I'll be running a projector and managing all the video and photos for.

Plenty have asked and I have consistently told all that when it comes to video editing Premier really is the easiest to adapt to in terms of a fully featured NLE.  Coming from Sony Vegas, which is a great tool even back in the earlier versions where I spent a lot of my early days editing clips together of video game captures for my friends and I doing Machinima stuff, to moving upward into a package like Premier Pro and After Effects.  After the event is over I'll post again with some depth about working on the project.

This weekend I managed to get the major ground work done designing the Arcade top and the sides.
I sent my client a rough template I had built using the vague description he'd given me.

Keep in mind I'm working the template to this design.  I lined everything up in Illustrator, and the edges can be cut to the shape of the top.

The Logo text is just a placeholder to see if he liked the idea of naming his arcade, and the name could be whatever he wants.

I got my client's feedback and am currently working on updating it to the details he specified.  He decided he wants a much fuller "collage" of characters from all kinds of games to completely cover the top, and to lose the logo idea. 

So now i'm just working on gathering and placing as many characters I can.  I may try to break up the design a bit more with some tech shapes that fill in the middle and give some more lines to work with character orientation and placement now that the logo is gone.

Resuming my old short skit storyboard too.  I'm hoping to have this done by the end of April as I'm just working on it here and there in my free time.  The intended running time for the short should be somewhere around 2-3 minutes.

Setting up a storyboard plot in Photoshop from scratch was fairly easy though getting to the organization took a bit of work:

 Each of those master folders has a folder for each cell or frame.

Each frame folder allows me to contain my elements separately so when I go cropping each frame out individually I can just delete the other frames from the PSD file, and import all the relevant elements into After Effects to build quick pre-viz animations with, and allow me to choose what I want to show in terms of aspect ratio, shot details (orange) , and camera movement (blue), or actor movement (green).

Let's see if anyone can guess what's going on just by looking at the frames below:

I'm hoping to get some friends to help put this together soon.  The paid projects come first so I'm working to get them finished so I can make time for these.  I'll try to keep regular updates coming. though I may start splitting the updates into individual project blogs.  As always, feel free to leave comments, criticism, feedback, tech support, links, hot links, polish sausage and just about anything else you can imagine... gosh, I'm hungry.

Fractal Gallery 4: Aural Ascendancy Series

I started this series but never got to finish it.  I have a bunch of fractals I designed that just never got around to rendering, so they may come out slowly this year.  Nonetheless I shall post up what was started in this series.  As the name might suggest for this series, I wanted to go for something more audio inspired.  A lot of these works to me felt like they captured the essence of audio or sound or a particular function that happens in the physical world.  For example, take "RT60" based on a particular method that I used to analyze an impulse response from a sample library I have and brought it in to Apophysis as a particular sample cloud to create the fractal.  Here's the collection so far, and feel free to check my deviantart page for the full views.

Red

Pulse

RT60

On another note,  I just got a nice private tour of a nice studio in Modesto with Troy accompanying Mok and myself.  We mingled and talked about projects.  Lots of awesome people to network with there.  Troy and I are cooking up something pretty cool if I don't say so myself in fact.  I showed him and a few friends this RPM Challenge coming up in February and have gotten a few people onboard with the idea.  I may start posting up some information on it as it gets closer.  

Right now I'm just working full force on this story concept of mine, and networking / job hunting.    Even have an audition on Saturday for a lead guitarist spot in some band... Lots and lots of opportunities I'm working on!

Stay tuned for more developments

Fractal Gallery 3: Anarchy Series

Anarchy Reigns

Frozen

Red Dwarf

Shards of Reality 2

Circle of Life

The Nexus

The Phoenix

Landfall

More on the way...

Fractal Gallery 2: Degeneration Series

After my first set of fractals went up, working full time at a local retailer was pretty much my only livelihood at the time so I spent a lot of time away from my computer, which allowed me lots of rendering hours to complete some more interesting ones I'd come home and fiddle with.  Degeneration series was born out of some rather unusual concepts just playing around with the fractal designs that I would "degenerate" from basic fractal patterns.

I'll forgo my commentary and just state up here that only a select few have any slight adjustments in photoshop, everything else is straight out of Apophysis 2.02. through 2.06.  For wallpaper sizes, please see the entire collection in full view at my deviantart. 

Motion Purge

Apeface

Escape

Escape 2

Helix

Butterfly

Dreamcatcher

Pulsar 2.0

Quantum Fold

Spiral Addiction 1.0

Spiral Addiction 2.0

Just for old time's sake?

Just thought I'd post up some references from my college classes back in 2003...

Practicing foreshortening and other perspective drawing techniques; oh, and basic forms.

In the meantime, I've been busy getting several projects with others finished.  Just finished Troy's ADR for our cheesy film; still need to do mine.  All the hit FX have been added in, final sound replacement is on it's way as well as temp music.  Also, need to finish the final verse for Constellation with Steven A.K.A. Redhawk (lawlz)!

An epic song has been taking an epic amount of time to get finished...  Deadlines really are a must!

Let's March On...

Just about ready to get back into some Wacom tablet action...  Just posting up some old drawings I did way back in high school for reference.  Definitely would like to revisit the ideas and see if I can manage something more... refined.

Bleach Inspired...

It's been a while since I posted up something.  My pace for practicing has been a lot slower than I originally intended but at least I'm keeping productive.  Been working on music production with a friend!  I did however manage to get some more updated on that last guy sketch.  It's definitely turned out to be a bit more Bleach inspired but it's fun none-the-less!

A Quick sketch

Been sick the passed week almost since the long overnight shift at my job doing Inventory.  Really sucks but at least I made it out of bed and on the tablet long enough to get a quick sketch done; still in progress.

Here is what I started last night, then had to get to sleep because of this stupid flu!

A bit further into it today.  Maybe I'll actually get this one finished to the point where it looks decent!

Bunny Killer!

Bunny Killer:  He will hunt down your stuffed animals...  There is no escaping! 

Final sketch on paper.

Touched up and coloring in Photoshop CS4.  Bunny added with Wacom tablet for effect :)