Harvest Moon over the Lake

My brother Caleb and I got out with the camera tonight and shot some pretty pictures of the harvest moon's light on the lake. My favorite is one I shot with the hammock and the dock silhouetted against the light. I tweaked the RAW image a little to adjust the contrast, noise reduction, and sharpening, and changed the white balance slightly. I wish I could post more pictures, but I'm working on a tenuous Internet link at the moment and it took over a minute and a half to upload the single cropped .jpg.

More pictures, posts, (and the much-delayed announcement) later...

IHS,
John Calvin Young

Murphy's Law of Announcements

Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

Young's Corollary for Publicly Promoted Announcements: If a definite time for an announcement or a release is made, events will conspire to make it ludicrous or plainly impossible to try to meet the deadline.

Yes, I am here. I am not dead. I am not even dead tired. But there will be no announcement tonight. I registered the domain, I picked the images for the splash screen. I even opened Photoshop and began the layout. That's when my iffy-but-working AC power supply for my laptop decided to fail, apparently irreparably.

30 minutes of fiddling later--still not working. No problem! Web work is by definition portable--I'll just move over to one of the other computers. (BTW, you don't begin to appreciate something like Adobe Photoshop until you have had it and suddenly don't.) So I fired up the trusty-and-free GIMP to finish the job and suddenly it crashes. With an unexplainable error. I download and reinstall GTK+ and GIMP 2.4.6. Twice. With no better results.

Rather than attempting to do it with Microsoft Paint, I decided to have another go at fixing the laptop. 45 minutes, three rubber bands, a piece of aluminum foil and a Norton Anthology of American Literature later, the power blinks on!

Joyfully I power up the laptop, open PS, and am importing my images when it decides to quit. Going back once more to GIMP, I reinstall it again, witness it crash AGAIN, and seized by some kind of desperation, begin disabling any .dll in my system32 folder that comes up with an error message. Finally, at 11:58, I belatedly conclude that apparently I am not to get this announcement out before midnight.

That is the comfort of being a Calvinist--the Lord must have a purpose of some sort behind this--who knows, possibly forcing me to get some sleep so I can get up and get to work in the morning. So I shall. The announcement will come tomorrow or the next day when the Lord enables me to get my electronic world put back together. Apparently it is also time to buy a new AC adapter...

Until then, a teaser...
What occurred on July 6th, 1938 that would have repercussions for the next 70 years? Hint: it's been in the international news a lot lately.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Big Announcement Tomorrow!

Anticipate a BIG announcement tomorrow, July 7th, 2008. Today would be better, being the 70th anniversary of a certain extremely relevant event, but it's the Sabbath. So you'll just have to wait until tomorrow.

Hint: it's about a new project. It won't be a big one in budget, but anticipate larger-than-average ripples in the pond.

Until tomorrow...

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Evening At The Lake

I took this photo while on vacation at Lake Wateree a couple of weeks ago. Subject is my brother Samuel fishing and our dog Martha waiting for the fish.

I love shooting RAW--it gives you such control over the final product. With the camera I was using, it would be very hard to get that picture under the right light conditions, so I actually shot it when it was a little lighter outdoors and adjusted it in post. It was not staged, though--they spent about 20 hours over the week fishing off the dock!

IHS,
John Calvin Young

Big Buck Bunny Released Online!

At long last, "Big Buck Bunny", the short-film animated result of the Peach Open Movie Project under the auspices of the Blender Foundation, has been released online. The Blender Foundation owns the source code and facilitates development of the open-source CG software package Blender. The Open Movie projects were designed to get a number of volunteer animators and filmmakers together to make a film specifically to showcase Blender's capabilities. If the capabilities or features are not present, they are typically developed and added during the project.

Although the organization of the project has been interesting, the quality of the finished project is the most intriguing point for me. Blender has come a long way--I've been using it since 2005, and its capabilities have expanded by leaps and bounds (no pun intended), especially in furs and particles, which are showcased in this film. This software has opened opportunities for many young animators who could not otherwise have made the step into professional-level animation. Some projects are even specifically using Blender for scalability, as it is freely available, such as The Filthy Spoon Project, modeled and designed entirely in Blender.

P.S.--The entire production files are also available, as well as DVDs for sale on the site. In the spirit of open-source software, though, the film is downloadable in up to 1080p resolution for free.

In other notes, the composer for the film, Jan Morgenstern, has released the whole score as a freely downloadable album.
Very interesting for those who might be scoring other short films. A full feature score is very interesting, but scoring a short film (like shooting one) is a rather different art.

Very, very interesting project. And I believe it was done with 7 lead animators. I think a project like this could very easily be done by one or another of the online groups, like CF.org for example.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Port Out Starboard Home

In the department of interesting movie trivia, I recently heard a possibly apocryphal story explaining both the origins of the word "posh" and the somewhat nonsensical lyrics of the "Posh, Posh" song in the much-loved film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (imdb). As the story goes, rich travelers sailing between Colonial India and Great Britain would pay extra for the priviledge of a cabin on the port side going out and the starboard coming home, as the peculiarities of the route would put the cabin in the shade for much of the Indian Ocean leg of the trip. Only the richest, most picky passengers could pay, however, so the modern definition of "posh" as "Smart, fashionable" with a subtle connotation of picky superiority followed from that original acronym of Port Out Starboard Home, supposedly printed on the higher-priced tickets. There seems to be a lack of concrete evidence for the practice, but the explanation certainly appeals to the imagination--and the rhyme.

This is livin', this is style
This is elegance by the mile

Oh the posh posh traveling life
The traveling life for me
First cabin and captain's table regal company
Whenever I'm bored I travel abroad
But ever so properly
Port out, starboard home
Posh with a capital P-O-S-H, posh

The hands that hold the scepters
Every head that holds a crown
They'll always give their all for me
They'll never let me down
I'm on my way to far away tah tah and toodle-oo
And fare thee well, and Bon Voyage arrivederci too

O the posh posh traveling life
The traveling life for me
First cabin and captain's table regal company
Pardon the dust of the upper crust
Fetch us a cup of tea
Port out, starboard home, posh with a capital P-O-S-H, posh

In every foreign strand I land the royal trumpets toot me
The royal welcome mat is out
They 21 gun salute me
But monarchies are constantly commanding me to call
Last month I miffed the Mufti but you can't oblige them all

Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me
Oh rumpetly tumpety didy didy dee dee dee dee dee
Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me
First cabin and captain's table regal company
When I'm at the helm the world's my realm and I do it stylishly
Port out, starboard home

Posh with a capital P-O-S-H
P-O-S-H, P-O-S-H...

(lyrics from http://www.lyrics-n-tunes.com/lyrics/chitty_posh.html)

Whether the story is historically valid or not it does explain the song beautifully. I enjoyed hearing this and just wanted to pass it on to you.

John Calvin Young

Making It In Online Video

One of the blogs I read on a regular basis is fxguide.com -- a very interesting blog on VFX techniques, research, and news. Among other things, they post articles that may not be directly connected to VFX, but may be of interest to the industry in general.

A couple of days ago Mike Seymour, one of the authors, posted an fascinating look into what it takes to make online media (whether video, audio, or text) a success, including detailed profiles of several successful website and statistics on the type of traffic it typically takes to break even. It is a long article, but offers useful advice on the types of business models that have turned out to be profitable, to be differentiated from those that have lost money since day one. The inclusion of real numbers really helps those trying to figure out potential profitability of their projects. You can read the full article at http://www.fxguide.com/qt/279/money-webcasts-podcasts-a-few-facts-and-a-few-thoughts.

Additionally, they also have quite a few highly interesting feature articles examining certain film projects in-depth as well as explanations of different VFX tools/techniques such as matchmoving or matte painting.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Note: I am not aware of anything inappropriate on the site, but I do not personally know the authors, nor have I read everything in the archives, so your mileage may vary. Some content may very well not be appropriate for all readers.