2008/04/17

Long Weekend

This weekend, I'm getting a rather good impression of the old saying; "Distance makes the heart grow fonder." My girlfriend, along with most of our mutual friends, have set off on the annual school band trip. They left last night. I'm having a hard time believing they've only been gone for a day. Even though last weekend had 3 days, I have a feeling this will be the real long weekend. They'll all be back on Sunday. I hope they're having a ton of fun. I should really look at this with a more positive spin. My girlfriend is off having a blast in Disney with her friends, and I've got a weekend completely free of distraction. Maybe I'll be able to start some kind of project, although I'm not sure what kind at the moment. The website I was working on has teetered off for the moment, as my dad hasn't had time to further the business plan upon which the whole site will be based. I do have an updated version of it that needs and upload though. I also felt inspired enough to do a fairly run-down looking version of my logo. I really like how it turned out.

I got a new camera today, a Jazz DV179. I got a really good deal on it, and am happy with it so far. I just wish I could get its webcam mode working in Linux. I did manage to get a ridiculous picture of my brother. I guess he didn't know that when someone points a camera at you, you shouldn't make a face you wouldn't want them to take a picture of, because they can and will.

Next week, I get to drop my history class, move my spare to third, and get a first period Communications Technology class. I'm pretty happy about that. I've been spending my spare in that class anyway, and never wanted history in the first place. I just wish I would have found out that Communications and Animation are no longer the same credit earlier in the semester, as this would have been much easier.

It seems I've become a bit of a tech support person since march break. I volunteered teaching seniors computers for that week, and am doing it again this week. I got my picture in the paper, and another lady looked me up in the phone book and asked me to come help her. I also found myself at my brother's friend's house helping his mother with a problem. It's amazing how well people insist on paying you for this kind of service. I have never once stated a price, or asked for payment, I've even said, "no, really, that's a bit much" a few times. Despite this, the going price for my services seems to be ten dollars an hour. I am in need of a job, maybe I should send out fliers...

Well, this post has exploded a bit from what I originally meant to put here, and I should probably be getting to bed. Until next time...


Maybe now would be a good time for that "CSS attack" on my blog that I've been planning...

2008/04/03

Film Festival

In my last post, I may have alluded to the fact that my school was putting on a small film festival type event. I've been working on a clip in blender since mid march, and was planning on submitting it to the festival. The Actual event is tomorrow, and my video was not submitted. I hid some snags at the last minute which meant I missed the submission deadline. Which isn't a big issue in and of itself, but it was the final straw. I wasn't to happy with the way the clip turned out. I had to leave it rendering overnight at my school, and eventually cut it short before it could finish rendering the last 60 frames or so. I had to cut it short so that I could bring it home that night so I could put it on disk in order to meet the deadline. Unfortunately, I failed to remember to actually copy the video onto my thumb drive.
So the video got cut down from 24 seconds to 22, (from 720 frames to 666, freaky, huh?) I have no real sound figured out for it, other than that the main background was going to be a Shepard tone. I was going to put some kind of music over that, but never got around to it. I didn't end up putting any real plot or anything into it, and none of the scenes I had pictured ever made it into the clip. To top it all off, I forgot to adjust one of the textures, and the position of a object, so it's glowing in a way it shouldn't, and is all glitchy where it meets the ground.
Lets run through that again: 22 second clip, with no sound or plot, and wasn't anything how I wanted it, and looked bad at points. I don't think that exactly qualifies as film fest material.
Of course, I'm not letting it go to waste, no siree. I've added a title screen, the Shepard tone, and replaced the missing frames with a preview animation of those same frames. It may not look all that great, but here it is:




And special thanks to our schools communication teacher for letting me use a school computer to render