This is

I think this one needs a bit of explaining…

As part of my fledgling midlife crisis, I’m trying to teach myself to play the guitar. Justin Sandercoe is a very nice man with a website devoted to teaching people to play the guitar. It’s like we’re made for each other. Speaking as a complete guitar noob, I can say that his beginner lessons do actually seem to work. And he does it all for free, which is nice.

He posts tutorial videos on Youtube, which was how I first found out about him, and he recently put up a competition there to win a bunch of guitar stuff, with the prize going to the video demonstrating the most innovative use of a guitar.

This is my entry: Bowling for Sandercoe

The music is by my fine internet chum, Loïc Desjardins, who wrote, performed and mixed the score. That’s probably him whistling on it too. He managed to do this all in the space of about a week, despite me giving him nothing in the way of a useable brief and changing around the edit of the film while he was still working on it. Visit his site and tell him how cool he is.

There will be the usual smorgasbord of downloadable versions and behind-the-scenes photos sometime in the near future.

Waiting for the music for this exciting new film has given me time to take stock and cast a critical eye over the version that I’d edited together. It turns out this is a good thing, because I spotted a few problems with it and I’m now in the process of reshooting a couple of bits that didn’t work quite as well as I wanted.

It’s also given me time to throw together a deeply misleading trailer that makes the film look a lot more interesting than it will probably end up being. Kind of like any other trailer, really…

Quicktime trailer
DivX trailer

I’ll post a youtube version once the film is out. The reasons for that will become apparent.

It occurs to me that I maybe didn’t need to switch to an easy-access blog-style system for this site because it never actually gets updated. I have this vision of subscribers to my RSS feed sitting at their computers with big white beards all matted with dust and cobwebs, grown old and decrepit waiting for the next infodump.

That’s going to change soon though, because there’s a new film on the way. All the animation is done and it’s 99% edited. I’m just waiting for some original music and then it’ll hit the intertubes, so dust off your download buttons and keep your eyes peeled for something new before the end of the month. That is all.

Actually, not quite all. I might post some teaser screenshots in a while. Maybe.

Just a quick note to say I’ve just uploaded a new test snippet to youtube. This one’s a treadmill technique that may or may not be useful for giving the appearance of a dolly shot of walking characters without actually moving the camera.

You can see it here.