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.

When you’re writing a four minute story that features nothing but two characters talking to each other, don’t forget that animating dialogue is actually really, really boring.

As part of the ongoing renovations, I’ve moved everything from the old site to an archive. If you can’t find something that used to be here, it should still be there. As far as I know, the only thing that I left out in the redesign was the frankly useless tips page, which I lost interest in about five years ago.

I’m running out of excuses to avoid animating stuff now. Maybe I should bite the bullet and get the camera out again.

I think the site is mostly done now. There’s a few things to fix and I need to add youtube links to the film pages but I think everything else is in place. If you spot any problems, you can now leave one of those snazzy internet comment things right here and I’ll try to fix it.

I’ve moved everything onto a WordPress blog, which necessitates a change in the folder structure. If you ended up here after following a link from another site, use the search box up top there to find whatever it is you came for. I’ll be updating the ones I remember doing myself over the next few days but I know a few other people have linked here. Those ones are going to stay broken.

Finally, I found out today that Kristin Hersh, who is responsible for the music in Pneuma, is having some problems out on the road. Car trouble and the general economics of small-scale touring mean that she and the band are losing money big time at the moment, but they’re carrying on and honouring their remaining tour dates anyway. It’s a sad state of affairs for an artist that I’ve been a fan of for about twenty years, and I’m writing this in the hope that a few kind souls out there will help out.

See, you can download a whole free EP and a handful of album tracks from her website. That’s pretty good value right there. On that page, up near the top, is a little red circle that says “tip jar”. If you liked Pneuma and you have a paypal account and a bit of cash to spare, I’d appreciate it if you dropped a dollar or two their way. They seem like nice people and I’d be sad to see them forced to give up touring over something like this.

Bear with me. I’m updating the site so things are going to look a bit funny for a while.