A month on a page

Hello my loyal and faithful (cough.. fictional) readers! Yes I am losing weight, how nice of you to notice and very sweet of you to mention the fact..

I did fully intend to post for Halloween, excuse my lateness but i've always been bad at showing up at the right time and organising my own thoughts (I am, however, very good at critisizing and organising other peoples lives!) So you can enjoy this now and look forward to a Christmas update sometime in early March.

Carving a pumpkin is such a cliché, so this year I decided to draw one instead! Unfortunately though, i didn't decide to take a decent, non-mobile-phone-photograph before it rotted into nothingness!

 

Next year I have decided that I am definitely going to design a Pimp-kin complete with feather velvet hat and cane (has it been done? google images says no!).. Lil' pumpkin ho's would be fun, too.

I also turned up to work in full costume as my manager had told me to, only to realise that nobody else had bothered and I was the only wanker dressed up as a creep!

Luckily the bar was dead (ba-dum, tish!), making it both not worth the effort and much less embarassing..

So what else have I been up to? Well I have been getting alot of emails requesting that I  recap my nightbus reading list in a kind of book review-esque post (Jk, noone ever emails me..) So here's a crappy picture and my dumb thoughts on each book!

World war Z, Max Brooks

This was a pretty interesting book. Like most men I love the idea of a Zombie Apocalypse, although unlike most men I have no fantasies that I would be the one to survive.. even though i've been going to the gym alot recently I still think I would be run down by an asthmatic grandma with an axe in her hip!
Overall I thought this was a good read. Again most men would probably love this book possibly because of, (more likely in spite of) all the military talk- weapons, tanks etc. but I did love the way it jumped very quickly all around the world to give you accounts of various survivors who managed to survive in a castle, a house and even a fish tank! (Ok, the last one I made up)
Read it if you have alot of short tube/train/bus journeys to make, you're not going to get sucked in and fall asleep with the light on but it will pass the time and give you a bit of a buzz.

 I'm going to lump these all together purely because they are all books written by Terry Pratchett (If you missed the huge gold letters on each cover then the detective stories, Snuff and Dodger, probably aren't for you)  Having said that, they were all very different stories written in the same often hilarious Pratchett style (yes I said it, books can be hilarious too, i'm serious..) I found them hard to read at first, but i've quickly learned to love it. I actually read Snuff first, which was a mistake because I then realised it's the most recent book in a series of 39! I ordered 'The colour of magic' which is book #1 and i'm now planning to work my way through that series.. (39 f*%^*ing books!) Read them, you'll love them. And if you don't.. well I couldn't care less, this isn't what I do! I'm not a book reviewer!

I just remembered that i'm late for that thing, you know.. well I have an apointment.. it's far too late to be writing things for noone to read, so until next time (don't hold your breath) goodnight and thanks for giving me the impression that you read this!

Your friend, 

Buddy Holly

Mumps!

Luckily pulling faces in the mirror kept it's novelty for the best part of 2 weeks!

Mumps.. who even thought it was a possibility? My sister assures me that I was immunised as a kid but apparantly alot of people get 'top ups' before they head off to university..
I'm now pretty much over it, and very lucky by all accounts because my testicles didn't swell up to the size of tennis balls! It's amazing how paranoid you can feel after doing a bit of reading online.. Permanent hearing loss, Impotence, Meningitis.. and all I got was a bit of pain and a hamsters face! :-)
In between feverish dreams (Which were awesome, by the way) I managed to finish part one of the third 'Song of Ice and Fire' book

I can't recommend these books enough! the second season of the tv series will also be starting April first! (either that or it was a very cruel april fools joke)

I've now got a hell of alot of work to catch up on, so no plans to leave the house and enjoy the sunshine!

What hue looking at?

After watching the first season of the HBO series 'Game of Thrones' I was absolutely enthralled- everything about it; the storytelling, the shots, the vfx and the characters were simply awesome. Realising that we had to wait until april 2012 for the second series I ordered the first 3 books and am currently battling through book number one!

But this post is about the hues, not the story- or more specifically the very common pairing of orange and blue hues (a quick warning though, once you see it you'll notice it everywhere and never get it out of your head!)
I think that orange and blue is the most common pairing purely because they are great complimentary colours, in spite of the fact that everything they do for the mood or feel of a scene completely contrasts.

I think that game of thrones does this beautifully. Without going too much into the story, incase anyone hasn't had the chance to see it yet (or simply doesn't care) We have one set of characters, tough and serious from the cold north, where danger is more prevalent and it's always dark/cold/depressing (the blues) that contrast with the warmer, more image concious, better spoken and generally 'better looking' characters from the south (the oranges)

 Using this technique they provide visual clues for the audiences. Game of thrones has a huge amount of characters that often move throughout the world, so to keep the more casual viewer on the ball with who we are watching and where we are, the north/south divide (which the show is constantly cutting between) is easily distinguished subliminally. Is it orange or blue?

For further reading I found this to be very amusing, pleading with hollywood to stop with the Blorange combo!

http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html

Books! Pre production!

Hello readers!

I have finished the term at university and just finished putting together a showreel for submission. It's a work in progress, there's alot i'd like to clean up/take out/put in but take a look if you'd like!

Click here!

I've also just ordered a couple of books to add to my ever growing collection-

Dream worlds by Hans Bacher, i've had a quick skim through this before and it seems like a very useful book- even more so because I am about to start pre production for my 2nd year film

 

And Timing for Animation which I have heard good things about

I can't wait to unwrap these presents for myself! Prepare for a fair few updates as I have plenty of work to be getting on with!