My Summer Adventures...

Wow, this has to be the longest time of no posts in this blogs existence. Just over a month!

All I have to say is that a 6 day work week is not very conducive to a lot of spare blogging time sadly. In good news I won't end up on the streets or hungry anytime soon!

Anyways thought I'd do a quick recap of my two "long" weekends, as they're where the only interesting and/or exciting things in my life have gone down.

Note I said quick!
So on the first weekend of August I decided to take Lady R to Cypress Hills Provincial Park. She'd seen tons of the Foothills and the Rockies, but not much of the prairies Alberta's other major terrain.

So we got out our trusty tent from New Zealand for some good old camping.

Apart from forgetting my hammer (I had an inkling I'd need it), and having to borrow a hatchet from a neighboring camper to peg down the tent, there were no incidents on this front.

We are both really happy with the tent, and while it is technically a bit large for just the two of us it affords a lot of space. Which is nice. The other feature we liked, and took full advantage of for the first time was the star gazing roof. You can remove the main canvas and watch the sky through this heavy mesh.

Why Cypress Hills? Well for one it had open campsites on the long weekend. Second it is a truly unique area in the Prairies. While the majority of the area was completely flattened by glaciers during the ice age, Cypress Hills was a lone "mountain" in the area as the glaciers couldn't quite erode them. So to this day it stands towering over the rest of the flat surroundings.

Sadly due to the ongoing forest fires in British Columbia, we couldn't quite see the curvature of the Earth that I fondly recall from this lookout.

While many areas of the Cypress Hills are as beautiful as I remember them, I forgot just how MUCH of it is developed for ranching. So after a few days we got bored of driving through acres and acres of cattle pasture (that and all the moose were hiding in the woods on account of the wet year, and not needing to venture where people are).

On the far side of the Saskatchewan side of the park we made a rather exciting discovery (for Lady R in particular) of a National Park dedicated to the first real RCMP fort in Canada. Granted had we researched our trip this wouldn't have been a surprise. As it turned out it was a rather nice surprise for the both of us. Though definitely more so for Mountie obsessed Lady R.

Having exhausted Cypress Hills we decided on our last full day to push into Saskatchewan. My major objective was to reach the East End T-Rex Research Centre.

Here is the majority of the facility in all its glory. While it was rather cool museum, though I'm not sure if I was happy paying $8.50 for each of us!... Though the money goes to a good cause. I point out again this photo is pretty much the whole place (minus the prep lab, behind me in this photo, and the auditorium which shows a 30 minute video on Sask palaeo). It might be a little over priced (considering the Tyrrell is only a $1.50 more for about 20 times the displays!).

If not for the major thunder storm system that was suddenly chasing us this day, we might have ended out Sask exploration at East End. With the weather being rather miserable behind us we pushed onward... As far as Moose Jaw, which is 2/3 of the way across Saskatchewan. This made it a pretty full on day.

The biggest event of the trip (and probably the year for us... and yes I'm comparing this to the Olympics) occurred on the way home with the view of this sunset.

I will not tell what happened this post. You have to guess, and in my next post I'll cover the huge event that occurred to me and Lady R here. (People who already know are NOT allowed to blow the surprise!)

Sadly long weekends don't last forever, and so on our last day we had to make our way home again. I however didn't feel like proceeding the normal way. Rather we skirted the Montana border, hitting all the sites me and Bond didn't hit in our 2006 road trip to Devil's Coulee.

One stop that I was rather pleased about was our brief stop at Red Rock Coulee. I'd seen pictures of it at the Tyrrell, but never found out where it was... Till this weekend.

Shortly up the road we visited Writing On Stone Provincial Park. Man I wish I'd made the trip sooner! It was spectacular!

Both Red Rock Coulee and Writing On Stone were much larger and impressive versions of some of New Zealand's most famous geologic attractions. I find this kind of ironic, and am glad on the one hand I saw these after NZ (as otherwise I would have been disappointed down under). It proves what I've been telling my Kiwi friends though, despite New Zealand being a great Middle Earth, the LOTR films could just as easily have been filmed in Canada!

Sadly the very intense rain systems caught up with us on this last day, and we drove a gauntlet of 4 really intense storms.

Three of these were so bad I had to slow right down on the highway due to reduced visibility. In typical fashion right as we arrived in Calgary we hit the worst of the lot, and it lead to the scariest moment I've had in a car in a long time. Giant pools of water collected on the road, and a truck beside us hit one sending a huge sheet of water to envelope my car, making us blind for 4 seconds at about 70km/hr!

We made it home safe and sound in the end, and apart from this finale, it was a very worthwhile and fun trip!

More to come soon...

Goals 2010

Time to set out roughly what I intend to do over the next year or so.

I'm going with a slightly different layout this year. This time project by project, and covering all their goals at once (last time I went with a temporal organization of the goals)

Traumador Goals

Short Term:

• Finish the winter OH-lympics before the end of summer!!! They had seemed easy enough to do when I started them during the actual Olympics, but they have turned out to be much more time consuming than I'd anticipated (that and my life hasn't exactly been ideal for anything fun or creative lately).
  

• Finish the Chronicles site upgrades I started in the new year. This includes the sidebar revamp, site orientation pages, and new background designs and variants. I intend on spending a good month doing this project, and posting minimally during this time (like it will be a big difference from now *sigh*)

• Finally get Traum into the NZ adventures I've been stockpiling for 3 years now! No later than the fall...

• Script out all of Traum's future adventures in Canada, and take the photos this August when Bond is in town.

To help me achieve all these goals, after the OH-lympics, I will not start posting an adventure until I have all the special effects for it done. Which will admittedly lead to a boom bust dynamic of Traum posts, but I think it might cut down on time lose of me stalling mid story as I scramble to put together the pictures.

Long Term:

• Continue with my top secret palaeontologist project. I currently have 1 in "the can", and 2 more signed up. However I need to make those appointments happen, and would love to arrange way more.

• Convert my old Bird-Dinosaur link DVD to an Internet compatible format and finally get it on the web.

• Film a bunch of new palaeo-fact videos... Sort of short term, as I have 5 planned for me and Bond's return tour of the Tyrrell.
  

ART Evolved Goals

Short Term:

• Do a summary of Pop Culture genres.

• Complete a series of Pop Culture pictures for the summer gallery.

Long Term:

• Getting on those Palaeo-artist interviews I arranged back in spring. (Stupid current life stuff).

Delta Patrol Goals

Short Term:

• In the fall aim to get all the laser fire effects done.

Long Term:

• Finish the modelling by next goal session

• Complete the movie by 2013 (PIP's 10th anniversary)

Virtual Delay

As has been the story of my 2010, life is overwhelming me a bit.

This time it is the move that me and Lady R had not planned on. We're pretty much in the new place, but EVERYTHING is in boxes. So my single day off will be probably spent putting the place together.

Helping keep me on task, but not relaxing much, will be the lack of internet we currently suffer. We are booked to get the net hooked up on Tuesday, but until than all my online outposts will be silent.

So catch you yet again on the flip side... Boo! I think all this flipping is making me dizzy!

2009 Goals

I can't believe it has been over a year (by a few weeks) since I last really sat down to layout where I've come from creatively and where I want to go...

So lets start by looking at what I accomplished and didn't in 2009:

Traumador

Success- I got Traum out of Alberta!

Failed- To get Traum into the many New Zealand adventures I have lined up for him...

Failed- To get an adventure done every 6 months as I'd hoped

Delta Patrol

Success- I got the rough cut of the movie done!

Failed- To get much modelling for the effects done...

Failed- To cranking out any final effect renders

Failed- To setup myself up to have the final film out next year!

ART Evolved and my Palaeo-art

Success- I have managed to get a piece into EVERY gallery on time so far (making me one of two people to do so!)

Success- I have continued to up the quality of my art (for the most part... when I have had the proper time and oppurtunity) when creating pieces for these galleries.

Success- I have managed to get my art published (non paid mind you) in several magazines!

So clearly of my creative projects my palaeo-art is the only one going well for me thus far. Traumador in particular has become an ongoing regret, and I need to step him up (like usual).

With that in mind, I now launch into my goals for 2010 and beyond next post...

Cha...cha... Changes!

Looking through my older files and blog posts I stumbled upon two independent discoveries, that actually go well together.

First was that my last real outlining of creative goals on the blog was just over a year ago... I had been planning on updating these every couple months!

The second discover was this old pic here.


This is an old Mark 0 Centrosaur model from back in 2005. Prehistoric in both subject and in terms of my art work.

I just found this funny, as I just upgraded my current Centrosaur.

This was the orignal Mark 3 version from back in 2008.

He just recently got a Mark 5 upgrade this year.

This past week he got a head upgrade. He now has perfect skull proportions and placement, a better beak, a proper nose, and a few other minor but better enhancements.

Anyways apart from this quick showcase of my current tweaking (the Centrosaur is about to play big into Traumador's adventures), I'm stating for the RECORD my next post WILL BE a look at how well I did with my 2009 goals and outlining my official 2010 goals!

So tune in for a look at what the Weapon of Mass Imagination intends to do with his next "year"!

The Storm MAY be passing...

The aftermath of last week's debacle is still playing out around me. I had thought our renting a new place last night would have been the end of it all, but I have learned (much to my extreme depression) it may have been too little too late.

This situation, caused by my thinking I was doing the right thing, has put a strain on many of my relationships, however I learned the damage between me and Lady R is a lot more serious than I'd thought. She has assured me that things should return to normal once we move into the new place, but I'm not a big fan of how upset she has been lately. Leading like usual to my outlook on life, that no good deed goes unpunished.

I've also shifted from not working all that much to working all the time! I only have Sundays off, and at moment my days are all 8-11 hour ones! With school getting out next week it is looking like my schedule should shift into at least a more manageable version of this timetable (I currently don't finish till 7-7:30pm each night).

Yesterday I had an unexpected bubble of time, so I popped back to my Trilobite piece. I now have a rough composition I'm working on, but had an interesting malfunction with one of my lighting effect.


This was the initial result trying to get my watery haze going. I like it. Not my usual attempt at realism, but the picture has a certain awe factor to it I like. So I might work on as final version like this as well.

Keeping My Mind Off Stuff

Things have returned to not good in my life. I shan't go into detail, but I've just discovered all the reasons I came back to Canada were not only wrong but a complete waste of time. We're not talking a little bit of time either. A whole year!

Rather than dwell on it (that is what "sleep" time is for... it is probably not good that I've gotten used to 3-5 hrs of sleep a night these day come to think of it!) I've been trying to keep myself busy.

With the upcoming Trilobite gallery on ART Evolved it is time to get something ready for that...


Here is a sneak peek. This was just a play render with my fill in sand I made today. The sand needs a bit of work, but I like the hiding it effect.

Here he is in the open. He is looking alright. I'm not entirely happy with the head, but the body/tail are quite awesome.

Next he needs legs and a proper environment.

Soundtracks: 2010 Keeps Them Coming!

So I know I promised my next soundtrack related post would be on popcorn music gone bad...

However this promise was made when I thought my than next trip to the cinema would fuel my rage with the second Iron Man soundtrack, and we'd get that post organically. Instead I was in for a very pleasant treat, which would than be followed up by another wish list album!

Basically 2010 has been defying all my expectations, and setting itself easily apart from the past 3-4 years... Good soundtracks have become a rarity in recent years, with the Zimmer clones choking much of the market, and many of the great composers lower their productivity (possibly due to this increased demand for popcorn music by studios). It appears that perhaps there has finally been some backlash against generic film music, and as of such I'm struggling to keep up with all the great new scores coming out!
The first Iron Man, while an amazing movie, had one of the weakest superhero soundtracks ever made (only Danny Elfman's Hulk comes to mind as worse). The official line was Director Jon Favreau wanted a score that could be played solely on an electric guitar. Okay on face value this sounds "cool" right? It was his intention to have a very cool sound for the film. Well think about that for a moment. Basically you're asking for a whole movie to rely on music a 12 year old in guitar lessons could play... It was just a really weak score, in every sense of the word!

I had expected a repeat of this entering the sequel. Only to discover seconds into the opening credit music I was in for a surprise, the music was of a more strong nature! Thinking this had to be fluke, and we'd leave the nice villain theme and reenter generic music, the explanation was spelled out on screen. Zimmer-clone Ramin Djawadi had been replaced by veteran utility composer John Debney.

I can only wonder if someone had realized how pathetic the first movie's music was, and thus sout a more capable composer (as Zimmer-clones of Djawadi's generation are not really capable of making more than one type of sound), or if the Zimmer clan was so engaged else where they couldn't be booked (I hope to learn of the first option personally).

The choice of Debney was frankly kind of brilliant. Debney has built a career on being incredibly versatile, and has often been brought in to save franchises musically. While he is not in my top 5 he is a composer I respect, and typically enjoy the work of. His Iron Man 2, while not the best score of the year (he is up against some very steep competition!), is a remarkably enjoyable score.

It still has electric guitar for the cool factor, but it is wisely a buried element among a strong orchestral arrangement. The highlights are the villain theme of Whiplash, Iron Man's new much more defined theme, and the finale action sequence where these two themes duel with each other on a epic scale!

This was nice extra punch by 2010. Though I'd settled into the notion that Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon were going to be the true highlights of the year... When we had another heavy hitter enter the ring this week!

The Last Airbender, by none other than my favourite composer James Newton Howard...

I'd been starting to miss Howard. His productivity dropped considerably post 2006, and what he was doing proved impossible for m3 to track down in New Zealand. In his absence I found that John Powell's huge recent output and old Jerry Goldsmith classics I hadn't owed were eating up the niche in my musical listening that Howard had occupied back in 2000 till my move to NZ.

It is so lovely to have him back!

With one of his most ambitious epic scores yet! What is even more cool is it is one of his M. Night Shyamalan collaboration scores. Howard has done all of M. Night's music, and these have resulted in some of my favourite musical tracks of all time. However as overall albums they have typically been lacking in across the board quality, with isolated tracks (one of which inevitably always being the climax track) being the highlights and the rest being somewhat forgettable.

The exception to this was Lady in the Water which is one of the strongest soundtracks of the modern age if you ask me. There had been hope that this new high quality would continue in their joint projects. From what I hear The Happening (in addition to being a truly awful movie) was not able to keep this going, with Howard's music being more like his earlier M. Night efforts. I won't judge it as I still haven't heard it.

However with Airbender we have another absolutely solid album start to finish! While not as immediately obvious as How To Train Your Dragon on the thematic end, Airbender is an absolutely solid fantasy effort on par with Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings. I have had to listen to it three times in the last two days to grasp its scope and more subtle (but very rewarding) themes. Once you get in its head space it is incredibly compelling!

Like the other greats of 2010, I'll do a proper review of these later. I'm still having to absorb most of these scores properly yet. I'm just enjoying having more music to absorb than I can handle. This hasn't happened in over 5 years!

Avatar has fully sunk in with its 6 months to digest. So I will get to these shortly when they have equally fully hit home.

I conclude with the hope this isn't the end from 2010 on the movie music end. It is turning into an incredibly memorable year!

The Good News

So life has been quite jam packed for me the past week or so...

On the same day as my rejection from the Calgary Board, I received a job working with a young boy with disabilities. Having now met with the family a few times we've got things ironed out so that I will be working with him every evening this last month of school, and than during the days in the summer.

Lady R is the best girlfriend ever, and bought me a new computer! Given its vastly superior performance over my old one (it renders in Carrara about 6-8 times faster!!!), and DAZ having a sale for the brand new Carrara 8 I broke down and picked that up relatively cheap (it was 50% off) new version of Carrara (finally!)...

So things are finally starting to pick up.

I've been too busy sorting stuff out for my new job (I have a pretty full on program to learn and set up), to sit down with the new Carrara and play much. Also most of its new features are pretty intense, and I'll need to sit down with the manual to get the hang of them. More to the point not having a physical copy of the manual I'll need to go to a print shop and get the PDF printed. However being 750 pages this is going to have to wait a little while!

I have plugged some of my "old" Dinosaurs into the new program, and no problems thus far. A few environmental factors didn't make the cross over for some reason, which is a bit annoying. In particular my water's caustic effects and tree bark shaders didn't get saved in the model files, and thus were left on the old machine. It is not the end of the world, it just means I have to manual copy them over to the new machine and tell my 3D models where to find them...

I've been toying with my "top secret" ART Evolved project while working on my job stuff. As I'm currently just trying to make the river work it is just a matter of adjusting the shaders and rendering. Given that the new machine renders the whole scene in 20 minutes this is making progress much faster (on the old machine this scene with plants and such would take over an hour!).
This was were I started on the new machine. It is a slight step back as, again, I lost all my tree bark in the cross over to the new puter.

While I liked the baseline of the water effects, the details were all wrong. The splashes were too defined, the colour of the mist and water were not working, and the whole thing seemed artificial.

Tweaking the water colour and reflection I started to sort of step in the right direction, only the colour was too bright. Now my Rex was standing in a river of Cool-Aid OH YEAH!

A key factor to water is its reflective nature. I'd only had its reflection up to 50%, so I cranked it up to 90% while darkening the colour and got something much better for the river. At the same time I made my splashes more transparent which removed the orb like nature of the water droplets, but the splashes weren't big enough and still not quite right on the colour scale.

Expanding the splashes and lightening the colours I likes the size of the splashes, but not the brightness.

Darkening down the splashes and their mist I arrived here. I like this, and think I'm done on the water front.

I also decided I didn't like the red colour scheme of the T-Rex sticking out from the environment so much. A T-Rex doesn't strike me as the sort of animal that wants to stand out. So I applied the Larry colouration to the model, and like how it subtly blends in with the background. Though I need to tweak the feather colouration as they currently disappear all together.

Next I just need to fix the riverbank (which also lost its texture map), the tree bark, and play with Carrara 8's new tree systems that should let me add dead leaves to the trees and play with some other settings to get way more realistic looking plants!

The Recent Bad News...

Have had a lot going in my life lately. Yesterday in particular had a particular nexus quality to it, with about 6 things all going down at once. Rather than one big post, I've decided to break this up into bad and good news posts. Partially as my good news still needs a day or two to get sorted out.

The first immediate and devastating piece of bad news is that I have been formally rejected from the Calgary Board of Education. So I won't be teaching in Canada anytime soon...

Without so much as an interview, I got a very generic letter stating I don't fit into the Board's ideals. How I don't fit in it doesn't say. Rather than take this personally (which it is hard not too) and assume this is do to with my application package I sent them, I need to remind myself of the more likely underlining cause. That being the 200 teachers they laid off as of yesterday...

In general these are "wonderful" times to be a beginning teacher. Of my dozen or so friends who all went into the teaching profession, only 1/3 are actual still teaching and most of them overseas. Yet people wonder why we're losing our edge? When we can't be bothered to invest in our education system...

Rather than end on this downer, another recent piece of news has hit my radar that has given me an employment idea.

The supposedly upcoming Hobbit movie is looking for a new director, while coincidentally I at the same time need a job. Hmmmmm



I propose I get the job! After all I'm qualified!

• I have directed/produced/acted in over 5 movies... well at least movie LIKE compilations.

• I've lived in and explored New Zealand to the point where I can tell you roughly where all the previous LOTR movies were filmed, and know some great untapped locations for new Middle Earth locales.

• I have extensive experience with low level special effects... how much harder could it be to have high end ones that actual do all the stuff I'd like them too?!?

• I could cut down the budget, by playing Gollum myself. Anyone who has been around me can tell you how eerily close my Gollum voice is to the real thing!

• I bring star power to this new project. Apart from Gandalf and maybe Bilbo (Ian Holm is sadly getting really old) what other established names are attached to this film (again I replace Andy Serkis as Gollum :P)? None, as the characters are all new to the film franchise. Sure the studio could search out people to fill in many of these roles, and they will have to. However I bring one star they'd never think of to the role of Smaug the Dragon, Traumador the Tyrannosaur!

• Finally my asking price is very reasonable and very competitive in today's modern entertainment industry!

So there is my official application to become the new director of The Hobbit.

(Oh I just thought of another thing. How many fancy pants directors could throw together their own crude logo like mine above in under 5 minutes like me :P)