I've failed
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 19.11.06As a movie goer. Completely failed.
Halfway through Casino Royale, someone’s phone rang. Multiple times. As I sat their wondering what idiot could have left their phone on in a theater, my own phone rang… and wouldn’t shut up! So as I sat there wondering just how long the theme from Boondock Saints would play till the phone finally paid attention to my attempts to send the call to voice mail (so sorry Adam!!), I ended up trying to muffle it in my pants. Seemed to work ok.
So save for the public shame, the movie was just incredible. I’ve not been a huge James Bond fan in the past, they’ve always been a little over the top and very sexual, though the entire espionage thing really gets me. This 007 movie, however, starts over. Literally, it’s the start of James’ career as a “double O”. Beginning in grainy black and white, he takes his first two major kills… finally earning elite status among spies.
May I point out the opening sequence is beautiful… stylish… elegant. Blocky vector style characters run through stylized backgrounds, and as each one dies, fall apart into showers of hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. Much like the visual feast of Lemony Snicket’s end credits, it’s an awesome treatment of the style and subject of the movie in a kinetic motion graphic piece. After which, well…
There follows some of the most impressive action I’ve ever seen in a movie. With a few nods to Parkour, we’re rid of the preponderance over ridiculous contraptions, and stripped of the unnecessary baggage, are free to fly… (Sebastian Foucan, of Parkour fame in France, plays a fleeing bomber with ineffable talent). Through buildings, over cranes, fighting and chasing, jumping and falling, moving at a speed that’s breathtaking.
Sure, there’s the obligatory Bond girls (and plenty of offscreen sex), but we’re also witnessing the tragic hardening of a man who used to be able to love. To anyone that may have enjoyed James Bond in the past, I can not recommend this enough (though do beware a particularly brutal torture scene), and to those few that might enjoy a bit of action… man, you can’t go wrong!
Oh, and the beautiful cars… so pretty…
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Colin and Cumberland
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 13.11.06On the lightwave forum I came across a short film shown in the Raindance festival of London. Fetch is one of a series of character sketches by one of the UK’s leading animation houses; Axis Animation. They seem to have a lot of fun with it, not to mention it’s done using Lightwave!
It’s all part of the language efforts by the BBC, helping teach kids some of the remaining celtic languages. While my efforts to learn any language are generally met with utter demise, it’s a nicely done site, and seems to be a cool way to learn.
Axis was also the studio to do CodeHunters, an 11 minute film used as part of the MTV Asia awards. CGSociety published an excellent article on the animation and design process. You can find higher res formats here, and believe me, it’s worth it. There’s a lot of nice touches to the style that have to be seen in detail to be appreciated!
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Reading Job
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 11.11.06I began reading Job a month or two ago; figured it’d put me in my place, give a better perspective on life. Always a good thing.
Somehow I started by reading the last chapter, the epilogue. It’s interesting because as you start again, from the beginning, you read everything knowing it’s all wrong. In the last chapter God tells Job’s three friends to make sacrifices for saying untrue things (Job 42:7). Giving faulty counsel, they denied God’s character. I’m paraphrasing a bit, so do read it for yourself!
Elifaz is the first of Job’s friends to speak, and what he says seems so good and righteous. God won’t let evil prevail, or piety falter. Oh, how frail is man! How could God look upon him? But take heart, and trust in God… He will be sure to save the righteous, and uphold those that are truly just.
It’s all “good” stuff. You could probably hear this in any Bible believing church in America or elsewhere! But it’s wrong. So what’s wrong with it? The only thing I could think of is that they believed their own righteous works beholden them to God, they could make themselves good enough that God would have to bless them. They believed their faith guaranteed earthly prosperity.
But that’s not the case, God is so insurmountably Holy, nothing we do even comes close to making our sin-stained life tolerable (Isaiah 64:6). It’s merely by His grace that he reaches down and saves us, it was true when Christ died on the cross, as it always was throughout the Old Testament. Something I’d never realized before… it’s always been God’s grace. He really hasn’t changed! People were never saved by the blood of animals, or by rules and regulations (Hebrews 10:3-4). Those were in place to remind people, but it was never about the externals. God has always saved by grace.
He is so much greater, more wonderful than can be comprehended. Easy to say, I suppose, and impossible to really grasp.
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New Feeds
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 10.11.06Amid cries of distress that my RSS feed was broken, I decided to finish my Feedburner setup. You’ll notice the RSS and Atom links towards the bottom of the right hand page navigation have been replaced with a single smart link; not only will it work in any reader (RSS, Atom, My Yahoo, etc.), but when loaded in an incompatible browser, you can still see the feed in HTML form.
More specific feeds will be added to the list as I start to publish tutorials (coming soon) or podcasts (coming not so soon), allowing readers to subscribe only to the parts they want.
If you’ve subscribed before, please change your subscription to this new link. Thanks! While I can’t make promises, it should be more or less permanent, and will be able to migrate through whatever hosting changes I make.
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Pathologically Stupid
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 9.11.06Phrase used to describe either a singular human or group of persons that embody every terrifying propensity towards the dangerously moronic. Taking the phrase literally, there there is also infered danger that these persons are highly contagious; such profound depths of mental vacuity will actually cause those around them to become less intelligent. Communicating with such people often poses problems as even basic language constructs pose road blocks on the path to… well…
“It’s like being drunk, except not as fun.” – Elihu Ihms
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Crash!
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 7.11.06I’m generally pretty good at abusing equipment (just intellectual abuse, not physically beating my computer), and I’ve certainly edited my fair share of massive photos. Yet somehow this hasn’t come up before…
(the image is a colour texture map of Rodinia, postulated to have been the super continent to precede Pangea, and the current star of a video I’m working on)
I double checked, and sure enough… the file I’d been working on (with such grievously slow processing speeds) had passed 1.75Gb of saved file space, before I’d started editing. Thankfully flattening part of it seemed to help and I was able to save it. Since I had a few original layers in another file, no edibility was really lost. Talking with Ben Wolken, this is an issue with Photoshop CS1 and previous; in CS2 the “large file format” was introduced.
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Comments are back online
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 5.11.06Thanks for your patience (all two readers who aren’t commenting anyway)! It should be working nicely now. I’ve reverted to a previous commenting setup and added a few security features. Things should be running fine.
papa john! don’t be ridiculous… just because i don’t comment doesn’t mean i don’t read your blog. i love to know how my dear cousin is doing!
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Commenting disabled
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 5.11.06Due to some recent spamming, I’ve temporarily taken comments offline. It shouldn’t be for too long, but I’ll have to figure out how to deal with the situation. Thank you for your patience, and my apologies to anyone that might have stumbled across any untoward posts.
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Mosaic
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 2.11.06I’ve been working recently on a project that needed a mosaic. I tried using Photoshop’s mosaic filter, which was absolutely horrific. It can pixelate an image into geometric blobs, but certainly nothing close to the beauty of tiny little squares arraigned along the curves and lines of a picture.
Other options were sought for, but not found. And so, it was drawn by hand. Black ink to surround the black tiles, red ink for everything else (since the red channel can be used in Photoshop to derive just the black, and the difference to get everything else). I developed a dent on my ring finger (now a nice little callus), not to mention plenty of cramps and pains. Probably due to poor pen holding habits; I just don’t do this often enough!
The result doesn’t seem too bad. Not terribly photoreal, but the project style is supposed to be illustrative. A lot of tweaking and texturing to do before it’s really finished, but this is what it looks like so far.
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It's official
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 29.10.06This monday I will be working for the Museum Art department, primarily doing 3D animations to be used in display videos, though a few printed pieces will likely be needed as well.
I had thought my new position would be temporary, but it seems it may be a little longer term than I first expected. The computer, equipment, and programs are all being transfered to the new department, and I’ll probably be working there at least till the museum opens.
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Hi! Now you have another reader AND commenter.