Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Dynamo

Ian Hubert has done it again. This kid is pretty amazing. He pumps out films like nobody's business.

His stories tend to have a quirky element to them, and "Dynamo" is no exception. Ian's character ('Gage') is the quintessential quagmire of quirk (again no surprise) but all that aside, Ian and his crew (karmapirates) manage to keep you curious enough to keep watching.

The production quality is extremely high and I found the sound track to be compelling (although I could have done without the old 20's ragtime or whatever it is in the opening scene - I personally would have preferred a high intensity track to really amp the tension). In fact, I believe there are mp3's from the shorts available for download on the karmapirates website which I'll be perusing shortly.

The acting from most the characters is a bit campy. After you adjust to it, I find it doesn't detract too badly from the story. For an unpaid outfit, there's really only so much you can do (and these guys do it all!!).

The effects are pretty fantastic when you consider how small this production team really is.  And of course, they use blender for most (if not all) of it! So bonus points right there. The closing scene in episode four when one of the characters leaves the apartment just blows me away. Soooo epic!

The trailer to episode five was recently released. I'm looking forward to the next chapter. Especially if it features more of Kavonaghan (Episode 2, my personal favorite).

The only thing that bothered me was even at the 1080p setting on youtube.com, the video seemed to suffer from a fair amount of compression noise (or whatever the technical term for that is).  I'm not entire sure it's not only on my end (watching via firefox on Ubunutu 12.04 - I'll have to do a little more testing)

Edit: It's my system. I tried watching the episodes on my nexus 7 and the video quality is beautiful. Now I get to troubleshoot why my desktop youtube experience is so lacklustre. Joy!

Anyway.. go. Partake!

Monday, March 4, 2013

Madstone

I attacked the dwarven problem this weekend.  Here's another pass. I found a decent reference to plagiarize and the result is bounds better than my previous attempts. I think the angle of the shield is off, but I didn't want to distort the icon. Probably should have used my circle ruler thingy too. Hindsight!



I also spent some time wrestling my scanner (plustek optic slim 2420+) in order to make capturing my doodlings more convenient  Turns out my scanner doesn't play very nice with windows 7 (even after downloading the supposed windows 7 driver from their site). I ended up giving up and just booted into XP to use it. Kind of a pain, but still better than using a camera to digitize my scrawlings.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Dwarven Commission

A buddy of mine (quite possible the only other person who will ever view this blog) has commissioned me to produce a drawing of a dwarven adventurer. The down side of coming to me for a commission is I'm a fairly horrible artist. But on the upside, that means I'm also horribly inexpensive.

Here are some rough sketches I produced. I used my nexus 7 to photo the drawings, as I was too lazy to get my scanner hooked up and working. Taking pictures with the nexus 7 is an adventure in and of itself. Now I know why they don't ship with a camera launcher app (I grabbed one from the app store).  As my final defense, let it be known these sketches were done without any reference whatsoever (which is never a good idea for those, such as I, who have not honed their artistry to mastery)

    

The Obligatory

Yes, here it is. The Official Blog Introduction.

What is this blog all about? I don't know. I can tell you what it's not about. Politics! Post topics will probably cover a wide range of possibilities, but in the near future I'll probably post about:
  • Art: Drawings I make, art I like, tools I use, whatever
  • Blender: Tutorials, tips, tricks, news, whatever
  • Ubuntu: Tutorials, tips, tricks, news, whatever
  • Games: Board, role playing, pc,  console, whatever 
  • Books: Yes, the kind you read, whatever
  • Other: whatever
Be sure to leave a comment if you so desire. Or not. Whatever