this one - on my freelance journalism, illustration and animation,
http://documentaryfilmmaking.blogspot.com/ - on (surprisingly) my documentary filmmaking work
and
http://christiandarkin.blogspot.com/ on everything else.
so - here's a digest of the last few days to give you a flavour:
I should probably start by letting you know a couple of the projects I'm working on...
I've got several articles to write for magazines about video making, illustration and general computer creative stuff. I've also just been asked by the Guardian to do a tutorial on the new Premiere Elements and the software arrived in the post this morning...
it looks pretty and seems to be a bit easier to use than the previous version.
I hope they haven't cut it down too much.I'm also a 3d illustrator and I'm just starting work on a Poster of human anatomy for gbeye (http://www.gbeye.com/) I've looked at the vast majority of anatomy posters and they look pretty plain, so I'm going for a pop-art look in the hope of bringing some colour to the thing. it looks pretty good so far...
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
put the finishing touches to the guardian article and sent it off - it's a very basic tutorial - most of what I do is for people who already know the basics so this was refreshingly simple. It was quite a small piece to be able to fit everything into though - so I hope it works OK. It'll be published in January in a saturday pull out on video editing.
Expressions of shock from the section editor - delivering copy days or weeks AHEAD of a deadline is virtually unheard of in the publishing industry, but I'm trying to get ahead - knowing that George could throw my schedule out of the window at any moment.
Now starting to label up the anatomy poster - latin names for muscles, organs and bones which all have to be right and spelled correctly (not my strong point)... it's going to be a long dull job and if I get any wrong, I'm going to look pretty stupid because I just know nobody's going to check it before it's printed...
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Having had a couple of weeks off for George's birth, I'm back in the office looking for writing work. As a freelancer, you get used to the rhythms of the business.
Got a call yesterday from Tom at Computer Arts saying could I do a short review of a 3d package (Cinema 4d) - also suggested Premiere Elments because these short reviews are half-pagers so the editor needs 2 to fill a page. also because I've already got Premiere Elements because of yesterday's Guardian article.
Now, because everyone on the magazines wants time off at Christmas, monthly mags always end up doing two issues in the space of one just before, and this means double the workload for everyone - especially the freelancers who end up with extra work because everyone in the office is too busy running round like headless chickens to write any of the issue in-house.
Add to this the fact that just before Christmas, all the software manufacturers go into overdrive trying to launch new versions of anything anyone might buy as a present, so there's lots more out there to cover.Tom's last deadline is the 24th of December (nasty) and he's got another before then too, so he wants to commission everything in the next week....
I also write the software reviews for ImagineFX and they've got the same problem. it looks like they've only got one review for me to do this month, but that has the same deadline (next friday) as the work I've taken on from Tom.
I suspect that the only reason Digital Video magazine haven't called me with the same problem is that they're so tight on their previous issue that nobody's had time to think about the looming Christmas deadlines yet...Rhythms of the business.
Meanwhile I'm going to try to do Toms two reviews today - before going off to Brighton this afternoon where Lisa is attending an Occupational Therapy conference tomorrow and I'm looking after George who will no doubt be screaming all day because he's not getting fed...
Friday November 9, 2007
Artwork on sale
I pop into WHSmiths and see a dinosaur DVD bundled with a magazine type book. It’s got the Natural History museum logo on it and I’d love to be making video with them as a partner, so I’m interested in this publication and buy it.
I open the magazine and find one of my Stock images has been used as a pull-out poster in the middle of the mag. It looks great. A few pages further on they’ve used another of my pics – a much less careful piece of work which they’ve chosen to blow up far too big. It looks rubbish.
The DVD accompanying the book was made in 1993 and looks awful. There’s some live footage shot at the museum, some creaky dialogue and some CG which looks like it came out of a videogame. The 3d glasses provided don’t seem to work.
I resolve to try to get a meeting with the museum and propose something a little more grown up…. I’m not sure what yet, but I'll report it in my documentary filmmaking blog.
Steven Poliakoff (I’m sure the spelling’s wrong) and editing
There’s an evening dedicated to the writer director on this weekend. He makes some great films and actually has control over them. When asked how he stops TV execs ruining his work, he said that on “shooting the past” he was told to speed it up and make it more action packed. He simply refused and the result was so popular (as popular as the Eastenders Christmas episode) that nobody stops him now.
We then saw one of his films – a monologue. It was rubbish.
I start wondering whether having other people with some control over your creative work is good or bad overall. For me, collaborative work has strengths – in that the jokes are better, the focus is sharper and the adherence to storytelling or other perceived ‘rules’ of creative work tends to be better because there’s someone there stopping any one person going off the rails.
However, most artistic projects go beyond the rules and the instant impact and only those working constantly on them can ever really get the whole picture. If someone taking a brief (or even a sustained) look at the finished product has control over it, they whittle it down to focus on their perception rather than the whole – more complex – picture.
This gives collaborative projects on the whole more impact and instant appeal, but less complexity and lasting strength.
In my own case, I often find when I’m working to a brief where the commissioner wants to change a lot of what I do, there’s often a very positive result – I end up improving the work. However, this only happens up to a point – beyond which the work starts to become too de-focused and the original ideas are lost or distorted.
Next time I get such a project in, I’ll take you through the revisions, and we’ll see what happens….
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