Comments Gromit!

OK, as mentioned in the previous blog, more stuff is to be added.

Image Comments
When perusing the gallery, if you go to the larger images there is a comment box below the larger image. This will allow you to add comments to each image.

You can let me know images you like or dislike and why. Keep it clean and enjoy.

Silk/Spence

Surprises, Soccer and Cars...

Whew, quite a busy weekend.

Karen and I drove down to Trumbull Connecticut to surprise my friend Bruce (checkout Stormseye) for his 40th birthday! Now, this was no small trip ... 3 hours there (no traffic) 4 hours back (lots of traffic and an unbelieveable rain storm). But the surprise on Bruce's face was worth every minute. Great day, meeting great people and seeing Bruce & Leigh's baby boy, Henry.

So, that was Saturday... onto Sunday...

Well, England were playing Ecuador (luckily the game was being shown on one of the none cable/satellite stations). Can't say it was a great game, neither side seemed to play all that well. Beckham being ill on the pitch, then scoring from an incredible free kick was a little surreal, but the lads won (yippee) … next England v Portugal ... nail-biting stuff. Though trying to watch the games over here in the USA has been somewhat difficult. We don't have satellite or cable at home and all the games during the week have been shown only on ESPN (cable/satellite only - some get streamed on the web at a really low quality). Some weekend games get shown over the air so I have been finding friends/bars/anywhere showing the games and driving a lot! It's a shame that the US team didn't make it further, but they put up a good fight in a very tough group.

Finally on Sunday afternoon we checked out the latest Pixar movie, Cars. Wow, amazing is all I can say. I mean the story is not earth shattering (but it is primarily a children’s story) but the graphics, animation, characters and voices were all more than spot on. If you go to see it, stay for the credits (and after them) for some of the funniest stuff... we really enjoyed this.

The funny thing about seeing Cars, were the trailers preceding it. Lots of computer animated kids films from non-Pixar studios and could you tell! Pixar are SOOO far ahead of the rest it's ridiculous... there was a short film shown before Cars, and even Pixar’s short films make everyone else look stupid. Having taken an animation course for this I know how insanely difficult this stuff is and Pixar obviously only has the cream of the crop in their studio, but the other guys should be studying Pixar like crazy, I know I will be!

Anyway, another week - Pyramid Developments should be launching another site this week and I have more plans for here, so keep 'em peeled...

Best

Silk/Spence

Gallery goodies

If you look to the left, go on, yes now. There, what did you see? ... Nothing, sheesh, OK look a little harder and you'll see that a 'navigation' section has apeeared! I know, I know, two pages hardly warrants navigation but more will appear, honestly.

Anyway, the big announcment is that there is now a GALLERY! - Great eh?, what do you mean a gallery of what.. well why don't you check it out and don't be afraid of letting me know what you think.

Have fun, enjoy and smile...

Silk/Spence

Gomez-a-go-go...

Guess who we bumped into... Ok, not so much as bumped into as paid money to go and see...

GOMEZ

Alright, I know, that was all fairly obvious but we did, so there.

After a few technical hitches, nothing serious you know, just guitars not working, mic's not working or falling apart, the usual stuff. They settled down and were their usual funster selves. Except for Tom who was very sadly not feeling 100%.

Though I do have one comment, why does live music go for volume over quality? It was really just too loud (this does NOT mean I am getting old!). Anyway, it was so loud that sounded like aural mud at times ... it would be better if they focused on providing quality sound at a comfortable level... OK, old man rant finished.

Gomez are great, the new album is great. Nuff said.. well, 'cept, if you do get a chance to see them, don't forget your earplugs like this idiot did!

;o)

Silk/Spence

OK, So what's he been upto?

Well, thanks for asking... are you ready...

As mentioned in this blog earlier, I went to school to learn some 3D Animation skills. ... and what did I learn? The course had three blocks :

Block 1 - Mechanical Modeling and simple animation.
So what did I do? I modeled a Subaru Impreza skidding through a forest track.



Block 2 - Advanced Mechanical Modeling and basic skeletal animation.
For this one I did a Japanese Gundam (though because of a bug in Maya the skeletal animation didn't work!)



Block 3 - Organic Modeling (Human character) and advanced skeletal animation.
Lastly, I tried to create my version of the character Death from The Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman.



and you can click those for bigger versions.

Anyway, I graduated from that class in May. Since then I have been honing my skills and trying to find work doint this stuff for a living, which in the Boston area is actually somewhat of a challenge...

There we go, that's what I have been doing....

Cheers

Silk/Spence

Well, I'm back...

... and this time I'm going to keep going on this... really I am... I promise!

So, a newish start. A cleaner layout, if a little odd. Older posts are available in the archives and the stuff at the side will be added to and expanded.

One change though... the comments section is still available BUT has a "verification word" system that will require you to enter the special codeword on the screen to add a comment. I put this in there to try and stop automated advertising programs adding garbage to the blog.

Have fun, smile and well, whatever ;o)

Silk/Spence