3D Fluff – Mash

A nice new video with some behind the scenes stuff of the show I worked on last year

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/video?id=7377893

Go grab it before it goes!
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320520457875

2x Quad core 3GHz Xeon
16 GB memory (8x Kingston DDR2 6400)
1 TB single harddrive 7200 RPM
2x DVD-R drives
GeForce 120 GT graphics card

New site is up and running for Cinebench 11.5 scores
www.CBScores.com

Just had Prince Charles, Natalie Imbruglia, Stephen Fry, Joan Rivers, Richard E Grant and Sharon Osbourne watch the Peter Pan show. Ooooh, look at me with all the name dropping

We're walking in the air

I’ve just finished working on a decently epic project, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is a theatre show taking place both physically and story-wise in the middle of London. The show is a high aiming production with a sizable budget and probably more technology crammed into a tent than has ever been attempted for a stage show before.

Ten giant high powered projectors embedded into the centre stage beam outwards over the audience’s heads to illuminate the inside of the tent which doubles up as a projection screen. With no internal structure holding the tent up, this means everyone gets an uninterrupted view. The 3D video is projected at 10,000 pixels wide, but with the overlap it ends up around 8.500 pixels wide as it goes 360º around the tent. Working on the video were

Bill Dudley – Set, costume and video designer
Tim Clapham - Effects and Compositing
Janine Pauke - Lighting and composition
Michael Vance - Neverland artist
Alex Cox – Editing and Projection
And myself, working as London flight artist and TD

The show runs in London from 10th June for a few months, then plans are already underway for an international tour, starting with North America

Sometimes you go out for a drink and end up somwhere odd, with strange people, who do bizzare things. Last night was one of those nights. For some reason in this part of Italy all of the local restaurants, supermarkets and bars are closed on Sunday and Monday, seeing as the hotel we’re in doesn’t serve food, this leaves us somewhat knackered.

During our desperate scouring for food we managed to find a bar called Original Joe’s; quite why this bar has an english sounding name I have no idea, theres nothing english speaking about it, especially Maria.

We picked this bar largely because it was open and also because they were still serving their single menu item: Grande Toastie! Its a toasted cheese and ham sandwich which when you havent eaten for 12 hours is most delicious.

The best bit of this bar though is Maria. Maria is the loud, usually drunken barmaid who is desperate for every bit of attention you would care to give her. At random intervals she will pull out a giant rubber penis and start hugging it, this thing is about the size of a cat. So large is Maria’s penis (I assume its hers) that she uses it to store a second slightly smaller penis inside, Its like a penis version of a russian doll.

Maria follows her responsible drinking rules very carefully, if she asks you want you want and you tell her you’ve had enough and are going home, she will ask you again. You *will* be asked what you want until you pick a drink. If you don’t pick anything, or if you do anything else to invoke her wrath you will have to endure a sudden stealthy nipple twist as punishment.

Even if you do pick a drink, don’t expect her to give you what you ordered, just be glad if you get something that even vaguely resembles what you asked for. A rum and coke can apparently be any combination of rum, vodka, coke, soda or gin.

I’ve done 3D work in some unusual places; I once turned up for a day of corporate training, only to find the client was a student that lived at home with his parents and shared a room with his brother, who was asleep snoring in the background the whole time.

Ive worked in a window-less basement with no source of food for 5 miles other than petrol station sandwiches.

Ive even worked in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s office after he moved to somewhere bigger. Not many working spaces have an ensuite shower room, 20 foot high ceiling and a mezzanine level, but this one did.

None though compares to working on a half built cruise ship in an italian shipyard. You need steel toe capped boots, hard hat, flourescent jacket and the ability to dodge various forklift trucks, monstrous cranes which put the death star to shame and hazardous italians who swing ladders on their shoulder like a Laurel and Hardy sketch.

The power goes off at random several times throughout the day which doesnt help the render machines, though it tends to cause a slightly bigger problem for the projection guy when his burning hot 10k bulbs suddenly lose all their cooling without warning.

I hate flying. I also hate not flying.

Almost 2 hours stuck in traffic on the motorway, a mad dash to the terminal and I miss my checkin desk by 5 minutes. I got bumped to the later flight at 4pm, but then the air traffic control went down and most flights were cancelled.

I go home and wait for the phone call from the travel department, 11pm rolls around and theres no call so off I merilly go to bed. Next morning, 9am and theres an email waiting for me which informs me I have a new flight booked…. It leaves in 50 minutes.

I’m now known as the guy who missed 3 flights.

My brother has just recently started a wedding video company in the last year or so. Within this time he’s picked up dreamweaver, photoshop, filmography and editing in sony vegas. Though it pains me to say it, im really impressed with what he’s managed to do.

A grand of software, a few more thousand for a pair of steady cam mounted HD bodies and hes off making work which genuinely is approaching the sort of quality you would see on a home makeover show or documentary.

http://www.mintyslippers.com for the main site and http://www.vimeo.com/1588413 for the video which just impressed me.

Another interesting request from cgtalk, how to unroll a poster. This reminded me of someone else who asked this a while back but with a red carpet for a film opening night. So here we go, a scene for R9+ which doesnt need any plugins. There’s a bit of texture squashing on the roll at the end, but nothing terrible.

http://www.3dfluff.com/files/rollin.zip