Photography: La Voie Maritime

I saw a little fog about 45 minutes into my ride, but it was after the sun was up, so it was burning off. However, at the 2-hour mark, I was on La Voie Maritime, a long strip of land between 2 islands on my route, and there were bands of heavy fog passing long after the sky was blue and sunny everywhere else. I had my iPhone that can take 48-megapixel RAW images, so I was able to get some nicer images. 

Animated short film: 25 Years Later (2026) made by Vincent-louis Apruzzese

A cyclist on a trip from his home in Montreal Quebec to his former hometown of Boston Massachusetts is haunted by memories of the time he spent there with his best friend 25 years previously. 

This is a remake of sorts of an earlier version of this animation made in Cinema 4D. I use Blender now and thought I might do better as it was a very personal project for me. I actually planned this trip for real but was never able to do it for various reasons recurring kidney problems on my part, family issues and the pandemic happening. This is a functional film for sure but many of the events are from life and experience from that time with my friend, Jay.  

Below is the original film, should anyone want to see it for comparison. I kept some of the original animation as I really liked them. Most of my problems visually were with the characters and how they and some of the renders looked. The basic structure is the same with some cleaning up of shots and scenes to hopefully work better and I also added a subtle effect for when things are in the past to make that clearer. 

Outriders (2003) restored and updated to HD

 

In 2003 I made a documentary for the 20th anniversary of Outriders, the gay group that ride annually from Boston to Provincetown in one day. I did it for almost 20 year when I lived in Boston and it is a great ride with great people. The standard definition version, like most Sd videos just doesn't cut it on modern devices so I am upgrading my older films so they can still be relevant and hopefully inform people about things like Outriders which is just a fantastic organization.

illustration: Dan portrait (Procreate)

I was little hesitant to post this since it will hopefully be sent as gift to the subject as a surprise but since he, like most people, never read my blog I decided to take the chance. Below is the detailed sketch I use as a guide when drawing, I like to have an overlay sketch to keep things from getting distorted and to remind me where details are. I am unsure how good the resemblance is. partly becuase its really hard to do that sometimes when you know the person really well, and we have been friends for many decades at this point. I also had to work from photos he has sent me since he moved to Orlando and they are great for me to look at but not always the best choice for a drawing. We are both avid cyclists so I wanted that represented. I think the strap might be changing the shape of his face enough that it's throwing the likeness off a little. I tinkered a lot with his expression which was slightly dour, in my opinion, and a slight smile is more "him". 

30e tour de l'île 2014

Most  people who know me, know I am an avid cyclist. Usually I just do long distances alone, but sometimes I do long distances alone with a big group. I don't have any cycling friends in Montréal for some reason but I had quite a few in Boston. In any case, this year the tour actually was doing the perimeter of the island completely.. not just half of it as it does normally. As it was something I wanted to do for 10 years but could never figure out a good route I decided to do it. 25000 regular riders and 3 000 of us doing the 130km version. I have a feeling not the entire 3 000 did the 130km, there was a 100km turn off option and I seemed to run into a ton of them at the point we reconnected again while I only saw maybe 3-10 people at time on the uncut route. In the end it was 138 km, and I spent the last 30 minutes of so not going into the finish area and ate an ice-cream instead. Too many damn people for my taste. My Garmin behave admirably and I was able to upload all the stats online. Almost 4600 calories and I had to force myself to eat just now. Just wasn't hungry.