New Demo Reel

Talk about Art

I recently listened to several Movie Meltdown podcasts about art (and some movies about art). I was struck firstly about how I really have no one to talk about the stuff I do with who can relate to it at all and secondly about how universal attitudes about art are. 

I have written about being creative before but I don’t think I mentioned some obvious things the podcast gang brought up. One thing the artists talked about was that many people don’t understand that being artistic isn’t a gift from on high you are somehow able to realize effortlessly and immediately. Creating something takes lots of practice, experimenting, false starts, dead ends and years of experience. Too often they were asked to draw me something cool or do something well outside their artistic field. It appears to outsiders that if you can paint a picture you can make a sculpture, draw a comic book and film a movie as well. All completely different talents and skill sets. It is the same problem I get with my graphic design work, because I can use photoshop etc I am expected to be able to program and create software, fix hardware and automatically be able to do anything involving a computer. 

Another thing was the why don’t you draw me this, you are creative… you can make a sign for our street fair sort of conversations artists get from friends, family and even clients. The assumption is they are somehow doing you a favour by letting you do something creative for them. I have never heard of an accountant being told hey! you can do our cycling club taxes!. There is an presumption that an artist will jump at the chance to anything asked of them as though they don’t have their own ideas or their own work to accomplish. It’s pretty rare anyone thinks to pay for these requests, just being asked to do weeks of work is payment enough I guess. I suspect artists don’t often refuse, mostly because there is the blind hope that if they do it, the requesting parties will somehow realize how much effort it takes to accomplish something creative. 

I don’t think these demands are badly intended, it’s just that ART in all caps is thought of as being something leisurely and fun, something that doesn’t take work to do well and is, to be frank, something kids do for amusement… not for adults as a career. 

BTW: look up the Movie Metldown podcast, it’s a conversion between friends more than anything else and can be very amusing and informative.)

Still anti-social

I have been using the Google + app for a while now, trying to give it a shot and find some sort of usefulness for it. It's not working out very well.

I decided to follow several groups, mostly science and sci-fi stuff and while I didn't expect to like even ½ of the postings there, it is all the other crap Google forces me to look at that really gets me angry. I know not many people (relatively) use Google + but I find it impossible to believe that stock photos of flowers or rivers are "popular on google" by any definition of popular. They also force you to receive posts from discussions you have no interest in, like "caturday" gifs. The only thing you can do is mark things as spam or ignore the post. I find I do both of those actions a hell of a lot more than I read posts I've actually requested to see. I did complain several times that being forced to see full screen images with horrible graphics proclaiming "Jesus is Lord" every 3 posts is verging on criminal harassment. What algorithm decided I wanted to see that? It's insulting.

The amount of tacky "funny"gifs is another issue, who posts these things? I have a feeling it's Google itself trying to puff up how many people are using the service. At least I hope it's Google and there really aren't that many mentally deficient people online making these insipid images and posting them 100 times a day for all to see. Opening the app is like the end of Clockwork Orange but instead of being forced to watch violence until it makes us vomit, we are forced, with no option otherwise, to have religious, love and "funny" gifs burned into our defenceless minds.

The saddest thing is the structure of the app is not terrible and works fairly well. If they want to have people use it, there needs to be more control over what comes in and ways to not just "+" things but "minus" them as well. There is a lot of bad information and abusive people, as with all social media, but no way for the community at large to control the abuses.

I do not use anything other social networks (Facebook included) and I imagine they aren't much better. As it is I am looking for ways to limit my use of even this service as much as possible. The annoyances still outweigh any benefits in my view.

Change of format comparison

I have been working on updating my demo reel and, as always, look back to work in the past to see if any of it should be included. I have little choice since new work is pretty scarce. I came across a project I did for a friend in 2008, a 3D animation set of a camera panning across a field of widescreen Tv sets (which were rare enough in 2008). We liked the final product and it was interesting enough so I decided to re-render it in HD. Not as easy as it seemed at first. For some reason the old Cinema 4D files wouldn't render more than a single frame except in preview mode. So used the original model and did the rest from a new project file.

The image is the origin standard definition frame sitting in the new HD one and it's amazing how much higher the quality is now. I have had a few people complain that Blu-ray os no better the a standard DVD but I think this image shows there is a huge difference

Quick Illustrations

I volunteered to do a couple quick illustrations for a local skeptic group run out of the Cracked Science web site. (The project is called "Moutons no more")I recently went to a very nicely done lecture by Jonathan Jarry and replied to his request for some design help. I am not really an illustrator, but nice to be able to help out.

Bad advice: Jack of all trades

As design work and other creative fields become less and less lucrative and jobs less and less available due to various causes (over abundance of graduates, do it yourself design for websites and many print projects), advice for how to deal with it is rampart. « Be a jack of all trades » is one of the most heard old chestnuts…  but is it good advice? 

Full disclosure, I do qualify as a jack of all trades to many people even though I specialize in only a couple of things. I can edit video, take and manipulate photos, do some web design, make illustrations, do high end after effects work and even some 3D animation. I’ve learned to do these things of a long period of time and most of them I learned as they emerged and caught my eye. They are all visual as well and so have that one thread in common. I will maintain that knowing a little bit about anything that touches your work is a good thing. A graphic designer’s basic job is to take elements, usually already created, and arrange them and text into something understandable to the viewer. Knowing what can and can’t be done with html (or whatever code) how to extract elements from a photo etc aid in making outstanding designs. 

Where this all falls down is that knowing a lot of things of course doesn’t make you good in all or any of them and more to the point - doesn’t get you work. Getting a good reputation with a couple of things with a large number of clients that will « call you first » (or a least second) when something comes up is how you stay alive. Too many HR departments and job descriptions for deign work are an alphabet soup of programming language requirements whether the potential client knows what they all mean or not (usually not). If designer was replaced with driver, that is like requiring a driver to also be able to build a car from scratch before getting a job delivering flowers. Sure a very few, might be able to do both but they are completely different skill sets. 

Learning new things always a good idea, but requiring unrelated skills under the designer label is just not helping anyone. The advice to struggling creatives is too often learn programming, learn 3D modelling for games, and so on. All great things but also not easy to learn and do not use the same talents. Better to just say « give up and change your career completely » because that is what you are really doing and honesty, might be better advice. 

Remember, those new fields are also very competitive and already filled with people who have the same client reputations and networks you had when design work was the rage. The idea that you can learn html and have the world at your feet is an old way of thinking that has long, long past. It’s bad advice to tell someone to learn something new just because they both involve computers (what doesn’t involve computers these days?). Courses and software to learn these things are not cheap and can take years. Not everyone can just not work for a few years and hold on to their home, family and the rest. 

So before you take the advice to learn some random new field, step back and ask yourself if it’s really going to get you somewhere. Many of those design jobs also require things like knowing microsoft office and answering the phones. In other words, they want a secretary who they can pawn off design work for free. Desperate times call fro desperate measure to be sure, but don’t kid yourself that knowing more will always get you more in today’s market. 

Colour or Black & White?

I have a tendency towards black and white but occasionally colour makes it's way into my drawings. In this case I drew the black and what version then colourized it for sort of a pen and water-colour look (I think). The colour does seem more dramatic. 

If interested, click to see expanded versions.

D5000 to D7100 macro test

So a few posts back I put "a new camera" on my list of things I wouldn't be getting anytime soon. Happily, due to a couple generous birthday cheques and mid-life crisis reasoning, I was able to get a new camera. (Plus my cousin Sheila recommended it as she has one as well and she has a lot of sway with me).  I decided on the Nikon D7100 based on a few features it had a I really wanted and the reviews of it saying it was as close to full frame sensor you could get for the price. It does in fact seem to have all the same features as the 610 except for the full frame sensor.

Because I need to know I didn't waste 1 000$ I did a few tests to make sure there was a noticeable difference in the images.

Basic shot - D7100 is on right

I think the sharpness and colour show the purchase was an improvement

100% side by side -  D7100 is on right

I was little disappointed there wasn't a bigger difference. The D5000 is 12 megapixels and the D7100 is 24. Maybe naively, I thought the new camera's images would be twice the size. There is a definite difference in the sharpness and clarity with the new camera though.

Differences I noticed right away
The D7100 is so much faster than the D5000 taking photos it took me a few days to adjust to it. The camera can also do 5 step bracketing over the normal 3 step which is a great help to me in some of my work.  There seems to a be less noise in low light shooting and the controls are much better situated after you get used to using them for a while. I miss the graphic menu system in the sense the D5000 visually showed you how much the lens was open when changing the f-stop, I just like visual queues over numbers but the menu itself was a lot more easy to understand in the newer camera overall.

My book for sale on iTunes!

My photo essay of Copps Hill Burial Ground his now for sale in iTunes in the ibook store for Canada and the USA! It will work on iPads and on Mac computers with Mavericks installed on them. I have no idea what to expect from this so please if you or anyone you know is interested in historical cemeteries, photography or Boston history... please tell them buy a copy and give me a stellar review!  It's 4,99$ !  I also did the illustrations taken directly from the stones themselves.

Film and digital differences still exist

I somehow persuaded myself to get a new camera after passing a certain age recently… better than a sports car I suppose. As usual when I have a new camera, it’s a digital SLR and it always makes me nostalgic for my film cameras. So, while I am in this mood I thought I’d bring up some of the differences between the formats that still exist, and might always exist between them. 

Conservation: Film is still the best way to conserve images. For one thing, a negative can be  reprinted and even scanned at different sizes and into different formats. It does degrade over time but so does digital and digital is less reliable over the long term for conservation. Digital files are pretty much in the highest quality they ever can be when you make them and it’s very hard to get them into a new, especially larger format without losing a noticeably in quality. 

Practicality: This is where digital shines. With one flash card you can take 100s if not 1000s of photos and they are all available to look at instantly. Processing film takes a room, chemicals and lots of expensive equipment. Not mention money. Once you have a a computer and a software for image processing (Photoshop is an example but there are more and more alternatives out there now) you are almost without limits as to how you can manipulate the photos and even make as many versions of it until you are happy with the results. many of the techniques in Photoshop are from ones used in dark rooms over the last century or so it’s just easier to accomplish now. 

The longevity of cameras: Film beats digital hands down in this respect. My old medium format from 100 years ago still works fine and can take awesome photos. Digital, is different, there is the every changing technologies, formats and the limit to the camera’s sensor lifespan. I also find digital cameras to be more expensive overall, something I don’t understand since they don’t last as long. 

Quality of image: This is a personal choice in many respects but I still find film a higher quality image and I think technically the amount of information in a digital image is still a long away off from the information you can contain on film, in most cases. I have yet to get images I like as much in digital that I got from my medium format camera. To be fair I don’t have medium format digital camera, nor the 10 000$ it would take to buy one. 

This conversation is pretty useless nowadays: While I might pine away for film, the fact of the matter is film is pretty much dead and even now is only used in a shrinking specialty market. Digital is not going away and the quickness and convenience of it doesn’t make it a bad thing at all. I do wonder and hope that eventually digital will catch up in the areas it it currently weaker in.