This is a montage of behind the scenes footage which gives some idea of how the videos are put together. Make sure you have seen the first four episodes first to avoid spoiling the story lines.
The music was not composed by me. It is distraction-free, royalty-free music that will do the job.
Mad Violinist receives a gift from his friend Reaper to help make the place look better, while Igor has to deal with the mice problem.
This one is pretty long, the entire clip goes for a whopping 5 minutes. Better get your popcorn!
Please, if you don’t have decent speakers, use headphones. Laptop speakers in particular, are horrible for playing good bass sounds in these video clips.
Press play on the player below to start the video. There may be a slight delay as the video downloads the buffer. After that, all will be right.
Please don’t forget to comment, it’s good to get some feedback.
Mad Violinist shows a cannon made in 1871 and explains why it was made, while Igor tries to light it. (30mb)
In this episode, Mad Violinist talks more about the box and reveals what’s inside it. (24mb)
Here is the first episode of “Mad Violinist”. Igor is feeling a little flat. (24mb)
Igor, my servant, makes his first appearance on my blog in the video clip below.
This is a follow up to my last post where I said I was getting back to using (learning) 3ds Max, and as you can see from the image on the left, I am not happy today.
In my previous post I showed three chess pieces I made – a pawn, a rook and a bishop. These were made following tutorials that were designed to introduce various methods one step at a time. 3ds Max is a difficult program to learn, I think mainly because there are so many hundreds or thousands of things that can be used (clicked on). It requires years of use to become competent enough to know how to do anything you want, just because there is SO MUCH to learn!
I am labouring the point of just how hard this software is to use, so that you won’t laugh when I say it took me NINE HOURS to create the knight, from a stupid tutorial that said at the start that it would take about ONE hour. It took me nine hours! That doesn’t include the sorry excuse for a horse that I created on my first attempt, which I abandoned almost halfway through, after 4 hours!
It’s been a while, but I am finally getting back to learning 3ds Max. I want to stick with it for a while to try to improve. I have dabbled with 3ds Max before, and just when I’ve started to learn something, I get busy, stop using the program, and then forget how to use it. If I can become good at creating 3d objects that can be moved around, and viewed from any perspective, then I can add some fun things to my video clips. Before I can do that, though, I have to build my skills.
The animation below is of a pawn, which I made today. It was a beginners exercise, introducing the lathe modifier. I’ll do a few more chess pieces before working my way up to the knight, which looks a bit tricky to make. I can’t just spin that in the lathe. Though… I might… try. 
It is supposed to be sculpted though, at least the horse head bit of it.
I applied a kind of rusty metal material (looks more like painted wood, I think it needs a bump map for proper texture) to the pawn. Well… why not?
Recently I bought Footrot Flats: The Dog Strips…, which is “The Ultimate Collectors Edition”. Not a lot of information about this book can be found online so I thought I’d share my thoughts on this excellent book.
This book was first printed in 2007, and reprinted twice in 2008. The print run seems to be pretty small, I found one description somewhere that described the 2007 print run as “FIRST EDITION 2007, LIMITED PRINT RUN, RARE”, and has a cost of AU$165. It seems that the 2008 print runs are quite small too (I found: “printed in limited numbers”), it’s hardly in stock anywhere and when it is, there’s usually only one copy. This rarity might have something to do with the hefty AU$99 price tag for my book, but then again it is a very hefty book. It’s a heavy hardcover book weighing 3.7kg (approx 9 pounds), jam packed with content.
LittleB and I were at Milsons Point before 6am this morning to photograph the dust storm. There were a couple of other photographers there too, but a lot were arriving when we were leaving. They missed the best light when the sky looked really orange.
I post-processed these photos straight away so that I could match the colour with the sky colour out the window. Not many adjustments were done, mainly resizing and sharpening, exposure adjustment (D700 exposed brighter than in real life and I had to reduce it). The vignettes were not added by me, they are from the lens. I was surprised at how much vignetting there was at 28mm, but then again it only showed up when reducing the exposure. It would be easy to remove the vignette in photoshop, but I normally add vignettes anyway, so I left them.
All photos were taken handheld @ around ISO 6400, I didn’t bother with the tripod. Click on the images to see the larger size. Also see my album!
