He's heating up!

Yesterday I had the privilige of watching my boss in action. He was on fire, I had never seen him like he was today. Usually we, me, him, and whoever else is in the meeting, yet today he had a mission. I am not sure if it is due to the size of the project and its complexity, with the deadline coming closer fast, yet I left the (long) meeting with a sense of awe with the powerful organising vision. The bar has been set high now on how to run the show and inspire your workers. It was magical, watching an artist create a masterpiece or watching a sunset over the ocean.

I was really impressed and am inspired that one day I will be able to do something like this on a project that I work on.

You never walk alone

It has taken 7 years to win at Anfield, 5 years in the Premier League, and me 3 attempts over 5 days to see Liverpool finally beat Manchester United. It was worth the wait to saviour the taste. I feel that this year is going to be different.

Concrete canvas

I got to watch what I think is a pretty cool documentary yesterday. It was called concrete canvas and it was about a street artist who specialised in 3d Chalk art. I have seen some of this in Melbourne before, yet nothing quite like in this show.

The show basically takes you through what the artist is thinking. It talks about the infamous Banksy and his art all over London, as well as some of the graffiti art that is under threat due to the Olympics. I was amazed at the creativity of the whole piece. I must admit when he showed me (or us the viewer) the wall and started talking about extending this here and that there I was like what? Yet after he started to put some of the sketches down between bouts of rain showers, I started to anticipate that something pretty cool was about to happen.

The art was pieced together slowly, and as time went on it was revealed what was going on, why certain things were being done. It also cut away to give the effect of time lapse. I searched on You Tube for the video and only came across this one (see below). Here are some photos off flickr and a web search that I was able to find to see the finished product.

You can view other works by Julian Beever here.

Angels and Demons

Today, the artwork for Google is based on the large Hadron Collider. Now I have no idea what this thing does yet it sounds impressive. I read in paper today that we should not be messing around with this thing anyway. After I read Angels and Demons, I found the name CERN everywhere and prior to that book, I had never even heard of CERN. Now I like my cocoon yet what these guys do is pretty out there stuff. What I can gather is that they are trying to create a universe under the Alps. I think this is probably not the best place for such a thing, yet I really am clueless about creating universes and such. I am reassured by Steven Hawking's comment that it is vital for the survival of humanity. I know we are in danger with global warming and the day after tomorrow world, yet that is quite far fetched from what I understood. I may have been a bit too quick there, I am already feeling a sense of doom falling on me, I just read that they are making Angels and Demons into a movie now.

GTArt

I am amazed still by the impact of the GTA series, it is everywhere. I was reloading my music to my computer and found in one of the folders this image. Clearly from GTA San Andreas, in one of the splash screens loading the game infact. Also, was reading about it in the newspaper. I feel it might be the star wars of the video game generation.

More GTA art this time from GTA San Andreas

The journey to the north

A while back I went to my home town. A road trip with a full car to help my friend settle into a new town. Being there really brought back memories, and unlike being in Melbourne, which is beautiful, cosmopolitan, and bustling, I really felt peaceful, a calmness that I hadn't felt since being in Long Xuyen.

Along the way I managed to shoot some photos and videos. On Sunday, I decided it was time to get cracking on one of my projects I had thought about for a while - Showing the world how different Australia is. And a journey from the bottom to the central eastern coast has a lot of variation. Unfortunately when we got to the mountains it was dark and raining so I didn't get any pictures of this variation in landscape. Just imagine mountains with rain forest and lots of steep winding roads.

This is my first decent project with the Premier Video editing software. I am pretty impressed with the way it turned out, yet couldn't find the Star Wars transitions, although some karaoke regulars might notice some of the karaoke transitions present. I wanted to do the Indiana Jones type maps where the map scrolls in the background over the foreground, yet I didn't have the patience to find out how to do it. I did a quick variation which I think does the job.

I opened the soundbooth program for the first time and found it a bit ordinary. I quickly reverted back to soundforge yet found that I forgot what i was looking to do and went back to the open soundbooth program. After a short look I found an icon which looked like what I wanted to do and by trial and error I got the basic results I was after. I have to say with all the functions in soundforge it was overwhelming, and soundforge still looks more versatile than soundbooth.

Also with this project I have worked out how to encode the final vidoes better and keep the quality a little higher than the first attempt at making a video. Well here it is a video diary of the journey north.

Enjoy!

Today's Google logo

Read all about agricultural technology in Australia here.