Telecaster Project

What can I say? I've been busy, so very, very busy but mostly working on things I'm not allowed to discuss hence the radio silence. Both of those projects are still ongoing so I will be infrequent here. This is something I can share though. To give myself something to do, alongside the amp project, I obtained a non-working Fender Telecaster off eBay for a very good price. I had some parts already looking for a home and so, having bought the remaining bits I needed, I began the process of dismantling the guitar, fixing what was broken, upgrading components and then rebuilding the whole thing from the smallest screw and solder joint, upwards. I've never dismantled and rebuilt a guitar this much before and it was quite a learning experience but I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Guitar Gets a New Home

It's been another work dominated week. I'm heading toward my deadline now and, as tends to be the case, I'm now doing 7 day weeks to get it all done. As I mentioned last time, I went up to my mother's last Friday night and cleared out all of my old stuff that she'd been storing as she's moving to a smaller house next month. One of the very few things I brought back was the second guitar I ever owned. I bought it nearly twenty years ago and as I graduated onto better instruments a few years later it has sat in its case at my mum's for about sixteen years. My plan was to bring it back, fettle it up into playing order again and give it to someone who was wanting to learn the guitar.

When I actually got the case open I found that two of the strings were missing, not a problem as I was planning to swap them all anyway, but it made me wonder what I'd been doing to the poor thing all those years ago. It was also fairly filthy, had creaky machine heads and trem plus when I plugged it in to see if it still functioned electrically the horrid hum and buzzing told me something was wrong somewhere. When I had got the remaining strings off and opened up the guitar the source of the hum became clear: my dreadful soldering at age 15. I had feared this might be the case and so I dutifully went through the guitars' innards and resoldered any of the dodgy connections afresh. I am still not good at soldering but I'm a damn sight better than I was back then clearly. After that I cleaned up the front, oiled all the mechanical parts and restrung the beast. This is how it looked after some surgery, a clean and a fresh set of strings:

Once the strings were on I fixed the intonation which was so far off I wondered how I'd managed to think anything I'd played back then was in tune and then plugged it back in. This time all was good. It's actually a really decent guitar. I had a play for a few minutes as a last goodbye and then put in into a gig bag ready to take into work.

Once it was safely stored in the studio I sent a message to the company news group to the effect that I had a guitar to give away and wanted to give it to someone who'd always wanted to play but never had - I wasn't going to give it to someone who already had an instrument. I got twelve responses and randomly picked the name of the receptionist. I was a bit surprised she'd asked to go into the draw as she didn't strike me as the guitar type. When I gave it to her she explained that she had two sons who desperately wanted a guitar and that made me feel very good. It had done me proud in my early teenage years and now it was going to get the chance to do the same again.

Long live rock and roll.

Fiat Lux

Holy crap but I've been busy. It's not all been work work work, but even the fun bits eat up time. The main things occupying my time are getting our shots ready for a temp screening next week (just as well we don't celebrate Thanksgiving as we're going need all the time we can get) and also preparing two talks I'm giving one in a week or so to a big industry shindig in London and I'm delivering another one this Friday at a university whose computer graphics course is regarded by many as the best in the UK. I'm much more excited about the latter as I get more of a sense of fulfillment talking to students than I do talking to industry people since the former might be appreciative of some inside knowledge.

I spent all Sunday preparing notes and slides for the lecture, which wasn't my intention. I'd planned to spend about 4 hours putting it together but as these things tend to, time ran away with me and I finished at about midnight. The lecture I'm doing is on creative lighting in computer graphics, something which a lot of CG courses are none too good at. I'm lucky because I started out as a fine artist and went through all the training that comes with that. These days, it seems, students are encouraged to specialise much sooner and so they miss out on the broad brush strokes of visual learning and frankly I see that in their work. My plan is to give them 40 minutes potted art theory and history focusing on light and then colour and round it out with looking at a specific example. It was making the slides for the "specific example" that took the time.

The idea was to set up a scene and try and light it in a few ways to show what emotions and moods can be created with lights alone including some not so successful ideas and explanations about why they don't work. I decided to use a model of the goddess Athena I have and set her in an alcove as this makes the lighting challenge more difficult as you don't have much free freedom to place your lights as if she were freestanding. To complicate matters further, she's holding a spear which can cast nasty shadows reducing the freedom of light placement further.

Anyway here's how it would look if you lit it with just a camera flash mounted right on top of the camera:

Yuck.

And here are a few different takes on lighting her:

I'm pleased with the last one. I hope the students get what I'm trying to tell them. The talk's on Friday afternoon so I'm bolting out of work at 12, heading to the station, travelling for two hours, getting a cab to the college, delivering my talk, getting back in a cab, another two hours in a train and then back into work at about 7 if we have another conference call to L.A. And then I shall rest.

Digital Pinhole Camera

Sisoftroos very kindly got me a cardboard pinhole camera kit for my birthday. I am putting a roll of aged 35mm colour film through it now and I shall be intrigued to see what, if anything, comes out from it. But this set me thinking about making a digital pinhole camera. At first I was over-complicating the issue by planning to make a pinhole camera that was focused onto a ground glass and then using a macro lens on the digicam to take a photo of the image projected onto the ground glass. This is, of course, way too fussy. A quick Google search showed a far more sensible approach:

1. Take a body cap for your type of camera.
2. Punch a hole in the centre of it.
3. Using a needle, make a tiny hole in a piece of adhesive aluminium foil.
4. Stick that over the hole in the body cap.
5. Put the body cap onto the camera and...
   
6. Voilà, you have a made a pinhole camera.

Here's what I've ended up with at the moment:

And this is from my first test at taking a photo with it:

I'm really quite pleased. It's very soft; I think a slightly smaller, more carefully punched hole ,will produce better results but it's not bad. The pleasing pin-hole quality of infinite depth of field is there and these days with Photoshop and such we can add some contrast into the otherwise rather flat images the pinhole produces. I'll try and improve the quality of my pin hole and take some more photos over the coming weeks. I might even try and shoot some time-lapse video.

More Processing Doodles

Here are three new algorithmically generated pictures using code I wrote in Processing. I'm quite fond of them, they seem to have a slightly ethereal Rothko quality.

Week two, the story so far...

It's been quite a relaxed second week of my holiday though I've been out and about a fair bit.

On Sunday I went to Lord's for my first cricket of the summer there. Two chums and I had tickets for the fourth day of the England vs New Zealand test match. There'd been a lot of rain interruptions on the first three days but though it remained bitterly cold when th sun went behind cloud it did at least not rain meaning we got a full day's play. The highlight for me was seeing the England captain, Michael Vaughan, score a very impressive century. He's always been one of my favourite batsmen, very elegant and stylish.

On Monday I did a little shopping and in the evening Tinseltroos joined me to have dinner with our chum Janusz. The Tall American had introduced me to a brilliant little retaurant in Jerusalem Passage called, somewhat unimaginitively, the "Passage Café". The food and cider is French, the staff I think are Belgian and the whole ensemble is cheapish and awesome. I bouillabaise to start and melt in the mouth tender duck for my main course. Being Belgian they do a mean line in waffles, crêpes and so on for pudding. All in all a very good night.

Yesterday my pal Baickin had leaving drinks as he's heading home to New Zealand for quote, "a while". I suspect he will return, he has every previous time he's gone home, but I think he needs a bit of time off and living is cheaper in Wellington than London. I shall miss him but as I say, he'll be back.

Today I've run an errand for Tinseltroos, read guitar magazines, played my guitar and generally taken it easy. I'm going to start cooking a veggie chilli for TInseltroos when she gets back from work and then I might begin the final stages of putting my book of photos together. I think I've narrowed the selection down to 38 that sit well together for me. There are pictures of which I am very fond that I've had to omit because they just didn't seem to sit right within the book as a whole, perhaps they can be made to work in some future selection. You can see a slide show of the current book here.

Tomorrow I will try to actually design the book. I'm expecting that to take longer and be more fraught than it should be, but perhaps that's just my natural cynicism coming to the fore. Maybe that's called "experience"?

Sketch Poly Mona Lisa

Sketch Poly Mona Lisa, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

I've been working on an arty programming project for a little while and this piece is one of the waypoints on the way to a greater goal of which I'll probably write more later. What's going on here is a demo of some code I've written to "sketch" any four sided shape in as natural a way as I can create an algorithm for. In this piece what happens is that I randomly generate a four sided polygon, randomly determine how fat the line should be, how scruffy and messy the penmanship and finally how finely spaced the lines should be. The code then selects a colour from an image that serves as a palette (in this case the Mona Lisa - hence the title) and then begins to sketch polygon after polygon until you tell it to stop. I let this run for about 15 minutes. I'm rather fond of it and I plan to make some "paintings" with this technique over the coming days.

Nose Goblins

As I still seem to be on the final lap of my stint on Hellboy I've started e-mailing friends I haven't seen for weeks or months for a catch up. For a few weeks I may actually get a social life back so now would be the time to see people. This would also be the time that the inevitable post-frantic-work cold hits me. I always get them as I wind down either as a show winds down or just after I've finished. I felt fine yesterday morning, which I spent in a car to Pinewood and then my usual waiting for an hour and a half in the canteen for the meeting to be called. I am beginning to know all the staff in there now, that's how much time I've spent there. I have at least now got into the habit of taking a notebook with me so I can do some work on my own little projects. By the time I got back to the studio at around 3-ish I knew something wasn't right and by 5 my nose was a torrent of snot which did not let up for the rest of the day. I fled work at 6 on the dot, bought fish and chips on my way home and watched the Roma vs Manchester United match on the TV as I curled up on the sofa shivering under a blanket. Mercifully there doesn't seem to be any head ache associated with this cold and I feel much better this morning so hopefully it's only a minor annoyance.

I've also started work on a photo book. The service I use to print my pictures online has started offering 5 inch square prints for about 5p a print. What I'm doing is getting a print of every photo that's a candidate and arranging them and then holding the stack together with a bulldog clip so I can look through it as if it were a book. This makes it easy to swap, remove and add photos as I go. Booda Baby, very kindly, not only said some very complimentary things about my pictures but also pointed me at a photo competition run by Blurb.com and a few others. This is quite fortuitous as I was probably going to go with Blurb to print my book when it was done anyway so if I have a set of photos I'm happy with by the entry closing date I'll probably enter it. What the hell. The current selection also exists as a set on my flickr account for anyone who might be interested. All subject to change/lameassedness/procrastination of course.

Now Listen All You People, Come Gather Round

It's been quite a hectic week so I'll break it down into a couple of posts. Monday was fairly uneventful but Tuesday was a day out of the office. Zounds!

A while back, when I was assured I'd be finished on Hellboy 2 by now, I agreed to do a talk about visual effects at a university up North. Even though I'm not actually yet done on Hellboy I was still determined to do the talk. There are a lot of industry people who were very nice to me when I was student and I feel I owe a debt and should give something back. I also like teaching when I get the chance.

I've done lectures before but I've been so busy for the last eighteen months to two years that I haven't visited anyone in a while. This meant that my talk needed completely re-writing to bring it up to the latest technology and put some more up to date films into it. Preparing this new talk was the main motivation for getting that new laptop when I did as I wanted to have a machine capable of playing the newer high-res video I wanted to show. I had spent several evenings running up to Monday night sorting material, producing slides to show and editing video to try and make as slick a fifty minute presentation as I could. I was quite pleased with this slide and the animation I did on it to introduce each element. I spent a whole evening with pieces of paper on the living room floor at home trying to design a flowchart where none of the lines crossed. It took a while but this is the result:



Tuesday morning came and I duly presented myself at St Pancras and took the train north. I went through the town where I latterly grew up, which is a dump, but the scenery improved after that and got properly lovely once we hit Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Train journeys when you are going there and back in a day and for something specific tend to take on a sense of stasis for me and so I sat staring out of the window for the whole journey once the countryside had become good, my mind pretty blank.

Upon my arrival I was snapped out of my reverie and whisked over the road from the station to the campus. I was given a whistle-stop tour, a brief moment to grab a sandwich and drink before I was ushered into the lecture theatre and set my laptop up, plugged it into the college's projector and got my trailers running for the students to have something to look at as we waited for the room to fill up. I got a pretty good crowd: all three years of their computer graphics degree, a few masters students and four members of staff. As we were five minutes late starting I had to take the talk at quite a pace and by the time I was done the whole fifty minutes had gone by in a blur. I get stage-fright when I perform "creatively" (music and such) but I have no nerves about giving speeches or talks. I just don't think I have much in the way of shame. Even so there is a largish dose of adrenaline that kicks in when I speak publicly and I was quite high by the time I was done.

After the talk a few students came to chat in the college coffee bar until it was time to put me back on a return train and I was just coming down off my natural high as we pulled out of the station. All in all a good day. The five and a half hours on trains went at a geologically slow pace but the three hours between getting off and getting back on the train went by in what seemed like a heart-beat. I got some good feedback from the talk and I now have up to date notes so with luck I'll get a few more invites to talk again soon.

To Boldy Go Where No Matrix Has Gone Before

I know this may not seem like much but I'm quite proud of it. There's still something funky going on with the perspective transform and the field of view calculation otherwise I'd be very proud of it. This wireframe cube you see above was rendered using some software I wrote in the Processing language. I have a long-term project I want to do once I've ironed out the wrinkles in my code but for now I'm quite pleased that it's drawing a cube, roughly where it's supposed to be. Although there is still much to do, even now you can define a camera position, a point for it to look at and some geometry and my little renderer will produce a perspective(ish) picture like you see above. I don't think it's too shabby for an afternoon and an evening's work. I've already learned a lot, my rudimentary trigonometry and matrix skills are hanging on by their finger nails but I know more than I did a week ago.