Monday, April 14, 2008

Controlling Our Food

"The French documentary, called “The world according to Monsanto” and directed by independent filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin, paints a grim picture of a company with a long track record of environmental crimes and health scandals."

This is a long documentary, but well worth the time spent watching it. In general, genetically modified crops are harmful to the environment as it is, but imposing them along with their accompanying poison "Roundup" on the whole world can have catastrophic and even cataclysmic consequences. These people (giant corporations have the same status as individual people without the same responsibilities as people have, thus cannot be prosecuted nor punished when they break the law or commit mass slaughters and destructions) must at all costs be stopped.
























Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Torusphere I

This is my second Bryce 5 3D animation. It took a lot of work and two sleepless nights... Creating the animation to get the results I had visualized took a few hours, rendering the one-minute animation to video took my computer sixteen hours... Editing it, finding the right music, fitting the video to the music and making it (more or less) synchronized with the music, then rendering it into a format that doesn't distort it took a whole day and half the night. More than 48 hours of almost non-stop work! I really need a new computer, a supercomputer (64 bits processor is my dream) with a gigantic amount of storage space, so that I don't have to wait for sixteen hours just to render a minute's worth of simple animation - each frame took a bit less than a minute to render, but some of my pictures which I would love to animate take much longer to render, and there are 30 frames per second, so if I were to make some of the animations I have in mind, it would take my computer over a week to render them to video, if not longer... Unfortunately, even a new and ordinary computer that is more powerful than my old machine is beyond my very modest income, especially as we now are two living on it.

Ah well, I will have to continue being patient and terribly frustrated (while my computer slaves away to render my animations to video, I can't use it for anything else, so I cannot continue creating all those pictures and animations which I have in mind, nor can I connect to the web), and the limitations of my old computer allow me to make only very short and very simple animations. It is always very painful for an artist not to have access to the materials he or she needs to fully express himself or herself, to fully allow his or her talent to blossom and skills to grow. But enough of my sob-story, I hope you enjoy my little beginner's creation! :)

The music is "Relax Your Soul A Second" by Epping/Reiter, from http://www.apmmusic.com
























Requires DivX to be installed - you can get it free from here: http://tinyurl.com/2zuxrs

While you are playing the video, the rest of your monitor screen might go dark or even black. This is normal, it is a feature of DivX to make viewing of videos more pleasant without anything else on your monitor to distract the eye.

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

My first 3D animation!

Until I watched Freetutorials' video on Bryce animation on March 28 and 29 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WYg1swDORI - I had been completely intimidated by the animation functions in Bryce - and reading user's manuals makes my mind go completely blank... So, after watching that video carfully several times, I gave it a go, and here is the result. I looped it several times to make it fit the length of the music file.
Royalty-free music: "Guitar Musette" by Angelo Debarre, licenced from APM music - http://www.apmmusic.com
























Requires DivX to be installed - you can get it free from here: http://tinyurl.com/2zuxrs

While you are playing the video, the rest of your monitor screen might go dark or even black. This is normal, it is a feature of DivX to make viewing of videos more pleasant without anything else on your monitor to distract the eye.