Nature by Numbers from Cristobal Vila on Vimeo.

A SHORT MOVIE INSPIRED ON NUMBERS, GEOMETRY AND NATURE.
Go to www.etereaestudios.com if you are looking for more information: the theory behind the movie (Fibonacci, Golden Ratio, Delaunay, Voronoi), stills and screenshots showing the work in progress. There are lots of free training materials and 3D workshops, too

I personally had nothing to do with this, but thought it deserves some love.

Bullocks. Really… there is hardly any other way to describe it. I mean… I could go into detail with my thoughts on the matter… but what’s the point? Sony has shown that it is willing to play Judas with its customers, and that there really isn’t much to be done about it. You may be familiar with my reliance on Linux on my PS3. This has not changed. If Sony has decided that it isn’t worth it to have me as a customer, who am I to argue? No more Playstation Network for me… and what with developers shipping buggy games that require downloadable patches… it looks like that means I won’t be buying any more PS3 games. I have to say, I shouldn’t be surprised. This is, after all, the company that installed a virus on customer’s computers. Knowing that Sony has the audacity to both remove advertised features from paying customers and infect their computers with malware makes it an easy decision for me to stop supporting them. My new PSP breaking within three months of buying it due to, what appears to be shoddy laser construction, makes it an even easier decision. Are you willing to support this company?

On a more positive note, I was at a club on Friday night to help support my brother in law by taking photos while he DJ’ed. The manager of the club spotted me and had me take photos for her as well. You can see some of those in the selection of images below in addition to a few others that I have taken since the last blog post.

Turns out that while I was redesigning my site, I mixed up the url for my RSS feed. If you’ve attempted to subscribe, try again! The link on the sidebar has now been fixed and should be pointing here. Also, I took the above picture in October 2004 just outside the apartment building I used to live in.

Wow! It’s been over a month since my last update! It’s easy to go a long time without updating, especially when you’ve been keeping yourself busy. And busy I’ve been! As you know, I picked up a Canon 7d a while ago, but I haven’t really gotten around to doing any video with it; until now, that is! The video that you see above is my most recent play-thing: a time-lapse video of a melting ice cube. Pictures were taken every 15 seconds and there’s a little bit of color correction done in post. I look forward to more forays into this area in the future.

I’ve becoming increasingly interested in video recently, and I may just have to start coming up with some concepts for my own short film. Interestingly, though I work as a visual effects artist, I think I want to try something that has no vfx work in it. I’ve been watching more films recently too:

Avatar
Was an entertaining movie. Reminded me of the usual Dances With Wolves/Pocahontas/Last Samurai plot and carried it well I think. I would have seen it twice if I didn’t have to see it in 3D. I found the action scenes too difficult to focus on and really would have preferred to see it in 2D.

Alice in Wonderland
Knowing that Alice wasn’t real 3D, I didn’t even want to give the glasses a chance. Was sorely disappointed in the story, and looking back I remember very little aside from Depp’s Scottish accent. Why was the hatter Scottish?

The Karate Kid
I’m not sure if I have ever seen this one before! But I watched it recently and I have to say, this is part of what is inspiring me to get into doing some live action stuff right now. A film that was well done with very little budget.

The Karate Kid Part II
What can I say? Watched the first one and had to watch the second. I’ve got the third one waiting to be seen now too. I had seen the last 30 minutes of this one before… but nothing before that. I like films that aren’t driven by visual effects.

Seven Samurai
We had a bunch of people over to watch this during Kurasawa’s 100th birthday. It’s the first time I’ve seen one of his films, and I was definitely a fan. It’s a long film, but well done.

La Dolce Vita
Ok… so I’m not a fan of every film. I think this one fits into the wtf genre of films.

My first attempt at a time-lapse was actually a melting chocolate bunny. Of course silly old me accidentally melted the poor thing in the process of trying to set-up. Lessons learned. Of course, I have been busy with taking photos over the past month as well, and it’s only fair that I show off a few more of them too.

I’ve been trying to get back into doing music. Starz Animation has an event that they have called “Music Night” that they run every now and then. A bunch of employees get together, learn some music, and put on a show. This year the company decided to move off site and into a pub for music night, so if you happened to be at the Blue Moon Pub in Toronto on March 26th, you could have seen me doing a few songs with some of the gang there. If you weren’t so lucky to have found your way into said pub on said night however, here’s a video I got of one of the songs we did. That would be me in the white shirt with the set of lungs.

And finally, before your head explodes, I’m going to leave you with this: it is my birthday on May 5th. These are things I want:

Audio
Windscreen
Boss GT-10 Guitar Effects Processor

Video
Spiderbrace 2 Combo
EF-S 10-22mm 3.5-4.5 USM

I apologize for having ludicrously expensive hobbies. You could always check here for any other ideas.

I went out to run some errands this morning before I went to do some rock climbing, namely I went to the St. Lawrence Market hoping to pick up some bread and something else for dinner. I had been there on Friday and the fact that the market sells kangaroo, camel, and ostrich had my curiosity piqued. Little did I realize however that the St. Lawrence Market is not open on Sundays or Mondays. It wasn’t a complete waste of time though…

I’ve been carrying my camera around like a useful version of my appendix since I got it… (this behaviour was reinforced by my rage at having left my camera at home one day when I happened to see some Storm Troopers downtown) and was able to grab some photos of a film that is being done in the area near the market. It didn’t occur to me to find out what film (hey maybe it’s even a tv series…) it was they were shooting, but maybe some one will see these pics and be able to identify it. There’s also a couple of other random pictures here that I took today. LOOK AT THEM!

  
  
    
  

Ah that new web design smell: Only half as noxious as new car smell. I attempted to launch the new design on Thursday, but failed to test in Internet Explorer. Tisk tisk I might add. It did not bode well and there were all sorts of Errors that cropped up. Layout problems… crashing… you know… the typical. At any rate, I believe that it’s all sorted out now and working in the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox. There’s one more item stricken from the to-do list. As I’m now involved in a music night with work I’ve got some songs to be doing, so I’ll be trying to get them recorded in the near future.

Speaking of which, I’ve done gone and made things a little bit harder on myself for completing the items on that list. A little more than a week ago, I broke down and bought myself a PSP. A used one that came with God of War. I’ve also broken down futher and picked up Final Fantasy Tactics, a component cable, an 8gb memory stick, and a bunch of demos from the PSNetwork. I’ve only played about an hour and a half of Tactics so far (though had played the PS1 version more than once) and I gotta say: awesome. This is what the game should have been in the first place. The translation is great, and I’m really a fan of the style used in the cut scenes. Bravo Squenix. You did some good in this world. Expect me to swoon some more when I finish the current book series I’m involved in.

And for the sake not letting this one escape… here’s a picture I took last week. Better late than never, right?

For those of you who have been here before, welcome back! As you can see, the site has undergone a transformation.  It’s taken a couple of weeks of work to get everything up and running and the only thing to beware of at this point is that in many of my older blog posts, I have linked to other blog posts.  As a result of the redesign, these links may not all be working yet.  I’ll be going through and updating these links in the near future, but in the meantime, hopefully you like the new layout as much as I do and don’t have any difficulty navigating around!

Edit: Oh Dear… Internet Explorer really hates my CSS… I’ll have to try and fix that this weekend.

As you are aware, not only did I have plans to change the site design, but google pulled a fast one on me and also has decided to limit the ftp capabilities of blogger.

I’ll be switching the site tomorrow night, so here’s some short head’s up for those of you who subscribe through RSS… things are a gunna be changing.

Catch ya on the flipside!

I’m being evicted from Blogger :*(

On the up side, this news came to me while I was already in the middle of re-designing my site… but this unfortunately means that I need to find another method for easily updating the blog portion of my site…

Does anyone have any suggestions for non-google operated blogging systems that can connect to custom webspaces through ftp?

I found my solution

Can’t stop listening to this at the moment.