Greyscale Gorilla & C4 Cafe

Nick Campbell

A blog worthy of mention, Greyscale Gorilla This one covers all my favourite subjects on Post Production, namely After Effects, Cinema 4d, Photoshop and others. Some great video tutorials (video tutorials are always the best) and a competition called the 5 Second Project which is very entertaining, check out the superb entries, inspiring stuff. All this done by a fella called Nick Campbell (he is the gorilla) from Chicago, USA. Nice one Nick!

As I explore the demo of Cinema 4d even more, I have subscribed to c4dcafe.com – who have some excellent tutorials too.  However it took me 3 attempts to get my subscription accepted, (you can’t view anything until you have subscribed which is annoying) and once you’ve completed their rather interrogative questionnaire, they hint heavily for donations. I hope some day they take a leaf out of other sites more accessible walk-in setups and deal with their funding issues by advertising or selling their own products, such as my favourite site Video Copilot or indeed Greyscale Gorilla! Another brownie point for them!

Draft complete

Well, the Twilight script has now completed it’s first draft and is being re-written and tweaked as we speak. Am now exploring the feasibility of various things I would like to achieve in the film and that may take several months. I feel it is vital to tackle however – it will determine not only what I can achieve in the film but may very well determine the whole look and feel of the film.

My plans are to take the computer graphics a step further and make my set from them. It is after all much cheaper than building a set, and you can be more adventurous too as you’re not limited to space and budget. My first efforts in that direction this past fortnight has been drawing the local pub where some of the films scenes take place.

And here is the first draft…no doubt it’ll change a lot down the line.

You can see already that the whole thing isn’t going to look naturalistic, there is inevitably a drawn theme to it. But that’s no bad thing. My thoughts are for doing a similar thing to the characters.

The difficulty will be getting the actors inserted into the set. Will post my tests on this blog later no doubt.  Also, graphics like this takes a while to render (so have had to order more RAM – which may take 2 months to arrive, no thanks to Apple) And there is so much more I have to learn about rendering with decent light (Global Illumination, Caustics and Ambient Occlusion to name just a few) Oh, so much to do! I’m in Geek heaven again!

In the meantime, if anyone wants to give me money to buy a good camera (£700-£1,400) or some decent lighting lamps (£300) feel free. Cos I’m skint! (More on my search for those later in this blog too)