Alexander Kucera

I’m actually in the middle of reading Mike Montero’s Design is a Job—which is recommended reading as well, by the way—but I couldn’t pass this one without at least peeking in. And it didn’t stay at peeking. I read through the whole book in one sitting. It reads very well, is entertaining and maybe, just maybe, it’ll motivate me to start writing more again. Which is the goal of this whole new blog thing after all.

You. Yes, you, the one person that has visited this site in the last year. You will likely not have noticed, but this site is once again looking 100% different again. I got bit by the CSS bug again a couple of weeks ago, got myself some new books on web design and content strategy and a new writing app and here we are. The new look is the barest minimum of chrome.

In the spirit of app recommendation lists that keep popping up everywhere I decided to make my own. I do have a lot of iOS apps. In fact, I went a little overboard in 2012 and the first half of 2013. So much so that after I added up the amount of money I spent on app purchases, I went on a very strict app feast for the rest of 2013.

Dear Spinning Beachball readers, the few of you that are still reading this RSS feed. I’m about to shut down the site for good. In fact, the last few entries you have been reading came from my personal blog. If you like to keep reading my highly irregular output, I advise you to subscribe to my RSS feed there. Also, since I’m shutting that site down, the URL http://thespinningbeachball.com/ is available for immediate sale.

Inspired by Federico Viticci’s Open Tabs Editorial workflow, I created this little workflow to quickly capture and act on story ideas for blog posts or other text documents. It all starts in Drafts, which I can fire up wherever I go from my iPhone. I enter an idea, or a short title or a link with a comment. This then gets appended to a Markdown file on Dropbox called Story Ideas.

I’m reading Shawn Blanc’s wonderful book Delight is in the Details and this one chapter rings especially true with me. It’s about what I like to call the creative cringe, the feeling everyone of us gets when we see our work and are not satisfied with it or where we see all the little and not so little flaws that make us cringe. Shawn is quoting Ira Glass: „All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.

My friend (twitter: mattdleonard text: Matt Leonard) has been sorting through “The Art of” articles on fxguide and I thought I’d post his list of all the ones that have been written. He has printed them all out in the office, and so far they fill 3 ring binders. So in date order of publication: The Art of Digital Faces at ICT – Digital Emily to Digital Ira (November 2013) The State of Rendering (July 2013) The State of Rendering - Part 1 The State of Rendering - Part 2 The Art of Games Environments (June 2013) The Art of Games Environments - Part 1 - Rendering “Remember Me” The Art of Games Environments - Part 2 - Rain The Art of Games Environments - Part 3 - Making Wet Environments The Science of Spherical Harmonics at Weta Digital (April 2013) The Art of Stereo Conversion (May 2012) The Science of Fluid Sims - Real Flow (April 2012) The Art of Rendering (April 2012) The Art of Destruction (or Art of Blowing Crap Up) (December 2011) The Art of Roto (October 2011) The Science of Fluid Sims (September 2011) The Art of Digital Colour (August 2011) The Art of Digital 3D Stereo Films (March 2008) The Art of Wire Removal (October 2007) The Art of Optical Flow (February 2006) The Art of Matte Painting (December 2005) The Art of Matte Painting - Part 1 - Painting it BIG The Art of Matte Painting - Part 2 - The Tools The Art of Matte Painting - Part 3 - The Art The Art of Matte Painting - Part 4 - Future of Matte Painting The Art of Keying (November 2005) The Art of High Dynamic Range Images (August 2005) The Art of Tracking (August 2004) The Art of Tracking - Part 1 - History of Tracking The Art of Tracking - Part 2 - Tips and Apps Overview Subtitle: Collected Edition

Yes, I finally am blogging again. Only 6 months of silence this time. Not too shabby. Anyway, a major hindrance was that my blogging workflow wasn’t working quite right yet, which in turn was like an invisible wall that I was just too tired to climb each time I want to post something. Luckily, I have had the last two days to tinker with it and to figure it out.

I don’t have my own camera kit specifically for VFX yet. Usually when I am on set, I either rent or get equipment from the production that is hiring me. Now I am about to build my own camera kit and to stay halfway reasonable I want to stay around €6000, though I can go over that amount to get a better kit if need be. And it looks like I might have to.