The Edge

My TF2 painting is sooo close to finished, but I haven't worked on it for a week—just no motivation at the moment.  Been getting critiques from friends.

As for Shake stuff that my two recent pieces have come from, I've slacked on that as well... when I was working till 5am on it for a week a while there...  It's become pretty cumbersome, waiting 15 seconds for a single frame to render can kill the creative spirit.

Been doing an encoding job for my partner in crime Jesse- he told me it'd be 2-3 hours of footage, turns out it was closer to 11.

that's 1080p30, 11 hours of it, 240GB of H.264 off the Canon 7D.  Encoding it to Apple ProRes 422 for a final weight around 900GB... it's taking a while and I can barely do anything while Compressor is running full tilt.

On Monday I'm going Stargazing with a group of friends, I just cleaned all the lenses in my huge telescope and things are looking awesome- looked at Saturn, Mars and the Orion Nebula last night.  Amazing.  Today went 30 miles away from my town to scout a field to take the group to- it's perfect.  Unfortunately on the way back I slammed into a mud puddle- nothing out of the norm but it must have gotten some electronics wet or something, because I've lost a TON of power in my car.  Hope it's up to 100% after drying in the morning but if not... I hope it's a simple fix.

Also I've been going back to my old high school to the Art department, this last Friday I asked the top 3 levels of Art what they wanted to learn from me, the digital guy (the teacher has a traditional background).  Going to be teaching RGB vs. HSV, Digital Painting (specifically a lot of kids want to learn concept art), Video Editing and maybe a little Flash animation.  I gave them a tutorial on using gradient maps to get a good start on accurate skin tones.  Not getting paid (AZ public schools have zero money) but hey, maybe some kids will want to be tutored.  Found out some of the things I said on RGB and the skin gradient tutorial were going over some people's heads, I'll be spending their Spring Break making tutorials in Shake and Photoshop- hopefully Shake will be so confusing they'll focus on the imagery and not the process of things.

Exit Question: should I link them to my DA page?  They already know my website URL...

(wow longer journal than I thought)