As you can see, by no means the finished article. My ideas for this piece have developed, so the final piece is unlikely to look much like this, but… Oh well. It gives an impression and shows the main effect I intend to use.

And that’s three posts in one day, after over a month of nothing, so I hope that’s slaked your thirst for… My blogs.

Clearly an animatic, all the images will be done a lot more nicely for the final piece, and there may even be real sound effects! But, there’s the gist of it.

I don’t know why, but my rough cut for VPP doesn’t seem to be uploading. Oh well.

Edit: 16th November: Just had feedback for this. 27/40, with the comment that my art work needs to be refined. I’m quite happy with that, after all, this is only the animatic. I fully intend to redo all the drawings as soon as my wrist heals fully*.

*I recently injured my wrist in a dishwashing incident.

Therefore, in a bid to break this vicious cycle, I’m writing this brief blog to let you all know what I’ve been up to, regarding uni work.

This first ‘semester’ contains 4 simultaneous modules, which will take me till mid January. The modules are Animation Concepts (ancon), Visual Communications (viscom), Video Post Production (VPP) and Interactive Media Design (IMD).

As of yet, I have had 3 deadlines, those being a logo design for viscom, an animatic (which is a basic prototype of the animation I’m making) for ancon, and a rough cut of my video for VPP.

My logo design is here. It’s a large file, at 1440 x 900 pixels, and it contains the logo and a nice background and the likes for it. Unfortunately, the bevel effect I used ruined the thumb in the logo, and I didn’t notice until after I’d submitted it. Oh well.

I’ll put the animatic and the rough cut up as soon as YouTube lets them through.

And, well, that’s all. Hopefully I’ll be blogging more from now on though. Now I’ve broken that nasty, nasty cycle.

A year ago, last September, unbeknownst to me, Santander, the Spanish Banking Giant, went to purchase Bradford & Bingley. Being somewhat uninterested in the news, this information completely passed me by until some point around July, I think, when I went in to my local Bradford & Bingley branch to make a withdrawal. Whilst I was there the nice lady behind the counter informed of the change, and all the wonderful benefits that I could hope to see coming my way. She gave me a new bank book, which I use to withdraw money as I haven’t gotten a debit card yet, she gave me the money I’d intended to withdraw, and she sent me on my merry way.

What I didn’t realise was that as well as the name and bank book being changed, my sort and account codes had also been changed. No big deal, you’d think, but let us consider 3 or 4 months earlier, when I’d applied for my student finance. Skip back to the present, or, well, yesterday. I’d enrolled a few days previously, and had been told I could expect to see my loan come through this Friday if all went well. So it’s Friday, and I walk into my Bradford & Bingley (they’ve yet to officially change the name), and I ask the nice lady (a different nice lady) if any money has been deposited in my account. It hasn’t. Having exchanged pleasantries, I tell the nice lady that it’s just my student loan, so no worries, it’ll probably be through on Monday. She’s the one who tells me about the sort and account codes, and how my money might be there on Monday, but if it’s not I ought to phone the loan people and tell them of the change.

Phone the loan people. Yeah… Unfortunately, I recently broke my phone. It had been playing up for most of the time I’ve had it (almost a year), but the final straw was a seemingly small disagreement we’d had. See, I was under the impression that when you’ve got full signal, you should be able to send a text. My phone disagreed, so I introduced it to a wall. To cut a long story short, I need a new phone… Well, I already needed a new phone… This has just forced me to act more swiftly. Now I come to the main problem. To get a new phone, I need my loan. To get my loan, I may need a phone. Bit of a catch 22.

So for now, all I can do is hope my loan makes its way into my account. There’s a good chance it will, and if it does, then I’ll be set. If it doesn’t… Well. We’ll just have to see, wont we?

So now that I am back in education, re-enrolled all officially like, I thought that it would be most prudent to update yonder blog, as it is, first and foremost, about my university work.

“But Tom!” you cry, “Surely you’ve jumped the gun, because as you have only just started back at uni, you don’t actually have any work yet!”

Most astute, dearest reader, you are correct. This is merely a prologue, to warm you up for the word-winding to come over this year. Hopefully your appetite has been whetted, and consequently, I will leave you now, wanting more, as all good story tellers should.

All that’s left for me to say is welcome to my second year of Multimedia Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University. I hope you enjoy reading about it as much as I intend to enjoy living it.

‘Loyal to the death’ I quite like, but I don’t think it’s very relevant to anything beyond loyalty. ‘The same as from the beginning’ sounds pretty useless to me. So what? It’s the same as it was when you started? You’ve not done much then. The phrase, “it was like that when I got here” springs to mind. ‘Deeds not words’ sounds better to me. Reminds me of a comic book I have somewhere, a copy of The Amazing Spider-Man in which Ezekiel, a man who is trying to steal Pete’s powers via some bizarre South-American ritual, is thwarted by Pete, and goes on to say that it’s better this way, because all his life he’s been saying, “when I have these powers I’ll fight crime,” “when I have these powers I’ll right wrongs,” all that kind of thing, but Pete has actually been fighting crime and righting wrongs and the likes. Basically, Ezekiel’s all talk, and that’s no good. It’s deeds, not words, which makes the man a hero. Virtute non verbis.

So I google ‘virtute non verbis’, which leads me to this blog, where the author writes,

Well, now it would seem the motto, virtute non verbis, doesn’t mean ‘deeds not words’ at all. It does, in fact, mean ‘virtue or strength, not words’. Not quite as catchy, is it? I suppose if two different websites can have contrary opinions of the translation of ‘virtute’, then maybe a third website should be found. A free online latin to english translator translated it to “valor not he who was born of the word”. I suppose, when you cut out all the crap, that just reads as ‘valour, not words’, which is starting to sound a bit more like it.

Either way you look at it, ‘virtute non verbis’ does seem to be one of the accepted mottoes of the family Robinson. Now have a doodle, based on the old Coat of Arms

First thing that I like today is last.fm. I’d heard of this many times before, even been on it a few times, but never signed up. Anyway, it came up in conversation with Ste. We’d started on about how facebook is, ultimately, all profile and no content. No one puts any decent stuff up there… Maybe a few lines of misspelled autobiographical information, and more pictures of themselves being needlessly drunk or carrying out mundane tasks than anyone really needs. I’d brought up that at least MySpace had had its music, evolving, in a way, from a social networking site to a giant music forum where bands and their fans could really connect. Ste mentioned that if we were going to be talking about music content on a website, then last.fm was where all the happening dudes were.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, I wrote a recent blog post on icons, and showed a set of icons which I had downloaded for use on this blog until I create my own. In the set of icons was one for last.fm, so it was already in the back of my mind when Ste mentioned it. Being thoroughly intrigued I signed up for an account and, with a bit of guidance from Ste, was soon compiling a library of my favourite artists, which I can now play as a constant stream of music. It really is rather wonderful. If I’m ever in the mood for a change I can open a ‘recommended’ playlist which will play tracks by musicians who are recommended to me based on what I already listen to. I can also tag songs on there, which I’m sure comes with it’s own myriad of advantages, or even create a playlist of songs which, I assume (I haven’t tried it yet) will just play through as and when I desire. So far, I’m finding it much to my liking. last.fm, my profile.

This is getting rather lengthy, so I’ll keep the next two items short and sweet. The second item on my list of things that I like is the upcoming Google Wave. Not yet released, they have a video of a presentation of it which can be found here. Despairing of MSN, as I am, I’m really looking forward to this latest piece by Google. Wave is to e-mail what Chrome is to a web browser; a complete rethink of something old and worn out for an age where the internet has infused our day to day lives. We have the technology to do remarkable things these days, and I think Wave will be an invaluable tool in the future. Think instant messaging, e-mail and wiki all rolled into one. Just watch the video.

Finally, let’s go offline. Shock, horror, I hear you protest. Well, shut up. I read books, and the last trilogy I read was a good one. The Black Magician trilogy by Trudi Canavan, that is. Read about it on wikipedia, here. If you like fantasy and magic and all that kind of stuff, as I do, give it a read.

That’s enough for today, I fear. Look out for more things that I like, coming SOON!

The first is Pon & Zi, who are a pair of lovable little doodlings that go around loving each other and having people go ‘aww’ over them. They are the creation of Jeff Thomas, and they live here. I discovered Pon & Zi after seeing one of their pictures, along with an URL, floating past in a YouTube video.

The second thing I want to share with you today, is the doodlings of some Canadian girl who seems to be called Mei. They’re of a similar style to Pon & Zi, although they’re not really. You’ll see what I mean when you’ve perused both galleries. It’s more a case that they’re reminiscent of each other. Mei’s work can be found here. I found her stuff whilst perusing comments of another friends work on livejournal.

I thought I’d share those with you, since I liked them, and this is my blog for sharing things that I like on.

Currently, the icons I am using were designed by Janko and can be found here and here. On this blog, they’re currently on the ‘about’ page, but you can expect them to move about a bit as I play around with how I make my blog work.

That’s all I really wanted to say, so I’ll leave it at that. Thanks, Janko!

“Due to the lack of security that it affords, Javascript is disabled on wp.com blogs… that means that wp.com will strip the javascript as unsafe content and you won’t be able to use the service. Sorry!” – Collin

Well, Collin, who I am holding accountable for no reason other than so I have somewhere to aim my annoyance, “Sorry!” isn’t good enough. I made a Pipe on Yahoo! which ties in my friends blogs RSS’s into one stream (that lives here), but when I followed the instructions to post it on a WordPress blog, it came up with javascript. So I’m annoyed at Yahoo! as well. Why say you can embed your services on a WordPress blog when you can’t? Maybe they can embed it on a wordpress.org blog, but if that’s so, they should really specify.

It’s not even like I particularly need it there… I just wanted it. A nice little feed of all my friends blogs under the pretty links that I have for visiting them. But no, I couldn’t even have that.

In other, better news, I have successfully passed my first year of uni. How exciting. We presented our final project to Ben, Brian, Darren and Mike, who seemed to enjoy it. I think the general consensus was that the quality was there, but a bit more of the old quantity would be nice. Fair enough, considering we hadn’t done as much as we’d planned to anyway. The League of Extraordinary Tutors should be online as soon as we get round to deciding on an URL. We don’t want anything League related since we’ll be using it for other things as well. We’ve also decided that we’ll carry it on indefinitely, probably at least until we complete one main story arc, and we’ll be swopping jobs around as well, so we can all have a go at the skills. Anyway, look forward to that coming soon.

That’s all I have to report right now. So, until next time… Try to stay alive, you know?