I am still doing things, which can be seen trickling slowly into WIPUP, but one of the more interesting ones that warrants a blog post was a short film-making competition I took part in a week ago. First off, I know nothing about filmmaking. 3D animation a little perhaps, but not filmmaking. So I initially went it just to have some fun. However walking away with first prize was definitely not what I had expected. Here was the entry after several hours of filming and splicing the video clips together.

Enjoy!

P.S. Yes, of course, Blender was used as the VSE.

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Secondly, I’ve been learning a little bit more about photography, and so here’s a little preview of one of my photos. I decided to burn-in the Gentoo logo on the bottom right so that it serves as a nicely patriotic wallpaper. It’s a vague enough shape to be mistaken for part of the picture, but recognisable enough to be Gentoo (I don’t like in-your-face logos). You can download a high res version here. Here’s a snapshot for the lazy. Perhaps other Gentoo users might appreciate another wallpaper!

Finally, I’ve purchased myself a basic VPS plan from JohnCompanies – of whom is the parent company of a very commendable company called rsync.net, of whom I’m still very happy with. Although not as cheap (as in, cheap + high quality reviews) as alternatives such as Linode (who offers double the resources at the same price), I went on a gamble that my great technical support experience will transfer over into a similar great experience.

Unfortunately, JohnCompanies does not offer Gentoo on their VPSes, only on their dedicated server packages. After some quick debate, I went for Debian. I shall proceed to migrate a few of my sites to this new server as well as a few of my existing hacked-together serverside toys. If you experience any downtime or shoddiness with any of my sites (blog + email included), it’s probably just due to the migration.

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It’s almost the deadline for the competition and we definitely can’t finish this on time, but apparently it doesn’t have to be finished – so I’m hoping the potential is what’ll give it support. This is just the first stage – creating the website, the next is to connect it to the Open Collaboration Services API, and start making fancy things like Plasmoids and plugins.

If you have no idea what it’s about, go check it out, then visit the site, and vote for it if you like what you see!

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The teachers at my school have learned that I know animation, so they’ve taken to shoving every presentation they need at me. This one, being a presentation on a poetry competition (seriously, all I can say is “this is the deadline, these are the themes, get working now”) has sparked off a rebellious nerve in my body, causing some unwarranted video of flying penguins to find its way into the choreography, as well as an opportunity to rickroll my whole school!

Anyways, here is the video:

Poetry Anthology Competition from Dion Moult on Vimeo.

Tools used were Blender and Macromedia Flash. Flash was used for the 2D animation, then exported into Blender. Blender was used for the 3D animation, compositing, and the final video sequencing. A tad bit of Audacity was used as well for sound equalizing and syncing, but that didn’t take up a huge role. Total time taken to produce was approximately 10 hours (including rendering time). Oh, and the stand-up poet clip at the end was compulsory to include, and not part of my doing at all.

And yes, I love the fact that I got to rickroll the entire school.

Other credits go to Florentyna Leow, who gave me the quotes and got the videos of penguins and Rick Astley for me.

Oh, and here’s the link to the Vimeo webpage if you’ve got something against me embedding the video in my blog post. The Vimeo page has a link to download the original 221MB mpg file.

Promise a back-to-techy stuff article soon.

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