A Tease of Things to Come

I finished this off half a month ago, but I have been so busy since that I haven't had a chance to post it.

This is the first piece of the puzzle for the ever elusive second season of Cheap Toys Review. I have been hard at work filming and want to get a few episodes under my belt before putting them online. Unlike the three episode "first season" that I made previously, where I pretty much jammed an assortment of footage together, this season is set to be much more ambitious for me.

I want it to be consistently good throughout and I'm just going to be working on it until i'm happy with it. I'll also hopefully have some help when it comes to filming outdoor segments and pieces where I need some action to be done.

I'll do a video soon with a preview of things to come.

The Winds Of Change

You can probably see that the blog has changed a little bit, taking away most of the focus from the Doctor Who styled theme I had going. It now has a more generic feeling to it, to give more emphasis on the fact that the Doctor Who series i've been working on isn't the only thing that I make.

And now, take a look at the new logo for Film Australis... which isn't anything too flashy, even though in motion it's shining and flashing and doing things of that nature.

So there you go. And then, let's take a look at the quasi-logo in use in a single frame from the new intro bumper which will appear in front of all of my film projects.

Of course, to get the best look at that possible, click on it and take a look at it at full size. Pretty happy with how it turned out. It is a vast improvement on the idea I had back in January.

Aside from that, I'm working on something at the moment, which I hope to have done once I have a location scouted. That is going to be the tricky part, as I need to get a bit of time during the day when I'm not sleeping after recovering from work.

WoooOOOooooOOOOooOOoo

I have been working on the Doctor Who series again recently, still plugging away at writing scripts and doing special effects and so forth whilst in between working. Most recently, I have been working on fixing up a version of the TARDIS that I used for the title sequences I previously made.

The reason for this is that not only am I making it look better for the final title sequence, but it will also be used within the series itself instead of one of the stock standard TARDIS's you can find online to use within "The Movies". So that is exciting.

Whilst i'm doing that, take a gander at this little image I whipped up. Note that the textures are still being worked on, so they aren't the exact colour that i'm after yet. I'm also working on making them pretty large textures so that the quality will be excellent.

Enjoy.

Diner of the Strange

Another episode of Brad Bradson! This one goes a little bit longer, with a large segment of dialogue. I think this is aiming at a little bit more of a different audience than the other two episodes, as this one uses a few tropes from sci-fi for this.

It somewhat reminds me of an episode of Stargate SG-1 which took place largely in a diner. But for this, I threw in an alternate universe Brad, hence the reason why the guy has a goatee. You cannot be from an alternate universe without having a goatee.

Another Brad Bradson!

To make up for not doing much recently, I ended up doing another episode of Brad Bradson.

Yes. These things are going to get weird.

Brad Bradson!

Haven't done much work on anything recently, as I have been going through a lot of personal issues. Sorry about that, but it seems like personal issues hit me constantly throughout the years and it stops my productivity completely for months on end.

However, I just worked on a little short animation once again using The Movies, and have just uploaded it to Youtube. It's called The Adventures of Brad Bradson, which is based upon a character I created many years ago for my first ever adventure game. The whole thing came about because I was just showing a classmate in my web design class how easy it was to make something using AGS.

I never really meant to release it, but I put it up for the hell of it and it became a minor underground hit for users of AGS. Those who got the whole concept that it was a pitiful joke liked it, and I soon worked on other games with some of the same stupid sort of humour.

Anyway, here it is... the first episode of The Adventures of Brad Bradson.

If you would like to check out the game, Brad Bradson I: Key Quest!, feel free to download it and enjoy it. I had also begun work on a sequel which was much more ambitious, but a hard drive failure caused me to lose much of the game and only some of the artwork and materials still exist. You can however download a copy of the demo which was released in 2005.

Aurora Australis

Since I took the name Film Australis, I have tried to come up with a decent enough logo for it's bumper at the beginning and sometimes the end of film projects. Nothing that I have done leaves me with a good enough first impression, and most are rather dull. I generally contribute this to using some form of object in the shape of Australia.

I always tend to go that route, forgetting that it is Film Australis, and not Film Australia. Instead of taking inspiration from the shape of the country, I should be focusing on the spectacle that is the southern lights... Aurora Australis.

It really needs to be worked on, on a PC.

Above is something I quickly came up with using Photoshop Touch on my Android tablet. I figure if I do something like this, and really flesh it out using Photoshop on my computer, then I can come up with something stunning.

Throw in some animation using After Effects to simulate the actual southern lights, and it should look excellent. Stay tuned to see how this one proceeds.

Showdown At The Blast Furnace

And here it is. Shot, edited and uploaded in under 24 hours on no budget whatsoever.

Enjoy.

Making of Showdown

At the moment, I am uploading a new piece of work that I shot yesterday. The video is still uploading to Youtube and is also being processed at the same time... for a change. I got inspiration from playing with the kids yesterday with some toy guns, and ended up going around to some local ruins of an old iron furnace.

We shot some quick shots with the whole western shootout angle, getting my dad to take a hold of the camera when I needed to be on the screen. Once we were done shooting, which was no easy feat, as the kids started getting bored by the end and were generally unresponsive to any direction (no wonder they say not to work with kids), we headed home where I began editing the footage together.

Next, I imported the footage into Adobe After Effects and got to work on the look of the footage. The comparisons between the original shots edited, and the final shots are below. You can tell the difference almost immediately.

The kids had fun, and so did I. I showed them this morning when they woke up and they loved it. I hope that others do as well. The video should be uploaded soon, and when it's done, I'll add it here to the site.

Green Screen

For quite a while now, I've been trying to get a hold of materials that I can use to create a green screen. Needless to say that this has been utterly unsuccessful.

The embodiment of evil, stuck inside
the hideous world of the 70's!

In what was some dumb luck, I stumbled across a few rolls of green wrapping paper which aren't quite the colour I was after, but will do. I went and put the stuff up on the wall in the spare room at my parents which currently only houses toys for the kids and a mattress I sleep on when I crash there.

I stuck it on the wall using some Blu-tac and it is okay.

To the right is a quick test I did with two of my children. I got them to stand in front of the screen whilst I quickly filmed them doing something. Anything.

The test did not have proper lighting, and was done with an incredibly poor camera. It had a lot of grain, and the resolution was at 720x480, so I didn't really have a lot to go with.

The two problems that I have at the moment are the fact that I do not have proper lighting and the fact that if I get some proper lighting, it might cause the paper to reflect it.

This would be bad, as it would defeat the purpose of having a green screen to shoot in front of.

In the next few days, I will be using a much better camera to film in front of it, and see how well it turns out. Hopefully I have solved my green screen problem, and this will do for a cheap method until such time that I can buy a proper kit.

Not bad for $8 worth of wrapping paper, and $2 worth of Blu-tac.

About Time... Travel

It has been a while since my last update on the Doctor Who series, and the main reason for that is that I haven't been able to do anymore work on the series apart from some writing. This is because I had not been able to use The Movies due to some sets going missing from my save game.

It seems this was due to the unlocking.ini file being in the wrong place. Odd, because it was in the place I had always had it and the day before the problem started, I had been working with the sets that went missing.

During this time, I have been working on scripts for the first episode and the last episode. Now that I have The Movies working again, i'll be working on getting the first episode done which means I need to finish off the first script. After that, I will be doing some voice casting, which means posting on number of Doctor Who forums as well as some other places that I can get some professional style voicework done.

So, until that is done however, which could be a while still... hopefully sooner than later though... here is something to whet your appettite. The pre-credits sequence of the first episode of the series, 'Skinwalker'.