Filmmaking
HitFilm tutorial: Disrupted waveform
I made my first HitFilm tutorial for about 10 months! It was all based around an image I made for an article header over on the International Literature Showcase website. Hopefully I’ll find the time to do more stuff like this.
Professional
I’m leaving FXHOME: here’s why
After 14 years, I’m leaving FXHOME at the end of this month.
14 is not an insubstantial number of years. One of my colleagues was 10 years old when I started working there. Back then, the Internet (and thus, the world) was very different. No Facebook. No YouTube. Google was still just a search engine. The iPhone hadn’t been invented. George W Bush and Tony Blair were getting ready to carve up the world. Nobody had seen the battle for Helms Deep. Half Life 2 was still two years away, as was Steam.
Anyway.
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Filmmaking
Heads Up: Riffing on Iron Man
Something I don’t think I’ve blogged about is my recent work at FXHOME on a Marvel-inspired campaign called Heads Up, designed to launch the new HitFilm 4 Express product. I ended up writing and editing a ton of videos, which have already nabbed over 204,000 views. A truly mind-bending stat.
Here’s the main sketch that everything hangs off:
Filmmaking
Feeling the chill: summoning the trolls
A recent video I produced and presented for the HitFilm channel was all about editing gaming videos. Pretty simple but useful stuff, presented in a nicely relaxed manner. Given the channel has a fairly diverse viewership, I wanted to have a brief overview that established the culture of online gaming videos for anybody unfamiliar with the concept. Here’s the finished video:
When scripting the episode I had a moment of weakness and it’s been irritating me ever since. (more…)
Filmmaking
DIY spaceships in 2016
I made a new video for the HitFilm YouTube channel. Check it out:
Two things to note:
- I need a haircut.
- The spaceship shot I created for that tutorial is better than any of the effects in my favourite sci-fi shows of the 1990s. It’s getting towards being acceptable for a mid-2000s show, at least with a bit more work.
Writing
Creating the cover for A Day of Faces
Read A Day of Faces here. Read all the writing notes here. Since April this year I’ve been writing a science fiction serial called A Day of Faces, which I’ve been publishing over on Wattpad. You can read it for free. Much like a physical cover in a bookshop, the Read more…
Professional
Experiences of SXSW
I went to SXSW! This is exciting because it’s an event which has grown increasingly relevant and influential over the last decade, has spread into every corner of every news website I read, and this year…I was there.
FXHOME kindly flew me there and back, accompanied by my colleagues Kirstie, Josh and Andrea. In summary: Austin is wonderful. SXSW is weird and confused but mostly good. (more…)
Games
Molyneux, Kickstarter & why fixed funding is good
Gosh, John Walker’s interview with Peter Molyneux makes for hard reading. It’s resulted in the usual outraged reaction from those gamers who get terrified of reading anything which isn’t a simple graphics/gameplay/replayability review with a percentage score. And, yes, Walker’s interview pulls no punches and its opening gambit is especially on the nose – but it’s also an astonishing, fascinating interview which gets to the heart of an issue that everybody else has danced around for about 10 years. (more…)
Filmmaking
Kramer-style star
An occasional hobby is taking Andrew Kramer’s fantastic tutorials for After Effects and transposing them into HitFilm, to see how close I can get ’em. Most of the time it works out pretty damn well. So, his latest tutorial is a beautiful star close-up, and this is my own version, Read more…