Harry Pottan

Saturday Higlights - Lunch w/ Mom at one of my favourite restaurant- Noblehouse. I recommened the Honey Prawns. Its sounds like an odd combo but I guarantee u'll hit heaven & beyond w/ one bite. Mmmmmmm...Mmmmmmmmmm

Rest of the day was spent bored to death. No-one would come out & play w/ me :( Earlier that morning I decided I would not sit at the PC. I was sick through & through modelling a 50s style robot & almost killed myself trying to texture it the day before. So I thought I'd curl up w/ a book. I wanted something light. I picked up my sis's copy of 'Harry Potter & The Order of The Phoenix'. I didn't sleep that night. The book is like an eel, its plot keeps twisting & turning. The author sure knows how to write a soap opera for kids (& bigger kids like me). I noticed a pattern- the characters mostly interacted in 3s. No dialogues only trialogues. A says something, B says something else & C is too distracted. Later on it seems B was right, A agrees that B was right & C says "Shit! we r all wrong" & then they bark up another tree. This narrative mechanism doesn't make the book a bad one. Infact its a good old fashioned, entertaining yarn. I suggest u pick it up, however u'd be left in the dark abt certain goings on, so try laying ur hand on the 3rd & 4th books (FYI '...Phoenix' is the 5th installment).
At certain points in the book I had to shout 'oooooooooh, not that number'.

Home-Made Explosives & Shootings

Day 3: Finally finished a 2 second shooting cannon sequence. 15 drawings in all- the cannon cocks up, shoots a cannon ball (duh!), does a jump for a recoil & falls apart. This would have been a flash if I had used a Flash MX (PC program). But when it comes to pen & paper its like manufacturing a cannon. The scene showed the cannon centred & lenghtwise; it had a wheel too. The fuse burns out, the cannon cocks up in a staggering fashion & shoots wonderfully... Look Ma no hands! But the X-Factor that screwed this piece was the wheel. The wheel had to respond to the cocking cannon by squashing itself, this took a day to get right. I found that sqashing & skewing it corrected the problem. Next phase recoil. For the recoil I had to rely on my sense of timing, i.e, "BE ONE WITH THE CANNON" (echo effect). Got that part fantastically wrong. The cannon looked like it floated back along an arc after shooting. So I had to decrease the arc radius & VOILA!! cannon shoots & recoils!

A line test is a preliminary movie of the rough drawings, that comprises the animation. Line tests save a lot of time & pain when it comes to getting the desired actions right. Sometimes the actions look almost right but ur eye lingers on this one 'thing'. U play the footage at different speeds & still don't get a clue abt whats going wrong. This explains the 3 days for the 2 sec cannon blast.

Next comes the part that sucks. Clean up! Its a painstaking process of neatly tracing out the rough drawings for the final shoot. We had this instructor, Sudeep. He claimed that he sucked at clean-up & hired people to do it for him. In his words " For this u need patience. Its a womans' job".

Concentration is tantamount. Tomorrow, must remember to kick Vikas's ass before beginning drawings. He happens to be the local hyperactive pest. Speaking of kicks, have u noticed that Charlie Chaplin movies had awesome kicks. The kicks where normal but the affect was devastating on the big brute's posterior. What actually happened was this, the actors acted really well, they had to exagerate actions as it was a comedy & u had no sound for the movies then. They kicked in such a way it compensated for the lack of sound too. But what made it funny was the reduced frame rate. The time delay between kick & effect on ass was very small. This also explains the walks in those movies, they were fast. Accepted frame rate today is 24 frames per second i.e, 24 drawings or stills per second.

Hail to 70s Porn!

Yup there has never been anything rawer than 70s porno flicks. Women with feathered back hair & John Holmes. No Twiggy wannabes (ironically the Twiggy phenomenon took hold during the late 70s). Voluptuous women (in case u can't visualize it anymore, think 'fat' in all the right places). Call me a sexist or by any other anti-feminist label, I give a rats ass. Bad lighting & ancient cameras added that certain je ne se quais. Some of them are down right haunting. The thin line between softcore & hardcore porn is more or less a recent invention. None of that new fangled chicken choking, its 70s porn for me all the way !

Best where the spin-offs from this industry. I remember watching a great movie *ing Richard Dreyfuss, I believe the movie was called 'Bits'. Dreyfus plays this porno movie director, who has a romping time w/ one of his starlets. The movie today would be 'a month in the life of a decadent director'. The movie goes into dealing w/ his sex-life, experience w/ drugs & ofcourse the mediocrity of being a porn movie director. It gives a bottom of the barrel perspective of life as an artist in the 70s.

For the buffs, uninitiated & simply curious :
X-Rated Posters
British Girls Adult Film Database

Another great movie revolving around the 70s scene is 'Sunset Strip'. This comedy/drama was released in 2000. Its abt a couple of individuals, to be precise, 24hrs of their lives in 1972 on Sunset Strip. Nick Stahl (Guy who plays John Connor in T3) is an upcoming guitarist. Then there is this alcoholic, loser song writer who has been unfortunately eclipsed by one of his hits & is trying to turn the tide (in a stupor). His friend, a colour blind photographer who happens to be the closet-freak of a lover, of this female who dresses up rock stars. A small time Penny Lane muse thing going on there. The Comedy is subtle & it has a nice happy ending which leaves u with a "Good for them".
Peace. Out.

NURBS & Nobel Prize Winners

Its been exactly 2 years since I last cut my hair. This day, that year I had vowed to accomplish a few things in a years time! Year 2 & all I can say to myself is 2 out of 3 ain't bad. Pathetic Pathiyil...as Pandi would have put it. Anyways the show must go on.

Spent most of the morning (erm afternoon) modelling w/ NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-plines). A fancy term for curved lines whose curvature is controlled by a set of control vertices. The key to modelling as any policeman would politely tell u is to think like a sculptor. It takes quite a lot of patience to sculpt a face using NURBS. Especially if u have to deal w/ a weird middle mouse button. The damn thing just doesn't work when held down, so tracking through a view easily, is impossible. Also I found that Maya (the software) kept crashing on my system. Which has left me to suffer an unwanted 'system suffered a crash' notification whenver I boot up. This got me thinking abt & drooling over alias wavefronts sketch book. This gizmo is an Electronic sketchbook, a perfect device for uber-lazy people like me. Heck, I bet that baby crashes too! Gravity u just can't escape it ^_^

Also finished reading the 'Everest Hotel' a very good book. A few books actually gave me a sense of being there - Marquez's '100 Years of Solitude'. In '..Solitude' I could actually smell Macondo (a village) in all its funk & splendour. '.. hotel' too evoked similar sentiments. Another great book along these lines which was a great read was Naguib Mehfouz's Sugar Street trilogy. Both Marquez & Naguib r Nobel Prize winners! They say that the Nobel Prize is rigged, but I still say that these guys r good.

I once saw a documentary on Naguib Mehfouz. He was shit old & sitting on a park bench. He was recovering from a stabbing. The stabber was a fundamentalist fanatic. It was a documentary on Belly Dancing & its decline in Egypt. Egypt had one of the best schools in Belly Dancing. However that mantle, now, is held by a school in Tunisia.

Trivia: Tattooine scenes in the Star Wars Episode II was entirely shot in Tunisia.
Known Fact: That movie is the ultimate crap ever made!!

THE GAME !!

I remember cribbing abt not having encountered that ultimate entertainer of game a few weeks back. Well I found it, its called 'Kirby 64- The Crystal Shards' (N64 platform). U play a character (Kirby) that looks like pink bubble with stubby hands & funky red shoes. Character is rendered in the Chibi format & awesomely animated. Violence takes on a cutesy turn in this baby. To kill enemies u suck them up. u can swallow them or spit 'em out. Now if an enemy has some power & u swallow the bugger, u accquire them too. If u swallow 2 powerfull baddies u get a hybrid power, this feature rocks!! Eg - Boomerang ability+electric shock = light saber a la Darth Maul.

In essence this game is a platformer, but the 3D level design gives it an awesome edge (pun intended). U walk along paths that wrap up mountains & the camera follows. The World is luscious w/ cutsey baddies & Crayon Sinchan style backgrounds. Music is Sonic-esque. People at Nintendo sure know how to make fun games. I love these guys.

On the design front, been sifting through my noodle for logo ideas. I have to design a spanking logo for the Island Motor Racing Club. This one is a good karma assignment. So far I have 3 mediocre designs on paper. Not satisfied, anways deadline is tomorrow 10am & the night is still young. Most of the morning & a good part of the afternoon was spent at the studio. Today was on of those perpetual hard-on days. Boxer shorts leave me horny ad infinitum. Frustrating part of the day wasn't trying to satiate desires, but coping w/ the horrible line-test machine which seems to have gotten worse after the repair. Interstingly, Shilpa one of the students out there, thought I was somebody else. Only after 5 hours did she realize it was me!! The wonders of the beardless state.

Had a dream, a very satisfying one, wherein I was kicking the asses (verbally) of people who bug me. Need more dreams like these.
Plans of drinking w/ ' Whiskey' G$ & ' Lime juice' Susk got killed. Susk is still slaving at the office.

Masochistic Nuns & Copy Controlled CDs +

I've been reading I. Allan Sealy's 'The Everest Hotel'. I'm half way through the book & its abt a lot of things. One of which happens to be the way an 80 yr old man relentlessly (term used loosely) tries to break the wa (inner harmony) of a nun. Anyways it got me thinking ......nuns r the biggest masochists on earth. They must be a frustrated lot, dedicating their lives to an abstract concept. The priest r lucky, they r always backed by altar boys. Sick! Speaking of nuns, I was reminded of 'Nuns on the run' an 80s British flick abt bank robbers who dress up as nuns & survive in a convent school for girls. Good movie w/ a nice ending.

Borrowed Enigma 5: Voyaguer from Susk. Its a copy controlled CD (CCCD). What sucks is the whole system. The damn thing expects windows to be installed & what not. I bet that if one is against piracy & bought a CCCD, one would rip it instantly for the heck of it!! In case ur wondering how they do it, check out

volition.vee.net/archives

Keep on making. Keep on breaking.

Past few hours have been spent trying to device a new peg bar arrangement that would do away with a need for a special paper punching machine. I ought to be animating & have 2 tasks more to finish but the tinkerer side of me begins to takeover. The Peg bar would ideally hold 15 sheets & save me a lot of headaches in dealing w/ the fools managing animaster.

Meanwhile an idea for an exhibition of my works (Ha Ha) has been fermenting in my mind. Ishraq sort of seeded the idea. But priority as of now would be to get my on-foot portfolio ready ASAP.

Sleep patterns have been derailed over the past 1 week. Sleep (when I do get it) is peppered w/ turbulent dreams. I'm conscious of the fact that I'm dreaming. While I'm dreaming I seem to be talking to myself. More like commenting eg, 'Eda u should be writing this down, it'd look good in a book' etc.

Been trying to finish Dungeon Keeper 2 since last sunday. Srikanth! Blood!!!