The Lost Thing wins best short at the 2010 AEAF Awards.
I just heard that The Lost Thing won the Short Film category at this years ‘Australian Effects and Animation Festival’ Awards, held in Sydney. There were 12 films in contention for this award, most of which I unfortunately haven’t yet seen. I look forward to checking them all them out in time. It’s important to support Australian work, and it is certainly exciting to win this award here in Australia. Here is the press release to read further about the winners and nominees of all other categories.
The Lost Thing wins the Grand Prix for Best Short Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival
Last Sunday the awards night was held for the short films of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). It was at the end of a weekend of shorts programs, that showed almost 100 films in total. There were films from all over the world in many different styles, including documentary, fictional, experimental and animation. Melbourne is my home town, and where The Lost Thing film was created, in a room above a laundromat. I have been to the MIFF many times in years past, and it was exciting to have a film that I had animated screening in the festival.
I finally saw the film Angry Man, which I liked very much. I have quite a deep appreciation for the traditional methods of stop-motion animation that Anita Killi used so beautifully in this film. During the awards announcements I was a little crest-fallen at first when we missed out on the award for best animation, although I understood why Angry Man had won. It is indeed worthy of the award. Thinking that our award window was then closed, it was an incredible surprise when the last award was announced – The Grand Prix for Best Short Film, awarded to The Lost Thing. I’m not sure exactly, but it must be one of the first times (if not the actual first) that an animated film has won overall against all other shorts, including live action. It is a great honour, and needless to say we, the small Lost Thing team, are pretty chuffed.
Leo Baker (animator and editor), Sophie Byrne (Producer) and Shaun Tan (Creator and Director)
Here you can read the press release of all the short film winners.
The Sneaky Rafter returns in “Nelson-land”
A while back I did a little test piece of animation of the “Sneaky Rafter” of Nelson Beer for The Taboo Group. They asked me to do another conceptual piece incorporating the 4 different iconic designs of the beer labels. The main icon being the “Sneaky Rafter” spider-monkey type creature (designed by Sonny Day and Biddy Maroney), as well as the “Rinzen Eye”, the “Trimapee” fashion label design, and “The Temper Trap” (band) head icon.
The characterization and animation of these 4 designs was created in 2 weeks. It’s not as well presented as I would have liked, but I’m glad I managed to output the concept of ‘Nelson-land’. I hope you can appreciate it for a piece completed in such tight time constraints.
Nelson Land from shredFest on Vimeo.
The Lost Thing is runner up at Palm Springs
Just got news that The Lost Thing was runner up to the winning film Angry Man under the category of best animated short, at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. I haven’t seen Angry Man yet, but am looking forward to catching it at a festival somewhere -It looks very intriguing indeed. It’s great to have the continued exposure for The Lost Thing! Congratulations to both films!
The Lost Thing wins the Yoram Gross Animation Award
The Lost Thing recently screened at the Sydney International Film Festival, which I attended for the first screening. It was great to see the film on the big screen amongst a public audience and hear their reactions.
At the end of the festival the awards were announced and The Lost Thing received the Yoram Gross Animation Award! It means a lot to win such an accolade in my own country. Here is a press release through Inside Film of the Award announcements for the 57th Sydney Film Festival.
Now I’m looking forward to the Melbourne International Film Festival!
The Lost Thing wins the Annecy Cristal!
Well, we were thrilled that The Lost Thing was accepted into The 34th Annecy International Animation Festival. But when it won the Cristal Award for best short film, we were completely over the moon!
Annecy is the worlds largest animation film festival, held in Annecy, France. To win this is a huge milestone for me, and the very small team at Passion Pictures Australia who worked to make this film. Congratulations to the LT gang, and a big thanks from me.
Here is a a youtube snippet of the Annecy festival, and of the Cristal awards announcement. Its all in French, but persevere till 2:20 where the winning short film is announced, The Lost Thing!
Here is wikipedia’s link about the animation festival, and previous winners of the Annecy Cristal.
“The Lost Thing” completed!
After over two and a half years of full time work, the animation project “The Lost Thing” is finally complete! Until now I haven’t been able to post any information about it, but now the Lost Thing website is up and running. Here you can see the trailer, stills and conceptual development of the film that I, and a small team adapted from Shaun Tan’s picture story book. I was responsible for all the animation and editing, as well as pre-visualisation, character rigging and contributions to everything else. Check it out!!
The film will now trickle through film festivals around the world, before an eventual dvd and blu-ray release.
So far (that I know of) it has been confirmed for the Annecy Animation Festival in France, the Sydney Film Festival and the Melbourne Film Festival, but I’m probably not meant to talk announce that just yet….
Its been a long project and a large amount of work for me, but I am most proud of the work and feel very privileged to have been given the opportunity to help bring such a fantastic project to life. I hope you can see it at a festival somewhere around the world!
backup your stuff! ….for 39kb on mac or 176kb on windows.
Computers suck. They can die on you at the worst time and you don’t want to lose your important stuff, like your mp3 collection…
I’m not really interested in backup systems that restore my computer to certain points in time, like time-machine. Although these are well designed and useful systems, they can be confusing and you can lose track of your files, as such systems are time based. All I want is a simple, reliable tool that archives important stuff, so I have peace of mind that my precious files are BACKED UP! So I wrote my own little backup utility in Python.
I originally wrote this for my personal Mac, and later adapted the script to work on Windows. I use windows for work, and there is a lot of data created daily that needs to be kept safe. The script backs up to external hard drives. I have multiple drives enabled on the Windows version that I use at work so I can rotate the drives daily -keeping one drive offsite (in case or fire, burglary, rodents etc). The other handy thing about the Windows one is that you can log out and it will run and then it can shut your machine down when finished (if you wish to shutdown). So once set up -all you need to do is log out of your machine and it takes care of everything.
The scripts are basically an organiser around the unix ‘rsync’ utility. Rsync doesn’t exist on Windows systems, so I have included an rsync.exe in the Windows version.
Both of the bundles have a folder of little bits and pieces. In the folder is the main Python script, you will need to open this in a decent text editor and edit some of the details to make it customized for your system. Note it is best to run the script via an automation system. The Windows version has an ‘instructions’ file for how to do this and setup Windows Scheduler. The Mac version has a cron file for automating via commandline with crontab. If you set this automation you can literally ’set and forget’. The script has inbuilt mail notification, which provides all information about the script output, so you can monitor the process.
Ahhh, peace of mind.
create lower resolution image proxies with python
For those who are friends of the command line, here is a simple python script that utilises PIL to generate lower resolution proxy images of your larger files.
This is often handy when doing any kind of vfx work where smaller files allow for faster interaction. The script is setup to process individual files or entire folders of images. I also use it a lot for quickly creating emailable size images from the larger res downloads off my digital camera. At the moment the script is setup merely to create jpeg type files, but I wanted to later implement the option of maintaining the original file format, or just specifying an output filetype.
Usage
From commandline:
python pathToLB_proxyMaker.py fileOrFolderToSourceFrom args
or of course, you can alias it to ‘proxy’ or whatever you like.
FLAGS:
-d –division Sets the divisional amount to create the new smaller res files. The images will be divided by this number.
-w –web Sets the target proxy Res so that the larger dimension is 640 – which is an ideal size for email and web work. If images are smaller than this res they will not be altered.
-1 –1k Sets the target proxy Res so that the larger dimension is 1024 – for a 1k approximation. If images are smaller than this res they will not be altered.
-t --type CURRENTLY NOT IMPLEMENTED: is intended to maintain the file format of the original files -otherwise will default to jpeg.
You can get it to make proxies based on a division amount of the original res -half res, quarter res etc. This is by using the “-d” flag followed by a dividing number. Eg. “-d 2″ will make half res files or “-d 4″ will make quarter res files. I have also included a couple of handy modes for making web or email size files.The flag “-1″ will make 1k files (where the larger of the 2 dimensions is set to 1024 pixels), or the flag “-w” makes a slightly smaller equivalent, where the larger of the 2 dimension is set to 640 pixels.
Known drawbacks
Unfortunately the version of PIL available at the time I wrote this post has a few annoying limitations. The main problem is that it will not maintain the image’s colour profile, or any other associated meta data. So if you have a particular colour profile assigned to your images, say ’sRGB’, it will not exist on the newly output proxy files. On my computer (Mac) I think it just assigns a ‘colour LCD’ profile upon opening the images -which can often look rather ordinary. Although you can manually reassign a colour profile to your images at a later date. I think there are various scripts out there that can do this, but that again is irritating as it means it becomes a 2 part process. I believe the next version of PIL (1.1.7) should address maintaining the colour profile across image manipulation.
sigma dp2 photography exhibition
Recently I was asked to take some photos to test the new snappy from Sigma – the “DP2“. It was for an exhibition to showcase the new camera. There were a variety of artists who were asked to contribute, making a great show from a mix of talent.
…and this is my image that I submitted for the exhibition:
“Hayley and the night cranes”
Not far from Melbourne Zoo, Parkville has its own herd of industrial giraffes overlooking Royal Park. Ordinary, even unsightly by day, they are transformed into serene, surreal elegance after dark.
In this photo I was lucky enough to capture a gazelle in the foreground.
This photo was taken with an 8 second exposure and manually fired flash, to capture Hayley in the foreground. 100 iso for less noise. The camera has a fixed 24mm lens. The aperture was at its maximum open – which is F2.8
Not a bad camera. I like the fact you can shoot entirely manually and in raw mode, but it would be nice to have different lens sizes to play with.
bringing the sneaky rafter to life -nelson beer
My good friends at the taboo group asked me to animate the character named “Sneaky Rafter” who is the original logo/icon for the new beer ‘Nelson’.
nelsonBeer
This is the first time he has been brought to life, so I guess we’re still figuring out his personality through the animation. I think he may be seen around Melbourne again, so keep your eyes peeled.
The lil rafter was projected at the Trimapee party for the end of Melbourne’s fashion week, raa raah daaahling!
Here is the animation of what was projected.