Mike King

Image Gallery

I added a new image gallery feature to my website here. No new images in there yet. I just moved my paintings and sketches into it and fixed all the links from my blog pages. Took longer than I would have liked, but it seems to be working fine now. I think it’s pretty nifty.

For tech heads, the image gallery is powered by Coppermine, a “multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick lib with a MySQL backend.” I was able to get it installed and running on my web server now that I upgraded the service to included PHP support.

Updating Website: email broken

I upgraded my webhosting package so that I could do a little more customization, get extra bandwidth, and stuff like that.

They don’t handle my domain name registration anymore. Blah. So that was a hidden cost I didn’t see.

I also don’t get unlimited email forwards anymore. Every email alias seems to count the same as a real email box. Not a big deal, but I’m disappointed.

And until my domain registration gets migrated, I have no email at mkingmovies.com, so just be warned.

What, it’s Tuesday?

Where do the days go? Last week was very rough. My daughter got sick with some sort of mysterious virus. So she was home most of last week and just got well today. One night her fever got to 105 degrees F. We called the nurse on duty and she told us to take our daughter in to the emergency room. Once there, they dosed her with motrin and tylenol. Well, duh, we could have done that–our question was if it was okay to do so. She hadn’t cleared 4 hours between doses, like it says on the back of the bottle. Better safe than sorry, I suppose. But that emergency room bill is gonna hurt. Being a stay-at-home dad came in handy last week. It wasn’t a big hit to take care of the kid. I didn’t get to work on my projects, but luckily nothing was critical.

To top it off, I think I caught a tinge of what my daughter had, which really wiped me out over the weekend. But I seem to be on the mend.

This week I’ve got to do an animatic for the SW:Revelations film. I’ve also got a short film to write for my brother’s next project. Inspiration is not striking. So it’s going to be the really painful kind of writing. But I’m going to plug through it. Oh, and it’s supposed to be a comedy. Wish me luck. I’m not exactly the funniest person on the planet. I wanted the challenge though. So I can only blame myself.

Very little progress on my novel. Big surprise. But I did manage to do some brainstorming and think I’ve got a couple of interesting ideas to flesh out. One of them may evolve into the overall mystery/evil plot that the heroine gets mixed up in.

Lastly, Neil Gaiman’s blog entry today included a little ode to Fred, the unlucky black cat, who appears to have taken up the hobby of vomiting on the carpet. Our family just went through a similar bout with one of our cats. And after many months of cleaning up cat yuk, we (with help from the vet) seem to have finally found the magic combination of food and medication to stop the madness. I just couldn’t help read Mr. Gaiman’s blog and think to myself, this man knows my pain.

SW: Revelations to-do list

Okay, this entry is for me more than anyone else. A reminder of stuff to do…

Shot 1: start on lighting scheme. shorten pause between tilt down and hyperspace exit. render layers. more motion blur on hyperspace exit.

Shot 2: Split into layers. Anim approved, add more ship traffic.

Shot 3: storyboards

The director thought my ship was okay, but didn’t like the back end. I thought that was the weakest part myself. It’s just too boxy. Oh, well. He said it was okay to use for misc ships. But didn’t want it to be the featured ship in shot #2, which was kind of what I was expecting.

SW: Revelations update. Cargo ship model.

229kb

Spent my scheduled time yesterday and today working on the fan film shots. I updated animation on the first two shots and am now letting them render over night. I also built a cargo ship to use in the shots because the original cargo ship I found had too much geometry. It barely loaded into my animation program and it still tended to crash a lot.

So I built my own original cargo ship. It turned out a little more detailed than I’d planned, but that’s okay because now I can get close up and the model will still look fine. (I haven’t textured the thing yet, it’s just geometry with a temporary texture map.) I sent this image to the director, hopefully he’ll approve the design. I just kind of slapped it together in 3ds max without doing any preliminary sketches. I looked at some pictures of Star Wars ships like the medical frigate, rebel cargo ship, and star destroyer and tried to keep my ship in that style.

The back end is still a little plain, but for what I need it should be fine.

This is the first spaceship model I’ve built from scratch and I’m pretty happy with it, especially considering how little time (relatively speaking) I’ve spent on it.

I’m also very happy with the lighting rig I came up with for these renders. It looks kind of similar to global illumination, but only required 4 lights (1 key, 2 fill, and 1 bounce). No raytracing, just a couple of shadow maps. It renders at 1k resolution in less than 10 seconds. Global illumination would look better, of course, but I thought I got a neat look with a simple set up.

If you look really closely at the renders, you might spot a little greenish-blue speck. That’s actually a 2 meter tall box I put in there for myself as scale reference — it’s about the height of a really tall person.

Another painting

About 3 hours of work this time. I outlined the figures directly from a Pirates of the Caribbean promotional photo. But all the paint work and detail was done freehand. This was so I didn’t have to worry about my poor draftsmanship; could just concentrate on blocking in shapes; and could focus on getting proper color and value relationships. I think I went overboard on the custom brush stuff, so it turned out a little messier than I wanted.

I learned a lot from these exercises. I’m pretty sure my next original painting will benefit from the lessons I learned from the two paintings I did today.

That’s probably it for a little while. Tomorrow I’ve got SW:Revelations shots to work on and writing to do.

painting study

I’m still trying to learn how to paint in Photoshop and have it look good. The guys I look up to the most right now are Craig Mullins and Stephen Martiniere.

Here’s a painting I did in about an hour, using a promo still from Kill Bill for reference. The anatomy of O-ren Ishii is pretty messed up. But I’m pretty happy with the overall color and composition all things considered.

Incredibles Trailer online!

The trailer is online at quicktime.com.

God, I am so happy I got to be part of this movie, if only for a little while. And the shots in the trailer? It’s just the barest hint of the goodies to come.

writers’ group

I attended a meeting of a writers’ group at my local bookstore. I’m not sure if it’s for me. I think I should attend the next meeting just to be sure. And meet more of the members.

The group is just getting started. From what everyone says, there’s maybe two or three people in it so far. But tonight the only attendees were the founder and myself. A little awkward, since I didn’t bring any writing of my own. Also, I’ve never been part of a writing group before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I think I might have made a faux pas to suggest we have writing exercises to do. But it was the first thing that came to mind as a way to structure the meeting. I think the founder wasn’t interested in that, having taken plenty of creative writing courses before. He’s more interested in critique.

For the next meeting I’m supposed to bring some ideas for writing exercises. I don’t want just creative prompts. I really want some exercises that help practice the craft and technique of writing — stuff like consciously avoiding passive voice or how to write dialog.

I should probably finish the first chapter of my novel and bring it along just in case. It’ll give me an extra push. So far I’ve got about 3 pages, so the goal isn’t out of the question.

Tomoyasu Hotei

I’m obsessed with that really cool guitar track used in Kill Bill Vol. 1 to introduce Lucy Liu’s character. (Track 9 on the soundtrack, title is “Battle Without Honor or Humanity.”) My brother lent me the soundtrack, so I did a little digging on the artist behind that piece: Tomoyasu Hotei.

I was surprised to see he’s “Japan’s leading rock guitarist and producer.” (Check out his profile here.) He’s got a compilation album out called Electric Samurai. Only available as an import, unfortunately. Can’t justify that cost right now, especially if I’m not sure that I’ll like the other tracks.

In his profile, it says he also co-wrote and performed three tracks on the soundtrack to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.