by ·Comments Off on Portal 2 Music Video – Exile Vilify By The National

I have another film from the Tortoise Butler crew to share today.  This one was made for Valve’s recent Portal 2 music video competition.

 

I actually didn’t have such a massive involvement in this one.  I worked on some of the special effects and just sat at my computer churning out Half Life / Portal themed posters and citadel images that they placed in the film in post production to give the deserted streets of London a more in-universe feel.

The production was really done on a shoe string (with a steady-cam repair being carried out using a wooden spoon at one point) and in a very short space of time, approaching 48 hour film challenge conditions.

The way in which this one came out surprised me.  Some of the effects I worked on were much more effective than I expected they would be and it just went to show just how much you can do with the machines you have in your home and how even in a short space of time you can produce some decent quality content.

I also can’t believe they found someone who looked so much like Chell.

by ·Comments Off on Constant Internet Connections for Gaming

A growing trend in gaming is that more and more titles require a constant online connection.  This is even in games that do not actually use the internet for any of their features and pure single player experiences that never require you to team up with other people over the internet.

There is a temptation to rant about how this is frustrating, because it is.  There is a temptation to launch into a tirade about digital rights management, the main reason for a persistent online connection being required and how damaging it is to consumer rights, because it is.  There is a temptation to question just how much extra money it costs to run activation servers to monitor these always-on connections and what happens if the company goes out of business and the server goes down, because this is a genuine concern.

Instead, I’m going to comment on just how far the internet has come to actually enable this scenario to even exist, but that it still comes with a price.

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by ·Comments Off on The Boating Cat

Being still utterly blown away by the fact that we’ve found our little silver killing machine, much to the relief of ourselves and the resident Chertsey wildlife population, I suspect my blog might take on a slightly bipolar feel for the next few days as I periodically say things like “I can’t believe we found the cat” which is something I stop and say out loud every five minutes or so.

This is the cat and the dog on the boat during a previous holiday.

They break the stereotype and seem to get on quite well, even if it does seem to occasionally be an uneasy alliance.  When we had brought the cat back to my house to feed her, she wrapped herself around my legs, my mum’s legs and much to all of our surprise, dog included, the dog’s legs.

by ·Comments Off on Technology as a Scapegoat

Riot or free-for-all shopping spree? Hard to tell.

Over the weekend and early this week, violent riots have sprung up over London supporting the cause of “we want a new pair of trainers and to smash windows and to burn houses”.

As people’s property and businesses burn and we see images of rioters strutting around sporadically throwing things at the police like confused adolescent school children having a sulk, the media keeps bringing up a piece of information that I feel is always on the brink of turning into something ugly.  They keep mentioning that these riots have been organised by using Blackberries and Twitter or Facebook.

It hasn’t happened yet, but I can’t help feeling that they’re trying to turn technology into a scapegoat for these riots.

What has actually caused this uprising is hard to tell.  Suggestions that it was in protest of the shooting of Mark Duggan as part of Operation Trident, an initiative targeting ‘black-on-black’ gun crime, is an absurd notion as that was protested peacefully in Tottenham before the violence erupted.  When you see a furniture store in flames in Croydon, it’s hard to reconcile that with a shooting in Tottenham.

There doesn’t even seem to be any political motivation.  This isn’t some wider protest about the state of the country.  There’s no one particular event that could have got people this riled up and although the news has been full of woe and downturn of late, its nothing that would get people fired up to smash and grab.

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We found my cat!

I generally try to avoid posting information about my personal life here because if I wasn’t me, I probably wouldn’t care either, but this has just bowled me over and even as I sit here writing this, I half expect to wake up in a minute.

After finishing my NCTJ diploma and my internship at Bit-Tech, there was a missing week between then and starting to focus more on Chaotic Tortoise where I was trawling the river Wey looking for the family cat.  Let me give you a bit of background.

Flossie in front of the narrow boat

This is Flossie.  She is a beautiful seven year old silver tabby, one part fur and good looks to two parts spiky bits.  She’s friendly, she’s sociable, she’ll happily curl up to you if you’re warmer than her unless you are a mouse or small fluffy creature in which case she will do the cat-like thing and tear you to shreds.  She is the very last thing I’d want to face in a dark alley if I was any species other than human.  It goes without saying that she is a much loved family cat that we have looked after since she was a kitten.

A couple of weeks ago, my parents were on holiday on their narrow boat and planned to come up to Surrey and the river Wey so that I could meet them for lunch or dinner for an evening at some point before they turned around and headed for home.

On the morning of the day that I was expecting to see them I got a heart-breaking call from my mum saying that they had lost the cat.

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