Fighting the rumours by writing another blog post, I’m not dead… yet. Busy I have been incredibly so over the past few weeks. As the Christmas holidays approach, my Uni deadlines start to creep in ever so slowly. As is customary with this time of year, I’ve been running left right and centre like a headless chicken, attempting to meet deadlines. Thankfully I seem to have met most of them for now.

Visual Media Applications, as a few people may be aware, is a module in my course, that teaches the basics of Adobe After Effects. Earlier on in the semester I had to follow a set of course tutorials. These tutorials had room for improvisation and encouraged creativity. They allowed me to get to grips with the powerful software package, whilst allowing me to experiment and play around.

The short tutorials were only a small part of my total assessment. My final assignment was to create a 30 second animation, within After Effects, based on either part of or an entire book. I chose to use the opening paragraph from Stephen Clarke’s “Talk To The Snail”. A video of how the animation turned out is above, feedback is always appreciated.

Chris Leydon.

Uni work has been hitting me hard pretty recently. It’s that time of year again where everyone finally realises that University isn’t one big social, as their first deadlines start to loom over the horizon. I, yet again, have fallen into the trap of NOT doing my Uni work as I go along my course; instead I’ve let it pile up and a deadline is approaching from around the corner. Admittedly it’s not as bad as I let it get last year, but I really should have learnt not to do this by now.

My modules, for the first semester of year two, consist of “Film Technology 2″, “Visual Media Applications”, “Video Editing Technology” and “Studio Production”. It’s my Visual Media Applications (VMA) work that’s starting to creep up on me.

VMA is a module that explores the use of After Effects within film. Throughout the course and over the past weeks, one has supposed to have been creating animations to upload to MySpace; how to do the basics of each animation was covered in the relevant lecture, one then has to put their own artistic flare on the work. I have yet to finish all of my animations. If truth be told, my mind has been preoccupied with other things; such as a social life, Keyone Productions progression and loosing a job.

The first animation that I’ve had to create for VMA, is one where a bunch of playing cards have to rotate, showing both the face and the back of the card, as well as appearing within 3D space. My take on this animation is displayed above in the video player. This animation has had to be uploaded to “MySpace” so that it can be peer assessed in order to complete my assignment and module.

Chris Leydon.

My week started off fairly simply, well I suppose it actually wasn’t. If truth be told last weekend we played a few pranks on our neighbours upstairs, they weren’t best pleased with this and so they retaliated by playing mind games, unbeknown to me, all through Monday. By the end of Monday, after my Film Tech lectures, I was incredibly mentally unstable and under the impression that I was going to be chucked out of Uni. This was not true. In the end our mental game playing neighbours came downstairs to our flat and told us all about the ruse; we weren’t best pleased.

Tuesday was a really good day for me. My first lecture was cancelled, but for the first time since I’ve been at Staffs I finally understood my Audio Processing lecture. It was a fantastic feeling and I’m really proud with myself.

Digital Image Production on Wednesday was as boring as ever but we’ve started on our first term project so I expect there will be some excitement soon. The rest of the day, however, was spent in intimate meetings with my Film Tech partner fiddling about with storyboards and pre-visualisation for our short three minute film. Everything went smoothly and I do believe that we have a really sweet project going on.

On Thursday, after waking up a tad late for Scriptwriting, I boarded a train with my trusty Mac and headed to London, to stay with my family over the weekend, for a party on the Saturday.

The London trip has really been a highlight of my week. I often visit London and so the attraction of going to the capital is usually lost on me, however this time I was attracted by the prospect of meeting up with some family members who I hadn’t seen for a few months, as well as attending the Leopard launch.

Friday was interesting. To begin with I helped out my uncle with installing a new bathroom (despite the fact that he is a sound technician) and then headed towards Oxford street for a bit of shopping.

Of course Friday was the launch day for the infamous operating system Mac OS X 10.5, otherwise known as Leopard. To celebrate this I donned my geek hat and headed to Apple Store UK Number one, the biggest Apple store in the world, situated on Regents Street. I joined the que for the launch at 5 pm, the store was due to open its doors as 6 pm (BST), but already there was a que going halfway around the city block. By 6 pm the que had elongated itself and had ended up looping around the block twice. I’m guessing that it’s pretty obvious that there are a few Apple geeks in London.

I must say that I met some fantastic people whilst waiting for Leopard, and when the time came we were very happy to have our special edition Leopard T-shirts and our hands on the most advanced operating system in the world. For those sad people who are interested in seeing some very blurred photos of the UK launch (they don’t allow cameras in store), I’ve included a link to my Picasa album at the end of this post.

Saturday evening saw me getting rather drunk at a party in the Bushy part of London. The party was for my cousin’s husbands 30th birthday and it turned out to be a rather fantastic evening (again photo’s included after post). I spent most of the evening talking complete bollocks and getting rather pissed with my favourite band of all time, Seeing Scarlet.

And now I’m on a train on my way back to Stafford, some week, and it only gets better from here on in.

Chris Leydon. 

Leopard UK Launch

Last weekend I was kidnapped by my parents and taken back home for a few days, they were only supposed to pop up here with a receipt so that I could change my digibox. Going home was rather fun and it gave me time to think back over al that’s happened over the past few weeks that I’ve actually been at University for. It also gave me the chance to meet up with the fabulous Mr Cooper and record a few more Podzones.

This weeks lectures haven’t been that interesting. Film Technology, however, was quite fun. We were allowed to start experimenting with the Cannon XL1s and we were set a task where we had to create three independent shots and frame them correctly.

In Digital Image Production we were introduced to Photoshop and taught the basics. Needless to say that I was one of the few in this class who left early as we had, had a bit of experience in Photoshop. I did stay for the actual lecture and demonstration but when it came to replicating the demonstration I buggered off.

Audio Production, once again, seems to be a waste of time. I wont go into another anti-Audio Production rant but pretty much the same thing happened again as it has done for the past few weeks.

The Keyone Productions website has been down for most of the week as I’ve been redesigning and reprogramming it. I must say that it is indeed starting to look very good, especially with the new Flash players that I’ve installed. No longer do we need to rely on Google Video.

I’m extremely pleased about the news of Leopard, otherwise known as Mac OS X 10.5, which is basically Apple’s new advanced operating system. It comes out on Friday and I’m hoping to be able to pick one up at the launch party in London’s Regents Street. I’ll take a few photos of the event and post them up on my blog after I’m finished. I know it’s a rather geeky thing to be doing, but who cares?

Chris Leydon.

I always seem to start off with good intentions whenever I dust off my old blog or create a new one, however I never quite manage to keep it up, until now (I hope).

A thought occoured to me earlier on in the day, now that I’m at uni, friends and family will be wondering what the hell I’m up to. So instead of talking to each individual person for hours on end each day and reciting the same old story to each person, I can just send people here instead to find out what it is exactly that I am doing.

I’m just finishing off my first “real” week on university, that is the first week with actual lectures in it, and I must say it has somewhat taken it out of me. This of course could be down to the freshers flu that has had me in bed most days, but that’s besides the point.

For those of you who aren’t aware I’m currently taking a BSc(Hons) in Film Technology Production at Staffordshire University.

The first week of lectures has been incredibly enlightening and interesting, I’ve recieved information on my first semester assignments and have already started work on them.

Film Technology is my first module, in which we have to create a professional 3 minute short film along with a presntation and various other bits and bobs.

Audio Processing requires us to create some sort of radio show (with a backing track) radio play (with backing track) or a song, as well as the presentation and all of the trimmings.

Digital Image Production is where we mess about with Photoshop and create a print style advert for a company such as Apple or Nike.

Scriptwriting is pretty self explanaory really, 5 minutes worth of screenplay. It’s all fun.

So it looks as though I’m to be quite busy over the next few months leading up to Christmas. I shall try and keep this poor olf blog up to date, as well as including some of the films that I’m working on.

Chris Leydon.