CHRISLEYDON.COM

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.

I love writing posts to my blog, I really do. Especially when I actually get a chance to sit down, lock myself away from the world and get on with it.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed that there are several breeds of blogger; those who blog about topics, those who blog for a living (and attempt to be journalists), and those who write about themselves. I seem to fall into the latter category, but then again what did you expect from a site called chrisleydon.com?

The last month has been very busy and productive for me. As you should be aware Keyone Productions has produced two videos for Bishops’ College in the past year; I received confirmation a few weeks ago that we’ve been commissioned to produce two/three further videos in the new academic year. This is fantastic news for a business as small as ours!

Whilst still on the topic of Keyone Productions, we’ve been approached by Mevio to continue to produce our video games show The Glitch. This time it would be in association with Mevio as part of their promotions campaign. If this goes ahead it would mean that Keyone Productions has two successful podcasts on the agreement, the other being The Podzone.

Moving onto the subject of Mevio and by UK default, BTPodShow, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve managed to gain an internship with them until September. I’m currently based in the UK, London, office for 30 hours a week. My roles involve, scouring the network for the best content we have, editing shows, monitoring stats, channel organising, spare hand and general bitch boy, or anything else they throw my way. I’m thoroughly enjoying it and will be rather sad when the time comes for me to leave. I’m proud and very glad that I’ve had the chance to be part of such a great team.

Chris Leydon.