La Vie en Rose

While moving house, I had the great pleasure of unpacking my oooold 33rpm record -- don't laugh, I have about 300, collected over years and years, and some of my favorite music is on them. Many albums were never issued on CD, to my knowledge -- or, if they were, I never saw them. One such album is a collection which includes "La Vie en Rose" -- the original music, by Carl Maria von Weber, which I don't think has much, if anything, to do with the 2007 movie about Edith Piaf...

The music got me to remembering a videoclip I saw decades (ouch!) ago: Mikhail Barynshikov dancing "The Spetre of the Rose" to this music. It was one segment in a long documentary series hosted by Margot Fonteyn, and I'd literally forgotten about it, till I unearthed the vinyl album. What a memory jogger!

Next stop, YouTube, and whaddaya know! Check this out, folks:

UPDATE: since I posted this, something has happened to this video, making it not play. I'll leave the link, in case it comes back on line, but for the moment ... well, dang. No video. Grrr.


...Baryshnikov in his late twenties, or at about thirty years of age. Glorious? Oh, yeah. And in turn this got me to thinking about art, and Sepctre de la Rose was the perfect vehicle via which to explore something I've wanted to do since before the house moving started. Back in October and November last year, prior to the Era of Boxes, Bubblewrap and Stickytape, I was speculating about art composited in Photoshop in layers. A ha! Here was the opportunity.

The background in this piece is a photograph of the trees near the "bog garden" at Loftia Gardens, on the shoulder of Mount Lofty, South Australia, which I took about three years ago. The foreground flowers were photographed in 2008 in Handorf, SA, right after a rain shower. The figure was designed last October for another project...

...and the composition was done this afternoon, including a lot of painting, especially the hair:

The hair was panted in three layers, using my Wacom Bamboo, which was my birthday pressie last year, and which I love so much, if the house was burning down, it's one of the few things I'd grab on my way out the door (any family members inside, including puddy-tat; cash, credit cards and ID; cell phone, turned on and calling 000 even as I dove for the Wacom Bamboo. We don't call 911 or 999 in this country. Do I have time to grab a change of clothes, too? Rats. Go for the Wacom Bamboo instead). 

With the figure posed, lit and rendered, the picture was combined in three layers: blurred out background ... on top of that, the figure ... on top of that, the foreground roses, which started life as two different photos. Next, the light and shadows were painted in, in colors -- he's highlighted in red on one side, by light striking up off the rose, and by in green on the other side, by light filtering in from the trees. All the other stuff, like "god rays" through the trees and motes in the air, highlights and shadows on the rose, and some "atmospherics" around the edges, were all painted at this point too ... but the hair is what makes it immediately "real."

Juxtaposing real images with 3D models can be risky, because images of reality tend to make the models worked into them look rather fake. But if you're clever with the lights and shadows, you can get away with it, and I think I did, in this one. The image was rendered at 3000 pixels wide, to give me the ability to get in there and paint tiny details, and then resized, and the version I've uploaded here is 2000 wide, so you can actually see those details.

Speaking of seeing details, there came a knock at the door today, when I hadn't expected a delivery truck till next week. That was fast! Two days ago, there was a catalog in the physical mailbox, down at the gate, from a company called mln.com.au -- that's the name, MLN. They're having this fantastic sale, with enormous discounts on big, big, huge monitors. Like, a full HD, LED 24" from LG, for A$167, still under A$200 with shipping? Now, how was I going to go past that?! Two days later, it's sitting on the desk beside me, with the NARC movie poster displayed as the wallpaper. Wow. I just did La Vie en Rose on it, and I'm blown away by the resolution, contrast, vibrancy, color register.  So nice!

Thanks once again go to Dave for saying, "Get it. Get it! Get it!!" Part of me still hesitates to just bite on these things, and I'm always so glad he, uh, insists. It's too bad Blogger doesn't have emoticons -- there would be a cheesy great smiley sitting right here!

Jade, January 25

Wildlife Photography (as promised)

As promised, a look at my Australian Wildlife Photography,with just a few uploaded as images and the rest zipped into a slideshow. I know most of the visitors to this blog are looking for beautiful guys, art featuring same, and tips on how to produce said art, rather than anything remotely like this, so I'll keep it brief!

Here's the whole video...



...and I'll be back in a day or two with a "shoot" on a whole new character. A while ago I mentioned getting a new skinmap and costume. The skinmap is great, but the face morph that accompanies it, as delivered by the designer, does nothing for me. It looked much better in the brochure pictures at Renderosity than in renders at this end. So I plopped the skinmap onto Michael 4 and designed a face of my own around it: a mature guy, age about 38 - 44, with loads of character. I really like the results, and am in the process of doing a full sequence of images. They're just taking upwards of two hours each to render, even on The Mighty Thor, and even "just" as raytraces! Patience is a virtue.

Also, am writing the next segment of Abraxas, so I will be back, and soon!

Jade, October 13

Microcosm

click to see all images at larger size

As promised: the world of the very small ... the forest floor at Belair National Park on June 1, 2009. These are a small selection of the images I shot -- and lost for three years! While searching for something else, I stumbled over them. I never forgot taking these pictures. It was a magical day, not really cold, just chilly, misty, dead of winter ... the sun would come out for a while then vanish again as the next bank of clouds came over.

The hardest thing was choosing a dozen from the shoot to upload here! The "first pick" was over 60, and whittling it down was tough. One of the "filters" was to take out everything that didn't pertain to the "Microcosm" theme. Before getting these images, Dave and I had stopped for lunch at another region of the park, Playford Lake. There were birds galore -- a whole flock of Ibis on the lake, and a lot more, including the male superb fairy wren ... and he stood still long enough for me to get two pictures -- which was no mean trick, when you consider he's the size of your thumb! Then, after getting these pictures, we took a hike in a third region of the park, and I was photographing koalas and kangaroos. So -- out they all went, leaving only the "Microcosm" theme. Even then, I had to cut about 40 images to 12, soooo...

I thought to myself, how about whacking the rest of them into a video? Which reminded me that I'd bought Corel Video Studio 2010, back in, uh, 2010. 

Next step: get the program installed on The Mighty Thor, and try desperately to remember how to use it. Figure out that it hadn't installed properly, because nothing worked. Uninstall it. Restart the computer. Reinstall it. Try again. Hey, it worked the second time around! (Thanks to Dave for jumping through the last couple of these hoops. I woke up with a migraine today, and if it had been up to me, I'd have frisbee'd the installation DVD back into the corner. Dave had more persistence!)

The soundtrack is empty: silent. You're not missing anything, and you haven't left the sound muted! It's just that I can't afford a hundred bucks to put halfway decent-sounding legal music on this little show. You know that YouTube is recently using a kind of "audio proofreading software" which scans the audio content of whatever you upload? You'll soon get a strange little email from them to the effect that you're breaching copyright law and will be investigated in due course. Don't want to go there ... also, I do understand about copyright. It's always so infuriating when people pirate ebooks, so in come to think of it ... why would I blithely "borrow" the music of some musician who also has to buy groceries and pay power bills? However --

I did take a look around at available canned music, before making the decision to upload this little show silent. Cheap music sounds dreadful -- it would actually detract from the quality of the video. By the time you get up to anything that sounds decent, you're looking at $100 investment. It's out there, and there's plenty of it. I've bookmarked a site called Royalty Free Music Dot Com ... guess what their URL is. (No, really?!) LOL ... if/when I ever get  seriously  into making YouTube videos, I'll get a bunch of stuff from https://www.free-stock-music.com and will do the remix, mashup thing, which is perfectly legal. 

2024 Edit: the original link in this place was royaltyfreemusic.com, but that appears to be dead. I've just tracked down what looks like a replacement service, but note that I have not (yet?) looked into it, so I don't know how good the stock is, or how much they charge, and so forth. This is just a quick fix for a dead link on an ancient post.

[Note to musicians: if you charged $10 for decent music, not $100, about a million people would pay you. Charging $100 just makes folks like myself say, "Not today, thanks." Makes sense to anybody???]

Till I feel ready to invest hundreds of bucks on soundtrack elements ... well, silence was good enough for Charlie Chaplin! Or --

Wing it, guys. All you gotta do is play an MP3 in the background while looking at this show. YouTube doesn't have an argument with that!

So, here's the video ... [drum roll, cymbal clash] ...

My reactions to Corel Video Studio? Not bad, but it's not as flexible as I'd have hoped, for $90, or whatever the pricetag was. It has a very annoying feature that you can not turn off: it's panning and zooming all over the images. All I actually wanted was a static slideshow! Noooo way to stop this, sorry. So long as the subject matter is landscapes, scenery etc., it doesn't really make much difference, but the first time I used this software was to make DVDs of people pictures, for my Mom to watch on TV. With Corel's panning and zooming, you mostly got people from the nose to the chin, or the hairline upwards! It was disastrous. I wound up making individual slideshows in Windows Movie Maker on my laptop, and then importing these segments, daisy-chain fashion, into Corel to master the DVD. How silly is that? But for sheer convenience I did this one, here, in Corel...

The output was wmv, and the upload to YouTube took a looooong time. I assume they compress the movie at their end before displaying it??? To this point, I admit, I don't know much about YouTube videos, but I suspect I shall learn. Incidentally, if you're looking for a really nice, quick way to daisy-chain video clips, though, Corel is perfect. Let's say you have a couple of dozen clips from a trip ... all the best bits chopped out ... the parts where the camera is blessedly still and the image is in focus! All you have to do is drag them into the "timeline," and then tell Corel to burn a DVD at HD quality. Couldn't be easier. Which makes it all the more weird that you can't stop the program panning and zooming over stills. Hmmm.

So there you have it: see the whole "Macrocosm" set of images, if you're inclined, without having to download about ten yards of pictures to the body of the blog. Neat. 

I might disappear on you for a couple of weeks, but don't be alarmed that the blog is abandoned. Far from it. I just have a bunch of things to do, and I don't think I'll have much time for art, more's the pity. But I do have some ideas percolating in the back of my mind!

Jade, September 30