Re: Maya sucks, XSI rocks !

Well! You've been busy. The Jim Dickson part has me green with envy, sticking normals into this here nurbs model of a certain Art of the Edit denizen. Sounds like you really are chillin' these days. Da Bomb.
I guess I'll have to do the Starlight. Doesn't sound as if I'd like missing. April. Hmmmm. LA?

A missing 50% of $ for my fantasy film turned up, went away, turned up, went away, turned up, went away and finally I pulled the plug on the freak show and went home to wait out the traditional dance and pissing contests that threaten to take until May. I am allowed to be a tad cantakerous and suddenly look into space with an inspired look and tune out a nuisance with a comment right out of a MEL script, like
"Hummm...! Sphere1.rotation... Hm! 300 or so..."
as befits an esteemed geek foreign director with white hairs and everything, and that lets me sit down and look busy while I answer COWleague moos.

Wonderful timing, it turned out, as I was given the chance to get involved in another indie project working with some pretty awesome young people who taught me a lot of new tricks and showed me some cool toys, including the most fascinating "dolly in a lunchbox": dolly wheels and hardware set up to snap in a plywood base and rolling on an amzing collection of tubes, verandas, rails, household tubing and furniture. Motion match is sweet, and the thing does not rattle along(!).

Then a doco, shot in Costa Rica, about the current trend called "Bio-Literacy" and the work of this Foundation trying to steer the hordes of visitors into learning the gist of the biology/ecosystem so they can have fun in a way that it's in everybody's interest to conserve and prize the ecosystem instead of letting beer bottles and plastic bags lying around.

Very incredibly cool, and the cool part is that the people DO get the idea when they are in a canopy tour, flying in a harness 100 feet up, sliding from one tree the size of a freakin' tower to another, larger, down besides this bend in the river. I'm going to edit the mess of Betacams, DV's, U-Matics and the like, and wondering on how to tie their message with animations discreetly done using PaintFx to smooth the disparity of materials into "a look".

...and that in turn provoked another indie, this time mine, which will be my first in DV, as I cannot take an HD rig to some of these places, but shot with anamorphic lens to get 16:9 full frame. I'm writing something based on a legend from the Popol-Vuh, the Mayan "Creation Myth" crossed with Agatha Christie for the ocassion, as the whole thing will be there for me to use in part two of the Bioliteracy doco next year, which I'm trying to shoot myself so the jumble is more manageable ;) and, since no payment is involved (I'm not that callous yet) for the Foundation, I'd get to fly to sunny Costa Rican woods and beaches... Seems it's goin' to be a mental season... er... MERRY season.

I've gone from Varicam to Dv and back to Beta and film in the same week. I'm 'reelin''... Thankfully I just have this big RGB funnel and this big wooden spoon...

The new "crowd" stuff in XSI, is it yummy?

das K