Shady Art from a Sunny Place
Gosh, if you are having a great time right now but you would rather be slightly depressed then go and see one of the Van Morsel/Wiseguy Productions animations. It's very interesting animated art with amazing dialogue. It sounds like audio recordings inspired by automatic writing and one wonders from what depths of the writer's unconscious it comes from. Interesting, yet deeply disturbing.
I am lucky enough to know the artist – but I won't blow his cover here. Let me just say that he lives in a town called Nelson, the most sunny place in all of New Zealand. His art can probably be best described as the opposite.
As a start I recommend Rook but there are heaps of other yet unpublished animations by Van Morsel which I hope will be available some time on YouTube or elsewhere.
Blender
I am currently testing Blender (Blender on Wikipedia), an open source 3d program − and I find it amazingly rich in features and quite user-friendly once you did a couple of tutorials. I did a few things in Lightwave and Maya in the past but I think Blender compares quite well to those and other commercial applications − but it's free!
I am definitely no 3d pro (well, not yet that is) and just start (once again) to use a 3d software but I am really excited about Blender. Like every other professional 3d program it takes quite a while to get into it, to understand the workflow and to figure out best practices; and even then there will always be a zillion new things to discover. So don't expect to get your Pixar job offer next Monday.
In general Blender has a good and easy-to-use interface (it is not your standard everyday interface but it makes a lot of sense), it seems to be very stable, has all features you would expect of a professional 3d software, can be used both for high quality rendering and 3d game design and development (with Python scripting, game engine and logic, etc...). It runs on a lot of different operating systems like Windows, Mac, Linux, Irix, Solaris, etc...
A problem that often appears with open-source projects is poor documentation and tutorials. However, with Blender you don't need to worry. There are heaps of high quality tutorials, a good documentation and a very supportive community. For a start I highly recommend the Wikibook Blender 3D: Noob to Pro.
Open source? Free software? Comparable to commercial software? If you don't quite trust this then it would probably help to see a good example. The open movie project Big Buck Bunny is a quite recent and hillarious short animation and pretty convincing for the capabilities of Blender. See the YouTube video below, watch it on Vimeo in higher definition, download it for free or support future open movie projects and buy the DVD. And for all those geeks out there don't forget to enjoy the story over the technical details. It's entertainment after all.
Nugob on YouTube
Some of my animations can now be found on YouTube. I put quite some effort into these short films so I thought I can as well make them avaiable to a wider public. Please enjoy!
The Robbery
Those and other short films can still be found and downloaded in Quicktime format in the animation section on this website.
I think it's really about time to make a new animation. It will take time but I really feel I want to make a new animated short film. Preferably with a different style this time; but as always: the story must be right in the first place.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces was the most interesting non-fiction book that I have read in a long time – if not in all time. I can understand that it is often described as one of the most influential works of the 20th century. The book was first published in 1949. Campbell (1904 - 1987), a scholar who spent his life studying mythology of different cultures, reveals in this book of comparative mythology what he calls the monomyth. This, in blunt terms, is a common pattern or structure of all myths and stories regardless of their cultural background, based on what Jung would call the collective unconscious.
A big part of the book attends to the Hero's Journey, the said common story structure, i.e. the call to adventure, the refusal of the call, initiation, thresholds, the road of trials, the return, and a lot more that may happen in one form or another during the hero's adventure.
But this is not merely a book about structure, it is a book about the transformation of the hero, the role of mythology as a vehicle to understand life and to create value for self and society, the task of gods as icons to "transport the mind and spirit, not up to, but past them, into the yonder void" (p. 180); it is about the often underestimated or even ignored power of the unconsciousness, and how all of this can serve us today not as in opposition to modern life and science but as a precious and often forgotten enrichment to everyday life.
Sesame Street Rocks!
"A-one and a-two and a-chicka booma chick!"
Rock'n'Roll!
Love, Hate and In-Between
"Hate is an interesting thing - it drives us as much as love, although in this beige world of ours it’s more Poodle to talk about aversion, viz.;
Person 1: I say, chap, I’m feeling a strong aversion to having my personal boundaries penetrated forcibly by your good self!
Person 2: Thanks for sharing."
– Mr. Felix in The Hall of the Mountain King pt. 4
As always: delightful and painful, funny yet disturbing, fact and fancy. There were quite a few updates recently on Mr. Felix' blog: At the Back of the Green Gibbon (AKA mrfelix.blogspot.com, AKA Pak Peelips).
Reading it always makes me feel to just drop everything, abandon everyone and go on a long journey, avoiding to define a clear destination. The journey is the reward. At the same time, however, it makes me appreciate everything I have and do and cherish everyone I value in my life. In other words: it confuses me in a very entertaining way, entertains me in a very confusing way and goes so far as to make me face myself, evaluate my life and accomplishments and either question or affirm my future plans. What else could I expect of good literature? Thank you, Felix!
If that blog should ever become a book, may I suggest this title: Pak Peelips – "New Records of a Floating Life".
No Regrets
Last Friday the list of things to do in my lifetime just became one item shorter. Having missed a Rage Against the Machine concert in Munich quite a few years back (with heavy regrets) shortly before the group disbanded in 2000 (I was unconsolable) I now had the chance to see re-united Rage Against the Machine live at the Big Day Out festival in Auckland. Rage was the main reason to go to the festival and hell, it was well worth seeing them performing all the great old songs from Testify, Bombtrack, Know Your Enemy, Bullet in the Head, Vietnow, Freedom, Township Rebellion, etc... to a great finale with Killing in the Name Of.
If there is ever a next time and they don't disband quickly again I would probably go to a Rage Against the Machine only concert.
One more word about the Big Day Out in general: having been to great Open Air festivals, second to none the Open Air St.Gallen in Switzerland, the Big Day Out was pretty much the bottom of the league. Why? It felt just too controlled and restricted - and it's just a one-day festival anyway. But nevertheless way better than a day at the office, that's for sure.
Photo Overdose
Kayaking in the Abel Tasman National Park on the New Zealand South Island, just a one-hour drive from Nelson, my home town in 2006.
Get your photo overdose right here on nugob.org! I love the Silverstripe photo gallery module! I could finally upload a large amount of photos from the last 5 years to the new gallery section on this website in no time: about 500 photos in 19 galleries.
I know this is complete overkill, so below is a small(ish) selection.
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