Go and Play

It's Monday morning. Bleech. Oh well, at least I don't have to work long today. I'm off to meet some award winning Aussie doco maker for a documentary master class in a couple of hours. Last week I got to meet Ray Argall, who is one of Australia's most elegantly simple cinematographers, which was a bit of a thrill cause I've always admired his work. Still, bed feels like the better alternative today. Who am I? Garfield? Mondays *sigh*

Oh well, to help break up the funk, go and play over at Gnat's place. He's running an awesome contest to win some of his beautiful hand crafted glassware. Be sure to mention that I sent you because if you win I will also get another marble. I already have one of his large glass marbles from a previous contest. It sits on my shelf at home and people often can't help picking it up and commenting on it. It's tactile like that.

Funny story about that Marble actually. It features in the most bizarre way in the THIS is Alan Chapman documentary. At the start there is a play off between Alan's love of Astronomy, he even has a star in Taurus named after him, and the fact that Alan comes from a family of stars. I have a shot in the Doco of a star exploding because Alan says about His star that, "If it ever explodes you'll hear on the news that the star Alan Scott Chapman just went Supernova"... queue star exploding and title slide! It's a bit of fun and that IS the kind of thing Alan says. He's an interesting lad. Anyway, the explosion is actually a digitally manipulated photo of Gnat's marble. Wait, let me go look for a copy of it... Oooo, through the magic of editing here is one I didn't prepare earlier...

This is also the queue for the wonderful title slide music of our good friend Tich.
Talk about impressive on the BIG screen. Yeah!

Anyway, as I was saying the exploding material coming out of this star (which is actually a background NASA let me use and an eclipsed Moon I shot from my frontyard last August) is actually Gnat's marble... which is posted here. Of course, I ran a couple of digital passes over it to remove all the non-whites while still allowing the metallic elements in the marble to act as noise, then added motion blurs and animated it in AfterFX until it actually looked like an explosion. When creating special FX you really have to think outside the box, no choice.

But hey, it's still Gnat's marble under all that movie magic manipulation. And if you'd like one yourself go to Gnat's and win it.