LEARNING SOMETHING NEW

When we were first offered to work on this project with Bryan Davis, my first reaction was "That's disgusting!" It's about a sea of rats and an office full of what Kate politely referred to as "yuck" and me I was thinking something closer to this. But once we really embraced it... figuratively of course... questions came up: Are rats wet or dry? What PMS number is bile? What does a keyboard look like if you dip it in battery acid? Does sulphuric acid cause a carpet to catch on fire? So you start looking for reference... from chemical spills, to college binge drinking to exploding laptops, just to discover... these textures are amazing! And really nothing quite like what you expect when you get started. The other fun part of accepting this challenge is shooting HDRI at a photoshoot with a rat dompteur and discovering that rats do a better job when praised. I guess it's true... you learn something new every day.




At the photoshoot with Claude, Bryan, Owen, and Kate.




Our rats are not quite as cute and it makes no difference whether you praise them. Stay tuned for the final outcome of this mess.

COOL 4D INSTALLATION

It's been a while since I've had a chance to make an entry, gone subsurface to work on some cool stuff we can't talk about. Good thing there is some art out there we can talk about, like this incredibly precise 4D installation, my friend Aurelio shared with me...



Created by Urbanscreen. Germans... figures. Enjoy!

PHOTOSHOP 3D

Spent a little quality time with my old pal Photoshop, maybe because he's the least flakey or maybe because he loves me unconditionally... in any case, the new 3D functions were something of interest to me for a while, and I finally found the time to play with it, thanks to Lynda who has a course on the matter. The most surprising and fun tool I discovered is the image based modeling, which is where you can create an extrusion based on gray values in an image, i.e. white is high and black is low... great for creating landscapes, mountains or cities on the quick and cheap. You'll find that under 3D > New Mesh from Grayscale > Plane.


Make sure you start with an RGB image, not too high res, and check out the New Mesh from Grayscale > Cylinder and Sphere too. Pretty cool what you can do with this.

HIGH AS A KITE — ABOVE NEW YORK

A photographer friend of mine, Chris Conroy, sent me this amazing link allowing you to immerse yourself in New York. It was the final push for me to get a ticket and make that trip to New York, the trip I've been putting off for so long. But that's another post altogether... stay tuned.

2009 WEBSITE REFRESH

Thrilled and relieved to announce the new Raygun website with new work for 2009, and many small refinements and improvements. Thank you Monste from yummyink for getting my blog out of the starting blocks and thank you Claudia, Carolina, José and Sue from tompertdesign for an amazing job on the design and the Flash presentation and the tenacity to stick through all of my endless refinements and changes of mind. I hope you feel it was worth it.

So what's new besides the portfolio? One of the new links on top is a sitemap, just for you Kate (and anybody else who wants to see all the work on one page in 2 seconds). New, too, is a link to request the printed book as well as a direct link to iTunes where you can download our Raygun app, check it out, it's only $0.00.

And then there's a link to this Blog, a space where I am planning to provide a look inside the plasma chamber of Raygun, share timesuck links and show work in progress of interesting projects as they happen, rather than put them off until the annual portfolio refresh. And, yes, I am aware that the link here to the website and the link back on the homepage to this blog is what they call an Infinite Loop. Hope you don't get trapped...

KUTIMAN

What you are about to see is a mix of seemingly unrelated YouTube clips composited together to create a unique and new work of art, called Thru You. It's amazing, and amazing too, the creativity of Kutiman, who is behind this eclectic composition of videos and sounds. And I just love that Steely Dan drummer who opens this thing... "The Mother of All Funk Chords"

OBSERVING WATER

This project has been a collaboration with photographer Claudia Goetzelmann. The idea behind was creating an aura of water around the model standing on different postures. 3D techniques were important on this scene in order to keep the model "out of the water" without damaging her make-up, hair style and shooting set. Observing the water falling has been one of the main assets on this project. A wide H2O research, studying the light, textures, shapes, movements, speed, etc. You are thirsty, aren't you?