It‘s been forever since I last posted anything; I’ve been stacked out with weddings, freelance work and my boy's birthday! Also finding out that I'm not able to have the day per week off I needed to do my MA has really taken the wind out of my sails; especially on this blog which I first started as a means of collating my diverse thoughts, primarily with regard to the MA.

I have since managed to agree 5 weeks unpaid leave per year with my employer (on top of my holiday), in order to begin exploring some of the MA projects I have in mind. As and when I get to do the course, I'll be hitting the ground running and will perhaps get more out of it.

However, first project has nothing to do with the MA; I‘m doing some visuals for a mate’s band Gojira … and man is it hard going! I'm using Quartz Composer which despite apparent simplicity, I'm finding immensely hard work! I don‘t know whether it’s just that I‘m so used to working with scripting languages that things like control structures seem overly complicated, or whether it’s simply a mind-set kind of thing that the more I use it the more obvious it will become?

The one thing I have definitely realised is that in order to actually create some kind of well crafted visual interest, it needs to actually be story-boarded in some fashion; by creating sets of colours, effects, graphics, images, movies and so on, based around each song, which can be combined in different ways in the live show, I might have a chance of creating something vaguely coherent!? We'll see!

Over the next week or so, I‘ll try to post at least some screen shots of how it’s going, in the lead up to the 2 gigs they (we) are playing at Greenbelt this year.