The Betrayal, the Post and the Boredom

The Betrayal

Awhile ago a friend of mine told me that I should get a Tumblr account. (If you’ve read my Tumblr post, this post will sound pretty familiar for a little while)

Call it boredom, but I have finally followed up on that suggestion, behold, I have a Tumblr account. Really not seeing why I even decided to create this account, due to the fact I already have a website where I write mind-boring blog posts about myself questioning, then re questioning myself… it’s all quite mental really, and now that I have a Tumblr (Drinking game, take a shot every time I say “Tumblr” =P) account I’ve basically just spread my insanity across two platforms. Three if you include my first blogging experience with Blogger.

[That’s part of the first post on my Tumblr account, I couldn’t be stuffed writing an explanation again.]

My Tumblr webpage obviously, is solely me, none of my brilliant benaball.com authors will be contributing their witty creative posts to it. The sad thing about this webpage is that it will probably run faster than my main website, because it has the backing of Tumblr’s many servers (If you don’t get tech stuff don’t even bother asking me to explain…), another sad thing is that it looks really nice and the final sad thing is that it’s far easier to post to Tumblr from my mobile devices and to write posts, than it is on my main website…

I’ve decided that Benaball will be for my bigger posts, VidLogs all the stuff I’ve already been using it for, and my Tumblr will be for little thoughts, snippets, quick photos and things like that. Chances are when school kicks back in I’ll end up abandoning both Tumblr and Benaball like I have in the past, meaning there won’t be any real frequency in posting…

Deary me, why did I bother typing tonight, I’m obviously not in the mood, I just feel so unstructured with my writing at the moment.

Anyways! So, I’ve got a Tumblr now you can follow and read if you’re interested, there, we good? No? Nevermind then, onto “the Post.”

The Post

When I was trying to write a clever quote on my new Tumblr page to show off my obviously super-natural intelligence, (…super-natural conceitedness) I ended up practically writing a post. I started a quote saying, “Imagination has no limits,[…]” then I foolishly added, “[…] or does it?” Gawd, why did you write that Ben? Surely I am aware that by writing that I would be sent into the paradox of my own questioning mentality.

I soon backspace’d my entire quote because it’d obviously grown far too large to be a quote, and decided to tell you here what I started mind bubbling about.

“Imagination has no limits, or does it?”

Does  imagination really have no limits? We say that with our imagination we can think of anything, picture anything, even sequence out in our minds how to kill, amputate and dismember the body parts of our enemies. It’s so ‘limitless’ that we feel as though we can say it’s unbound, it’s as large as space itself.

But what if our imagination is in fact limited? What if by instinct we can’t actually think of some things, but because we can’t think about it, we don’t know that it’s not there, and as I’ve said before, If we grow up with something being in our lives, we’ll see it as normal. (Imagine if you grew up and your eyes saw the colour blue as red, and the colour red as blue. You wouldn’t pick up on it at all, it would be completely normal to you because you grew up with it like that.) Could it be that out there somewhere in the universe there is a being that can imagine beyond what we can, perhaps their mind could be more advanced than ours… But we cannot imagine what things they’d be capable of imagining because, we’re not capable of imagining it! Call me mental and send me to the nearest ward, but it’s things like this that can make you incredibly confused. What are you’re thoughts on this?

Do you think that the imagination does in fact have its limits? I think it’s interesting that most the things we imagine aren’t truly original, they are often a modified version of something else we’ve already seen.

The Boredom

Boredom is probably the reason why I got a Tumblr account… although, I do have a lot to do. I have things to do, yet I’m putting them off, meaning that I’m bored until I eventually do them. I really am bored writing about boredom, and I’ve only written a line and a half… Gah, I’ll finish this post here.

 

Thanks for reading as always people.

Ben,

(P.S. This guy MUST become president! XD)

Rayman Origins

Rayman origins is the first 2d game to ever come out on a console in years, people say its not that good that 2d sucks and 3D is better. This game suprised me because all of them people who said such things about this game are loosers. Rayman 2 was one of the games i could rember renting from a video shop to play on my ps1, it had good graphics for its time it was colourfull and it was challenging. I became a fan that day, i knew this game wouldent be that bad. Well despite its name it actually based after the third rayman game just years later or somthing like that anyway its not a prequal to the first three its actually a sequal to them. Its got 60+ LEVELS!!! Most games have 25 to 30 levels plus it gets much, much harder through out the game. Most platoform games now stay easy all the way through, like the new crash and spyro games and another thing  rayman is still fun to play becuase its still owned by there founding owners (Ubsoft) also the game has changed a lot its four player and you get to play as globox and them two little blue anoying guys wich there names are on the tip of my tounge. Its 2d like i said. Rayman can’t shoot his fist as far and its a fast past game.

 [review pros=” original 2d consept” cons=”nothing ” score=100]

VidLog

Feeding Conor – Da Da Da – Official Lyric Video: VidLog

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a lyric music video for a band called Feeding Conor. During last year I designed many of the graphics for their Facebook page, their band page, and the album cover for Da Da Da.  But now it was time to create something that would really make people go “Wow.”

I had actually started this project awhile ago, but I made the mistake of trying to make the entire thing in After Effects. It was incredibly time-consuming, the lyrics were practically impossible to align with the music and I used some effects that just ended up in really blurry, unprofessional looking, results. I had about 5 lines of the song laid out in After Effects, and it had taken forever to get that far. Unimpressed with the progress of the project I decided to start from scratch with a new approach. I’d learnt my mistake, After Effects was simply no good for timing out the lyrics, and I’d wasted a considerable amount of time figuring that out.

The first step in this process was to get all the timing for the words, this was the most boring part of the production, as I had to slowly scrub through the song bit by bit and manually time out the entire song word-by-word, slow, but faster than the way I was doing it before. I did the timing in Adobe Premiere as it was far easier to listen to the audio while I was moving things around, and that’s something that After Effects doesn’t do very well.

Next I imported the data into After Effects and started to structure the scene word-by-word (again), moving the fonts around etc. Once I’d finished all the lines of the song it was time to start designing the atmosphere. At first I had planned on having a bland grey and white gradient background with a little texture around the edges. I decided to fiddle around with the look a bit, I made the gradient dark, and added a basic fractal noise generator in the background as well.

After a bit of thinking I just made it 3D. In After Effects I added a (virtual) camera, set up the words in a 3D room, added a particle system followed by a 3D lens flare and some more minor particles faintly distinguishable in the background. At the beginning, some old footage I filmed of an electric guitar was also included… probably didn’t need to bother with that, but anyhow.

I rendered out two versions to start with, it took 1 and a half hours to render because of all the camera rotation and massive amount of particles, the first version was basically the final product, just minus a few extra animations. The second version was the same, except it had a constant flow of particles towards the right hand side of the video, the whole way through.

I rendered out a third, which removed the flowing particles and in turn gave more emphasis on the actual text, which was the objective of the video in the first place… Tis’ a lyric video after all. I also added a little bit of colour correction, added “Da Da Da” underneath the Feeding Conor logo at the start and tweaked some of the words a bit as I thought they needed adjusting.

FINALLY, I did a fourth render, I used the video from the third render, added the spacey images of the band members at the end along with a lightning effect and the final promotion stuff. The other thing to note about the fourth and final render is that I actually mixed it with the second render, which had the flowing stream of particles. I thought that the flowing stream of particles made the end part of the video look a lot more electrifying and bright . . . so meh.

 

You can watch the final video here:

 

Be sure to check out Feeding Conor’s Facebook page if you haven’t already.

 

Thanks for reading, I’m off to watch Leverage. (One of the best shows in the entire world)

 

Ben,

The Eye

Ok. So i got really bored and decided to make this really cool ‘Eye’ picture using Corel PHOTO-PAINT X3.

This is the photo that i started off with: (As you can see it is a really crappy, low quality picture)

Starter Picture

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And after a lot of time and effort (not realy… it only took about two hours…ok that sounds like a long time but i did it all by hand (with the tablet) so really its not) this is what i came up with:

The Eye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was gonna put how i did it and everything but i can’t be bothered right now. I may do so at a later date though.

Merci et béni soit,

Blaise.

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The Hidden Facts of Everyday Objects

Hello!!

How is everyone? With 2012 now in action, we are discovering what challenges lie ahead, what things we want to accomplish etc. I mean, it’s all in a day’s work right?

Anyway, the point of this post was to point out some peculiar things that happen everyday, yet we seem to not notice them due to the fact it occurs with inanimate objects…

For example, have you ever put a wire coat hanger in a wardrobe, then come back six months later and found a whole lot of them? Waited another 6 months and found a full wardrobe with coat hangers all over the floor,  the coat hangers being bent, broken, intertwined etc? No one ever sees how they multiply, how they manage to accomplish such feats…

Yep, believe or not, they have sex life.

You may now be wondering why the heck I am writing about this, are you not?

It is a serious issue, it happens everywhere and not just with coat hangers either. Ping-pong balls are another one. Each ping-pong ball has a colour on it somewhere, and each colour is part of the light spectrum (or the rainbow). The balls with a warm colour (red, orange, yellow) are the females, while the balls with a cool colour (blue, indigo, violet) are the males, bearing in mind that green is neutral.

Get 2 packets of ping-pong balls, one packet containing a warm colour and the other a cool colour. Open them and put them in a cupboard, making sure all the balls are in their correct packets. Come back a few weeks later, and there will be a ball missing from each packet, after which you usually find a few ping-pong balls more in the house than you actually started with…

Put one male and one female in an empty box together, and you guessed it, a full box after 6 months. As usual, it is known to happen everyday but we just don’t know how it happens…

There are continued investigations by residents that have noticed this happen with coat hangers, and people that play ping-pong have also started investigations… Just remember though, this has been happening for many years, but has only been investigated in the last decade.

On that note, I shall depart. Keep your eyes open everyone, and maybe we can learn more about this issue!

Bye for now,

Fester.

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