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Gotta plug these guys. http://www.wongfuproductions.com
They've been churning out personal short films and music videos for a few years now and it's great to see how they've improved from when they first started out. Great work, guys.
This RenderMan related tutorial shows mainly how to animate RenderMan shaders in Maya. To illustrate this tutorial, I decided to create an Ocean shader animated purely through the use of procedural textures with RenderMan.
This tutorial isn't a guide on how to create a photorealistic ocean shader in any way. No real world ocean effects like frothing and waves collision - none of that. That would be a whole new tutorial on its own.
For some purposes though, this simple effect may be good enough for production. Here's the final clip: http://www.timshim.com/downloads/ocean_demo.mov. The compositing work was quick and dirty - I added in a still image of a sky picture and animated it to match the ocean somewhat. Not very good but better than leaving a black hole for a sky.
So here we go ...
Step 1
Create a NURBS plane. Create > NURBS Primitives > Plane. This will be our ocean surface.
Step 2
Before creating the Shader in RenderMan's RAT, you'll need to add a new Maya attribute to the NURBS plane. Later, we'll link this attribute to the RenderMan shader. To clarify this a bit before going further - the reason for doing this is simply because we are not able to key the attributes directly in RenderMan's Slim palettes. Thus, we'll have to connect it to an external Maya attribute which is keyable (animatable).
Ok. On with the tutorial.
First, select the NURBS plane and in the Channel Box, rename the NURBS plane to 'oceanPlane'. This is to ease remembering the name of the object - we'll need it later on.
In Maya, select the NURBS plane and, from the menu, click Modify > Add Attribute ...
Attribute Name => OceanWaves
Minimum => 0
Maximum => 1
Default => 0
The rest of the options can be left at their defaults. Click 'Add' and we're done here.
Step 3
Now we create the ocean shader.
Open up a new Slim palette from the RenderMan menu and create an Ensemble. RenderMan > Slim > New Palette. In the new Slim palette, File > Create Appearance > Ensemble > Ensemble. Rename this Ensemble to 'Ocean'. This is optional, but good practice for obvious reasons.
Step 4
Double-click the Ensemble to open up its Attribute Editor. Plug in a 'Glass' surface into the 'Surface' attribute. Here are my settings.
Step 5
Now let's add some displacement (or rather, bump) to the shader. Go back out to the Ensemble's attribute panel. Plug a 'Simple' into the 'Displacement' attribute. Here are my settings.
Step 6
Now we'll add a Brownian fractal to simulate the look of an ocean. In the Simple panel, in the Displacement attribute, plug in a 'Brownian' (Pattern > Brownian).
This is where we need to link the 'Fourth Dimension' attribute to the OceanWaves Maya attribute we created in Step 2.
Ok, now there's this quirk with RenderMan's UI that I thought isn't too intuitive. Apparently, for certain panels, like in this example, we are able to 'toggle' between two different interfaces. It isn't apparent at first until you read the Info by clicking on the [i] next to the panel name. In this case, it's the [i] next to 'Brownian Parameters'. Even then, the intructions isn't exactly clear on how to do this toggle.
Here's how. Close the Brownian Parameters area by clicking on the down arrow. Now this time, hold Control and click on the arrow again to open up the Brownian Parameters area. Now we see the other interface.
Now we can input the only line of TCL code needed to link the 'Fourth Dimension' attribute to the OceanWaves attribute of the NURBS plane. Click on the input button to the right of the 'Fourth Dimension' field and select 'TCL Expression'. This is the line of code we need to input in the field: [mattr "oceanPlane.OceanWaves" $f]. 'oceanPlane' is the object name and 'OceanWaves' is the attribute we created for the object earlier. The $f here is important as it tells the shader to update on every frame. And my deductive powers tells me 'mattr' probably stands for 'Maya attribute'.
That's all there is to it. Now your shader is connected to your Maya attribute and when you change or key the OceanWaves attribute, the 'Fourth Dimension' attribute in the Brownian shader will update as well.
Step 7
This is an optional step but I did it anyway. This step simply links the Brownian node to the Specular of the 'Glass' shader. Open up the Slim palette, right click on the Ocean shader and select Call Graph > Graph Children. Middle click the Brownian node and drag the arrow onto the Glass shader. Select 'Specular Strength' from the pop up. Done.
Step 8
Okay, now to animate the OceanWaves attribute. This is simple enough. Select the NURBS plane. In the Channel Box, we see the new attribute 'Ocean Waves' in it. Set a key on frame 1. Then change the 'Ocean Waves' to 1.0 and set another key on frame 50. What I also did is to cycle offset the animation graph so the animation will run indefinitely.
And there you have it. Given it isn't exactly a perfect Ocean simulation but it illustrates how to animate textures with RenderMan in Maya. Thanks for reading, please leave comments or feedback. If you've got a better way of doing this, please let me know and I'll post your feedback as an update to this tutorial. Cheers.
The Ten Rules for Web Startups from Evan Williams' blog. Evan's the founder of Odeo, an audio recording and sharing web app built with my current favorite new web technology, Ruby on Rails.
#1: Be Narrow
Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there's less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there's a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope - and you can do so with leverage.
#2: Be Different
Ideas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about - and probably working on - the same thing you are. And one of them is Google. Deal with it. How? First of all, realize that no sufficiently interesting space will be limited to one player. In a sense, competition actually is good - especially to legitimize new markets. Second, see #1 - the specialist will almost always kick the generalist's ass. Third, consider doing something that's not so cutting edge. Many highly successful companies - the aforementioned big G being one - have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have "blog" in their name, RSS companies "feed," or podcasting companies "pod" or "cast"? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.
#3: Be Casual
We're moving into what I call the era of the "Casual Web" (and casual content creation). This is much bigger than the hobbyist web or the professional web. Why? Because people have lives. And now, people with lives also have broadband. If you want to hit the really big home runs, create services that fit in with - and, indeed, help - people's everyday lives without requiring lots of commitment or identity change. Flickr enables personal publishing among millions of folks who would never consider themselves personal publishers - they're just sharing pictures with friends and family, a casual activity. Casual games are huge. Skype enables casual conversations.
#4: Be Picky
Another perennial business rule, and it applies to everything you do: features, employees, investors, partners, press opportunities. Startups are often too eager to accept people or ideas into their world. You can almost always afford to wait if something doesn't feel just right, and false negatives are usually better than false positives. One of Google's biggest strengths - and sources of frustration for outsiders - was their willingness to say no to opportunities, easy money, potential employees, and deals.
#5: Be User-Centric
User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it's sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks. Don't get sidetracked by technologies or the blog-worthiness of your next feature. Always focus on the user and all will be well.
#6: Be Self-Centered
Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires. (But don't trick yourself into thinking you are your user, when it comes to usability.) Another aspect of this is to not get seduced into doing deals with big companies at the expense or your users or at the expense of making your product better. When you're small and they're big, it's hard to say no, but see #4.
#7: Be Greedy
It's always good to have options. One of the best ways to do that is to have income. While it's true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company's ass. In other words, design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months (and do it with PayPal). Done right, charging money can actually accelerate growth, not impede it, because then you have something to fuel marketing costs with. More importantly, having money coming in the door puts you in a much more powerful position when it comes to your next round of funding or acquisition talks. In fact, consider whether you need to have a free version at all. The TypePad approach - taking the high-end position in the market - makes for a great business model in the right market. Less support. Less scalability concerns. Less abuse. And much higher margins.
#8: Be Tiny
It's standard web startup wisdom by now that with the substantially lower costs to starting something on the web, the difficulty of IPOs, and the willingness of the big guys to shell out for small teams doing innovative stuff, the most likely end game if you're successful is acquisition. Acquisitions are much easier if they're small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go. And keeping valuations low is possible because it doesn't cost much to start something anymore (especially if you keep the scope narrow). Besides the obvious techniques, one way to do this is to use turnkey services to lower your overhead - Administaff, ServerBeach, web apps, maybe even Elance.
#9: Be Agile
You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time - but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups - except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr's company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong. That's why the waterfall approach to building software is obsolete in favor of agile techniques. The same philosophy should be applied to building a company.
#10: Be Balanced
What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can't be all the time. Nature requires balance for health - as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I've found than David Allen's GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you'll have a secret weapon.
#11 (bonus!): Be Wary
Overgeneralized lists of business "rules" are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.
"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic," speech at the Sorbonne, Paris (April 23, 1910)
AppleInsider - Apple's Jobs tweaks his $9M glass cube
Another reason why I admire Steve Jobs so much. He spends his own money on company-related endeavours that are more art than business. It's this passion for the company and his work that inspire me so much. Really, how many other CEOs that you know of who would spend his own money on the company he works in like this? Steve is not just a businessman, he's also an artist. He just paints with money.
Note that this glass cube is nothing more than the ENTRANCE to the underground store. That's what I call a Grand Entrance.
Just recently, a friend of mine from the US told me that smoking is very 'un-cool' there, his words not mine. According to him, most Americans are pretty much against smoking, even among the younger generations. I was surprised.
Because also, just recently, I watched George Clooney's 'Good Night and Good Luck'. And it seemed like everybody smoked. That triggered a curious thought. Not only in that film, but also in most American films, smoking has always been acceptable and in a lot of cases, cool as it is usually linked to the main characters of the film - think Constantine.
So this got me thinking. Have the tobacco companies resorted to financing Hollywood films (at least partially) in exchange for the ability to brainwash audiences into thinking that smoking is cool? I believe so. It seemed so obvious but the way they are doing it is so subtle it's almost beautiful, in a marketing sort of way. No name branding, no logos, nothing to infer any sort of product placement. Subliminal advertising at its best.
I am neither for or against this nor do I claim this as fact. Merely just pointing out an interesting observation I made. The rest is for you to decide on your own. Good night, and good luck.
by George Carlin
The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.
We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.
We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space.
We've done larger things, but not better things. We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill.
It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete. Remember, spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever. Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.
Remember to give a warm hug to the one next to you because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn't cost a cent. Remember, to say, "I love you" to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you. Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again. Give time to love, give time to speak and give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.
The Art of Motion - Google Video
Interesting concept for a music video. I might try something like this one day.
I heard about this 'revolutionary' camera sometime back last year and posted a discussion on the Cinematography.com forums. Lo and behold, I got a reply from the creator of this brand new camera. His name is Jim Jannard and most of you probably won't know who he is. I myself didn't know who he was then but through the geeky grapevines, I learned that Jim is the Founder and now Chairman of OAKLEY! (Really, I kid you not)
When someone of that stature makes a statement that he's out to create something revolutionary, you don't take it lightly. After all, he's got a track record for doing it.
So now, fast forward to 2006, the RED team will be making an official announcement with a prototype of the RED camera come NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) and I believe it's going to be a huge thing, especially for the independent filmmaker. Jim himself said that the camera will be priced with the indie filmmaker in mind. This is mind-boggling, really, as this camera, according to the specs on RED's website blows ALL the high-end cameras from Panavision, Sony, Panasonic and just about anything else in it's league right out of the water! And these cameras cost more than your average house. In any case, we won't know what Jim means by 'priced for the indie filmmaker' until we actually see the numbers. Soon. soon.
Here are links to the RED website, some recent info about RED and an interview with Jim on HDforIndies:
This short 15 second commercial was a project I completed earlier this year for a local food manufacturing company. It's a full animation piece, the highlight being my 3D animated character(s). This spot was aired on national television as well as on Asia's cable network, Astro, over the Chinese New Year period.
I wouldn't really call it a concept, but the main goal of this short ad was to make it appealing to children, hence the liberal use of bright, saturated colors - namely red and yellow. And of course, the introduction of the animated lion (not real lion, lion dance kind of lion), which was animated more like a puppy dog to make it look more friendly and dare I say it, cute. Ah, well, the people you have to please in this line of work.
Modeled, Textured and Animated in Alias Maya with fur created using Joe Alter's Shave & A Haircut.
Save the QuickTime movie here: http://www.timshim.com/downloads/DahfaCNY_Spot.mov
A short passage I found somewhere sometime back. Don't know where it's quoted from but it must have been meaningful for me to have copied and pasted it into Notepad. Here it is:
'Starting a company is not like finding a new job. With a new job, you want something that is interesting, pays well, enables you to reach your personal goals, etc, etc. It's a stopping point along a journey.
Starting a company is very different. Your passion for the business should come from your heart. It's not something that "matches your abilities," but something that compels you to put everything on the line. So when something moves you to this extent, you've found it. You don't necessarily go looking for it like you would read the "Jobs Wanted" section of the classified ads.'
This is the text of the Commencement address to the graduating students of Stanford University by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
Steve put in words exactly what I've always believed in. I have this text printed out and thumbtacked to my board to remind me that we should never stop learning, never stop craving for knowledge. Also, coming from a man I admire perhaps a tad too much, his speech certainly reveals a bit more about how he thinks and acts, which I find truly inspiring. To no end.
Here's his speech:
You've got to find what you love.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
This is amazing shit, really. The video demos showcasing this product for using film lenses with a DVX-100 video camera is simply the best looking video looks I've ever seen. Given they've probably also treated the videos using Magic Bullet but the shallow Depth of Field and focus blurs are just so beautiful it's hard not to salivate at the possibilities this would offer for filmmaking practitioners such as my goodself.
Wish the website had more details, though. In any case, I will most definitely keep an eye out for this product.
Update: A short film shot with the CineMek G35. Wow, yet again. http://www.mysimilo.com
Useful to me, probably useless to the vast majority. This short list is my way of bookmarking some of the more interesting sites I check out every so often for fun and learning.
In no particular order,
Scott Adam's Dilbert Blog. I like his wit and sense of humor and his far-out 'theories'.
Guy Kawasaki's Blog. This one speaks to the entrepreneur in me.
HDForIndies. This one speaks to the geek in me. In binary, no less.
Presentation Zen. This one speaks to the zen master in me. Heh ... right.
Kenny Sia's Blog. Fellow Kuchingite and friend of a friend who's now a friend.
ProLost. Stu Maschwitz's blog. Geek alert! Very high concentrations of geek content.
TUAW. The Unofficial Apple Website. Not really a blog, per se. Speaks to the Apple fanboy in me.
Cinematography.com. Ok, this is so totally not a blog but it's THE place I go to everyday to read forum posts. Occasionally, I post, too.
CGTalk. Every CG Artist's destination for answers to such mundane questions as 'How do I get Renderman to render blackhole matte passes using RibBox?'
So there.
Another MV I managed to dig out of the archives. This one was for Shal Sagan.
Conceptually, this piece was inspired by a Lomo camera which I bought when I was in Singapore for Resfest 2004. In fact, some of the stills in the video were taken with that same Lomo camera, which died after I finished the video and had to bring it back to Singapore to be replaced.
Photographed with 35mm still film and DV, the essence of the story is a teenage girl's search for the meaning of life.
As always, here's the link: http://www.timshim.com/downloads/MessageInABottle.mov.
I dig this sort of stuff.
God's Debris is a book I stumbled upon on the web just recently. I downloaded and started reading and finished all 132 pages within a few hours.
This book is about Religion, Science, Beliefs, Reality, God, Einstein and much more.
Strangely enough, God's Debris was written by Scott Adams, the guy who does the Dilbert cartoons.
Click on to read an excerpt from the introduction Scott gives to see if it's your cup of tea. Oh, and the book is free so you can either head on to Scott's website to read more and download the book or you can download it right off my site by clicking here. (Right click then Save as, please)
God's Debris - Introduction
This is not a Dilbert book. It contains no humor. I call it a 132-page thought experiment wrapped in a fictional story. I’ll explain the thought experiment part later.
God’s Debris doesn’t fit into normal publishing cubbyholes. There is even disagreement about whether the material is fiction or nonfiction. I contend that it is fiction because the characters don’t exist. Some people contend that it is nonfiction because the opinions and philosophies of the characters might have lasting impact on the reader.
The story contains no violence, no sexual content, and no offensive language. But the ideas expressed by the characters are inappropriate for young minds. People under the age of fourteen should not read it.
The target audience for God’s Debris is people who enjoy having their brains spun around inside their skulls. After a certain age most people are uncomfortable with new ideas. That certain age varies by person, but if you’re over fifty-five (mentally) you probably won’t enjoy this thought experiment. If you’re eighty going on thirty-five, you might like it. If you’re twenty-three, your odds of liking it are very good.
The story’s central character has a view about God that you’ve probably never heard before. If you think you would be offended by a fictional character’s untraditional view of God, please don’t read this.
The opinions and philosophies expressed by the characters are not my own, except by coincidence in a few spots not worth mentioning. Please don’t write me with passionate explanations of why my views are wrong. You won’t discover my opinions by reading my fiction.
The central character in God’s Debris knows everything. Literally everything. This presented a challenge to me as a writer. When you consider all of the things that can be known, I don’t know much. My solution was to create smart-sounding answers using the skeptic’s creed: The simplest explanation is usually right.
My experience tells me that in this complicated world the simplest explanation is usually dead wrong. But I’ve noticed that the simplest explanation usually sounds right and is far more convincing than any complicated explanation could hope to be. That’s good enough for my purposes here. The simplest-explanation approach turned out to be more provocative than I expected. The simplest explanations for the Big Questions ended up connecting paths that don’t normally get connected. The description of reality in God’s Debris isn’t true, as far as I know, but it’s oddly compelling. Therein lies the thought experiment:
Try to figure out what’s wrong with the simplest explanations.
The central character states a number of scientific “facts.” Some of his weirdest statements are consistent with what scientists generally believe. Some of what he says is creative baloney designed to sound true. See if you can tell the difference. You might love this thought experiment wrapped in a story. Or you might hate it. But you won’t easily get it out of your mind. For maximum enjoyment, share God’s Debris with a smart friend and then discuss it while enjoying a tasty beverage.
- Scott Adams
Bryan asked me to whip out a short video to be sent to the Producers of The Amazing Race Asia in Singapore as an audition piece for him and Liz.
I shot this one afternoon on a rainy day and had it completed a day or two later. Had to dub that night's episode of The Amazing Race to get Phil's (is that his name, I forget) conjecture when he says 'You're the first team to arrive' as well as 'You're the last team' since we re-created two scenarios of Bry and Liz being first and last.
The first part of the video is a precursory introduction and 'why you should pick us' type of stuff. The rest of the video are fun re-enactments of Amazing Race moments.
Right click then Save as to download the video from this link: http://www.timshim.com/downloads/Bryans_AmazingRace.mov.
Old news but might as well plug a short film I produced with a friend as a spec for a commercial. It's called 'A Taste Of Love' and follows the story of a young man in search of that certain something which reminds him of someone he loves. This short film explores the idea of how we associate physical things with an emotional connection. This film won the Audience Award in Korea's AISFF (Asiana International Short Film Festival) 2005.
Another piece of oldie but goodie is my very first Music Video which I wrote, directed and everything in betweened. It's called 'Masih' - the Malay word for 'Still', as in 'I still have this inexplicable itch on my bottom'. The band's name is Evenstarr. The concept for this video revolves around the idea that the band members have these alter egos - geeky, fanboy school students who are on their way to catch the real band at a gig.
So what're you waiting for? Me to give you the links? Uhmm ... right
A Taste Of Love - http://www.sarawakfilmsociety.org/onlinefilms/alwyntay/
Masih - http://www.79studios.com/evenstarr/
Perhaps I'll elaborate on the Making Of for each of these in a later entry. Check back later.
Have been toying around with Ruby On Rails and its AJAX implementation. Checked out programming in Ruby for the first time and it's pretty sweet. Love how the language is so 'zen-like'.
Here's a link to a RoR demo I did using Flickr's API. What this demo does is pull up a list of 30 thumbnail images from Flickr using words you input in the search tags field. (Sorry, no porn, though. Flickr's fault. Not mine.)
Ch-ch-check it out! http://www.shim.tv