Fantasy artist Régis Moulun and I talked about one of his paintings recently. This particular painting has had an effect on my own style, and how I think about making pictures.
In the video, Régis talks about the painting, and how he designed it to create maximum dramatic tension.
If you want to see more of Régis art, check out his art page on Facebook.
A special thank you to:
I was strapped for time, and came up with the bright idea of making a Keynote presentation on my iPad, exporting it as a movie, and touching it up in iMovie. That, I believed, would allow me to sneak away to work on the presentation, a couple of minutes here, and a couple of minutes there, without hiding away from family and friends. I always feel guilty when hiding away to create pictures, write a book, or edit the occasional video, but if I stopped doing that, I would not be me anymore.
Using the iPad was a big mistake! It turns out, you can record video clips in Keynote, but when you try to export them, Keynote hangs or crashes. I came up with a workaround, hide the video clips, and export slides with pictures only, then combine everything in iMovie instead.
That worked...until I discovered that every time I made a cut in iMovie, iMovie changed the color toning of one of the resulting video clips. On top of that, I discovered that when recording video in Keyonote, the sound is okay, but when recording sound only, the recording is noisy and the overall quality is pretty bad.
Eventually, I gave up, moved all video clips to my PC, and edited everything with DaVinci Resolve instead. As it turned out, DaVinci's noise filter also made a decent job of rescuing the sound recordings.
If I had used DaVinci from the start, I probably would have been ready on time. I hope I remember that lesson next time.
Enough about my video creation misadventures! What's on the video clip? Is it worth your time? If you are interested in Fantasy, Horror, and Science-Fiction art, it might be.
2020 wasn't a good year for photography, but it gave me the opportunity to think, to come up with new ideas, and to storyboard them. On the video you will find material from the one photo session I had in 2020, with the model and actress Eliza Sica. You will also find plenty of storyboards, and you will be able to compare some of the storyboards with finished photo composites.
While working on the video, it became rather obvious that my pictures changed quite a bit over the course of the year. For the better, I think. I have built connections with a number of very good artists on Facebook in 2020. That, combined with diving head first into art books by Régis Moulun, James Gurney, Frank Frazetta (well, a book with his art, not a book by him), Patrick J. Jones, and others, and practicing 3D storyboarding a lot, has made a difference.
I wish you a great 2021! The odds are pretty good that it will be better than 2020.
