Monsters are art...

IMDB

2011-07-06T09:19:00.001-07:00

Shakespeare's Mobile

2011-07-05T07:31:00.000-07:00

I've recently completed working as a media mentor in vfx on the film Shakespeare's Mobile for Integrate Bristol, it was great project to be involved in and acted as a nice balance to the rather more serious Silent Scream.

You can read more about the film here.

I'll post some stills and possibly clips here soon.

Living Frontiers

2011-07-05T07:28:00.000-07:00

I recently completed a grade and motion graphic for a film being shown as part of an exhibition called Living Frontiers for Zed Productions. The Telegraph wrote an article about the exhibition, which you can see here.

I'll upload some stills from the graphic soon!

Silent Scream

2011-07-05T07:27:00.000-07:00

I recently completed a colour grade for the film Silent Scream. It's the second film I've worked on with Integrate Bristol (the first being Dhag Dheer). The film deals with the very pressing problem of FGM being practiced on girls from the UK (and world wide), and whilst causing a bit of a stir has been very well received.

You can read more about it on the Integrate Bristol website here. There's also a trailer here to view, but it's not got the final grade applied.

Pictures from the event (which Alesha Dixon attended) can be seen here.

The Bristol Evening Post wrote an article about the event, you can read that here.

I'll upload some stills from this film soon.

The Golden Age of Canals

2011-05-17T05:01:00.000-07:00

ALP's latest BBC4 doc went out last night, and got viewing figures of 990,00. Which is pretty amazing, for BBC 4.

You can catch it on iPlayer, and help boost that figure, should you wish :o)

I did the grade and online, and am very happy with how it turned out.

Minecraft! Part 2...

2011-05-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

Oh dear, making a longer Minecraft timelapse seems to have killed or at least coincided with the death of my laptop :o(

About the last thing it managed was the upload to Vimeo, hope you like it:

Apparently Blogger doesn't like more than one Vimeo video embedded in each post, this would have just been an update...

Update:

Woo! Laptop fixed! :o)

Minecraft!

2011-05-02T13:08:00.000-07:00

Minecraft can be one of those distractions that gets in the way of doing something 'productive', but I've had an idea for a short film sort of thing to make with it, and this video is the very (VERY) beginnings of something actually happening to that effect. I need a more powerful computer though, my laptop does not like long draw distances :o(

Shakespeare's Mobile

2011-04-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

I'm helping out on another project for Integrate Bristol, this time is a film called Shakespeare's Mobile, which was written by a nine year old from Whitehall Primary. The first days filming was yesterday, and was a lot of fun. The Bristol Evening Post wrote an article about the project, which you can read here.

I'll post more news and pictures from this when I can, but it should be a very rewarding experience.

Creatures of Japan #01

2011-03-24T05:11:00.000-07:00

I knocked up this photograph of a bear in a crowded street in Japan. The photograph was originally by Anthony Jones, who has an an excellent blog of his photographs and work as a sound recordist in TV.

I made it look vintage 'cos that's what the kids are up to these days.

Instagram

2011-03-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in ages, despite having loads of stuff to put up... Shame on me. But, I wanted to link to a site to show something that I really, really like. Instagram is an iPhone app for photo sharing, with loads of really nice filters built in, and it's free! You can see my most recent pics here.

And to give you a bit of a preview, here's the last pic I put up:

Oh, and I suppose this may be a tease of something something up in the future...

Plastic Bullet contest part 2!

2010-11-22T06:27:00.000-08:00

I'm in the favourite submissions for day 2! Take a look:

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/blog/tag/contest-2/?utm_source=constantcontact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20101119-PlasticContestIntl&utm_content=textlink-lastcontest

Fingers crossed :o)

Plastic Bullet contest, which picture to enter!?

2010-11-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

Red Giant Software are running a contest to promote their great Plastic Bullet app. I'd love to get my mitts on some of their software, so I've decided to have a crack at it. You don't have to have taken the picture on an iPhone, but you have to have used their iPhone app to process the pic, so I picked a few shots taken on my EOS 500D when in Greece over the summer and treated them, and have a shortlist of pics that I'm uploading here.

Only one picture per person though, so now I have to pick one...

So... What exactly have I been doing!?

2010-11-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

It's been a looong time since I updated my blog, too long. I have a big backlog of stuff to post and I'll be putting it up over the next few days.

In the meantime (on the off chance someone reads this!), why not have a look at my Movember profile and maybe donate a bit too? You can check out pictures of what my facial hair is up to and help me raise money for The Prostate Cancer Charity at the same time!

Oh, and I've put my blog in the Orange Ballonacy race. Not really sure how this works, but I'll put something up especially for it soon too.

The Arch House, HDR photograph.

2010-06-03T05:50:00.000-07:00

Tony Jones (sound recordist, photographer and occasional cameraman) and I were out experimenting with HDR photography yesterday, here's my results from that:

It's the park side of the Arch House deli in Clifton Village (excellent lunches, by the way!)

Old Tractor

2010-06-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I got to escape Bristol and visit the countryside, having my camera with me I got to spend a bit of time taking pictures, here's some of an old tractor that I'm quite pleased with:

Free "Scribbles" After Effects Project!

2010-05-31T14:35:00.000-07:00

I saw a file for purchase on videohive.net (videohive.net/item/sketch/91631) that gives a sketched look to footage, and I thought to myself, I could do that!

Here's a video as an example:

"Scribbles" effect in After Effects, turn an footage into a sketch style animation! from Michael Lansdell on Vimeo.

It's a bit blocky from the compression in the example above, still, if you'd like to use this for your own footage, you can download the project here. Just drop your footage into the "source" timeline, and you're done!

One other thing you'll need is a paper texture of your own, these are easy to make (just scan some paper!), or to find online if you'd like something a bit more exciting :o), just plonk it underneath the other comps and that's it!

If you find this useful I'd love to see what you've done with it, so please let me know.

More pictures!

2010-05-28T02:21:00.000-07:00

I've been doing more Photoshop-painting kinda things again, for an upcoming project. I took the text off but one of them may give the game away...

I'm maybe not that great at people!

Nice way to spend an afternoon...

2010-05-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

Here is a preview of something we're working on at ALP. It required me to do a bit of painting (in Photoshop and with photo references though!), and that's what I'm putting up here.

What could this be for?

Photoshop brushes and what I've been up to.

2010-04-24T03:24:00.000-07:00

Not posted anything recently, I've been busy at work finishing off our current BBC series, and also squeezed in an "animated comic" for a Teachers TV programme, which I hope to post up soon. In the mean time, here are some stills from it:

It's actually illustrating the story of a boy who I worked with on the Dhag Dheer project (although he's Turkish, not Somalian), and his family's trouble with immigration officers since living here. It's a powerful story.

Slightly less serious, I recently found a lot of really cool, free custom brushes for Photoshop online, and this is what I made playing with them:

It's kinda silly and gory, but, well the blog is called Monsters Are art, what would you expect!?

I want CS5!

2010-04-13T05:09:00.000-07:00

The Rotobrush tool in After Effects looks AMAZING!

Anyway, if you want to help me win it, or have a go yourself then click here.

Awesome, thank you! :o)

Sea Fever

2010-04-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

We're putting the final touches to our latest BBC4 series at the minute, it's called Sea Fever and is three one hour programmes telling about the British relationship with the sea over the past one hundred years.

It's shaping up very well, hopefully it will be as well received as the rest of our stuff for the BBC.

More audio generated stuff!

2010-04-09T03:06:00.000-07:00

This is a work in progress audio driven video piece I've been working on, the track is called Threshold Consciousness and is by Two.Seconds.Per.Sonar . Not much more to it than that, hope you like it :o)

Updated! Now the full length of the track, but needs a bit of work in the middle still.

Threshold Consciousness Audio-Generated Clip from Michael Lansdell on Vimeo.

Dhag Dheer, complete and online!

2010-04-09T03:01:00.000-07:00

Dhag Dheer is a film made in collaboration between Integrate Bristol and the City Academy, Bristol. You can see previous posts about it here.

Well, the final film is online now!

If you'd like to watch it you can go to the Integrate Bristol website, or click here.

I hope you all enjoy it.

Free Tilt-Shift After Effects Project!

2010-03-29T02:10:00.000-07:00

I watched Dollhouse (binged rather, I also finished watching it the other day - both series) for the first time the other day, and the first seasons nifty tilt-shift title sequence reminded me I wanted to have a crack at replicating the popular tilt-shift look used here and elsewhere. This is the result of that:

Tilt-Shift Effect (+ free After Effects project!) from Michael Lansdell on Vimeo.

Now, I've seen lots of tutorials about the place to do this, but most of them go about it in a way that to me seems a bit rubbish, that is, they fade the blur in rather than increasing the intensity of the blur. What I've done is create an easily adjustable gradient layer (a pre-comped mask) that controls the amount of blur on your image.

To use the project, import your clip and drop it into the "Footage" comp. In the Depth comp, turn off the focus visibility, and use this to set up the mask on the layer "Blurred", but don't forget to turn on the visibility for the layer "Focus" again once you're done. Now you should have the tilt-shift effect visible in it's full glory in the "Mini-iser" comp, so you can export your video away!
I won't go into a full run-down of how it works here, but I'm making the project freely available for you to play around with. I'd love to hear from anyone using it, and maybe even see some examples. If the response is good I might be inclined to throw some more bits up in the future :o)

Oh, and you can download the project here.

Note that I've used the lens blur filter, this is sloooooow to render (should be about a minute to render a second, but maybe my machine isn't too hot these days!), but looks so much better it's definitely worth the wait! Also, in my example, the blur flattens out at a certain point, technically this isn't accurate, but at the level it does this it doesn't really matter, if you don't want to in your own project it's simply a matter of fiddling with the mask feathering.

The music used here is a rough mix of a track called Plateau by the excellent Silver Pyre, check out his music on the website and maybe have a look at some of the other video pieces on here and my vimeo channel using his music. The video has been used by kind permission of Guillermo Soto, check out his stuff on Vimeo too :o)

Monsters are art...

IMDB

Shakespeare's Mobile

Living Frontiers

Silent Scream

Sponsored Dog Walk

The Golden Age of Canals

Minecraft! Part 2...

Minecraft!

Shakespeare's Mobile

Creatures of Japan #01

Instagram

Plastic Bullet contest part 2!

Plastic Bullet contest, which picture to enter!?

So... What exactly have I been doing!?

The Arch House, HDR photograph.

Old Tractor

Free "Scribbles" After Effects Project!

More pictures!

Nice way to spend an afternoon...

Photoshop brushes and what I've been up to.

I want CS5!

Sea Fever

More audio generated stuff!

Dhag Dheer, complete and online!

Free Tilt-Shift After Effects Project!