Surrounding this text should now be the new version of my website, an ongoing project for nearly a year now. I've moved hosting to Inch Hosting and upgraded the entire site to Joomla 1.5. This had to be done completely manually as I wanted to rearrange some of the articles, especially as the site had now changed from its original design and needed tidying up. It also allowed me to take advantage of some cleaner template designs and menus with rounded corners. And zooming thumbnails. These things make a different, you see.

 

I've added a large number of new banners from the Bristol and Birmingham comic conventions this year, and a few more by my work colleagues. Some really great sketches in there and I'm looking forward to getting more next year when the first Cymru Con hits Cardiff in August. The comics section has been expended to add biographies for all the new artists and I'm almost done adding comments to all the sketches. I'll have to figure out what else I can add to this section in the coming months.

 

In the work section, I'm slowing filling in the gaps of my professional work and rewriting some of the older articles to bring them up to date and tweak the sometimes undiplomatic language. There's already an article about my effects work on Caradog James' Blonde promo that I did last year and there'll be further articles on Jason King's Screen Gems film Horace and the most recent Dinamo projects.

 

At Dinamo, we've now completed work on Grandpa in my Pocket and it's set to air in February on CBeebies. I spent the summer on set during filming to supervise the production and make sure that the completely digital workflow ran smoothly. Thankfully, everything went along fine and we only had a couple of minor hiccups that were more down to experience than anything else. Work continues on Telly Tales (for Children's BBC and BBC Wales) and a couple of other VFX children's projects that I can't discuss here but should be in production early in the new year.

 

My recommendations this Christmas are to watch Life, which stars Damien Lewis and has just finished its first series run on TV. It's taken a little while to get going but Lewis makes for a watchable lead and the drama is certainly more character-based than most police shows, although it still doesn't hold a candle to The Wire. The comic series Fables has also just finished its first story arc (an eleven volume epic!) and a superb finish it was too. Coupled with the news that a pilot for a TV show based on the comic has just been commissioned, I look forward to the comics continuing next year. Joe Abercrombie has now finished his fantasy trilogy with Last Argument of Kings. I reviewed The Blade Itself in a blog post last year and I can say that the final volume lived up to the promise of the first. He has a spin-off book coming out next year.

 

Until next time...