Hurrah! The cold is over and spring is here. Not that is was particularly cold this winter, more like an annoying chill. I think I only wore my Thinsulate hat once!

Anyway, in the two months since my last post, we completed work on the With Temptation video, we've almost finished the effects on a short film and development work has begun on future projects, none of which I can discuss here. I'm going to post some images from the Within Temptation video soon, mainly because the video was rejected by the band causing the collapse of the production company and the loss of over half our payment. We were blamed for that loss but, in our defence, I have to point out that we had about five days to do nearly seventy greenscreen and 3D FX shots - all from under-lit and under-exposed HD which had been captured at the wrong size. In the end, I barely had time to review all the shots before they were sent off, some of which had even been shot without our supervision, and I had to redo some at the last minute because of excessive noise. Because the on-set monitor was a low-quality LCD display, the image looked brighter than it actually was and so when I came to do the compositing, I had raise the brightness of the image by about 225% to compensate, which, in turn, revealed all the digital noise. The director had been working the misapprehension that we'd be working over Christmas - no chance! - and that he could just send us loads of shots to do that he could then choose from - which planet were you from again? Under such pressures and ridiculous time constraints, I'm not surprised we failed. Anyway, lesson learnt and I won't be doing anything so stupid again.

The short film is almost complete and I'll be able to post that soon. Apart from that, there's nothing new on the work front except that I'll be redoing the Dinamo website next week and will be converting everything to flash movies (similar to Youtube) so that everything plays in the same window. I'm then going to do the same for this site, as well as post Something Real on Youtube!

For the past two weeks, I've barely been in work because I was selected for jury duty. I sat on three trials in total, one ended in a hung jury, the others were 'not guilty'. It was a really interesting experience to see the process from beginning to end and I'd be happy to do it again, mainly because I got to be foreman for the last two trials! I could have avoided it for six months but I felt it was the right thing to do and I knew there weren't any great deadlines looming. Life changing? Perhaps.

What I am looking forward to at the moment? Besides all the new development work, I'm looking forward to cinema-going in May and watching Spider-man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and (maybe) Shrek 3. Also Transformers (undecided), Bourne Ultimatum (you know it's going to be good) and 300 (greenscreen!) Out at the moment is the excellent Hot Fuzz and the rather cheerful Music and Lyrics (better than I expected.)

Enjoy.