It's half past midnight on a Saturday night and I've just finished updating all the banners from the Birmingham comics convention. Perhaps I made a rod for my own back by making it an information resource but what the hell! Illness and work got in the way of finishing it last weekend. Currently, the banners are not random and clicking on them just goes to the home page, but this will be fixed soon. Also, I'm going to go through them all and add the artists names to one corner. I think it's a good idea to credit the artists more clearly even though it might mess up the composition a little.

Each artist now has a small write-up about their career plus links to their respective home pages and blogs (if available.) Also, each sketch has a description to accompany it and you can view them all by listing the entries alphabetically by artist. Hopefully as more and more sketches get done over the years, the entries for each artist will grow accordingly. There's a few I didn't get at the convention: Dave Gibbons, Doug Braithwaite, Kevin Nowlan (although I got to chat briefly to him at the end), Hunt Emerson, Gary Erskine and John McCrea, but perhaps I'll catch up with them another time. Now that I've got this resource online, I want to start commissioning work by post from artists I'll probably never get a chance to meet unless I battle through ComicCon!

On the Dinamo front, I'm finishing work on the titles for 2 Dŷ a Ni (formerly Canpunt a Mochyn) this week and looking forward to seeing the titles for Pobol Y Cwm on S4C this Monday. If I miss them, I'm not too worried as they'll be on nightly for the next five years! On Friday, I'll be at Glamorgan University giving a talk about Dinamo and then an introduction to a module I'll be leading on CG/Live Action integration. We're very keen at Dinamo to get involved with the local animation courses, especially as we'll be hiring quite a few animators over the next twelve months, 2D, 3D and compositing! CG and live action integration is a major part of our work and it's rarely covered on animation courses. Hopefully this module will give the students an insight into the local VFX industry!

The move to Joomla 1.5 is going to take longer than I expected as the two plugins for the site won't be converted to the new codebase for some time. That said, if alternatives are available then I use them instead. Personally, I want to use 1.5 because it feels better to use, has cleaner template construction and will be future proofed for 1.6 and 2.0 (where some of the more interesting features will be added.)

Now that the insane workload of the last two months is now over, I must get back to going to the cinema. There's four films I need to see (Stardust, Ratatouille, Sicko and Eastern Promises) and quite a few more on the way. I've already missed so many that my DVD rental list is growing rapidly. What's the point of paying for a Cineworld card if you don't use it, I ask myself.