Self Portraits

Written on July 5, 2012 – 9:04 pm by Ding

I have a belief that anyone trying to create anything will inadvertently create self portraits of themselves over and over again without even realising.

I have started working on some pixel art for a new project and was very proud of some alterations I made on my ‘Ding sprite’ from Ego to make him a low level dungeon-crawling adventurer.

 

 

I thought that looked pretty good, until my girlfriend noticed the following things:

1) That’s probably closer to my actual hair colour anyway.

2) I appear to be wearing that particular tee-shirt today.

Right down to the V-neck.

Score one for extra confidence in a theory, lose one for falling back into artistic self-insertion habits.

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X – Gaming news without the noise

Written on March 23, 2012 – 1:57 pm by Ding

X is my new site for gaming news, reviews, opinion pieces and anything else game related.

Its USP? No comments!

I know that to not try and build a community is a heresy in this age of social media and ultra-connectivity, but frankly, when I go to a  site to read reviews or news, I don’t care what my fellow readers think. I care what the people talking to the journalists think, I even care what the journalist thinks, but anything else will either go unread or will actually put me off.

As with many things in life, if you think something, it is highly unlikely that you’re alone in that thinking and so to that end, I have created X. Maybe it’s a digital throwback doomed to failure, or maybe it’s the next big thing. Only time will tell.

I am by no means abandoning this blog – I like it, it’s green and it lets me post pictures of tortoises – but I will be shifting all of my gaming related content (apart from any development I may do to avoid a conflict of interests) to X instead of here.

And if you want to comment, you have the following options: 1) comment here, 2)dDrop me an email, 3) tweet or 4) stand in the street and shout at the traffic.

Categories: Computer Games, Projects, Writing | Tags: , | No Responses

Curiosity Killed The World

Written on August 20, 2011 – 10:30 am by Ding

As part of my Learn By Doing series of films like my stop motion adventure a few days ago, I did something in live action this time.

Lesson learnt from this video:  You can cover a lot of sins with sound.  I think every one who offers film making advice online says it, but you never really appreciate it until you record something horribly crackly.

There are some out there that might say “well if you’re not 100% happy with it, why publish it?” and to them I say good point, but also I want to share my mistakes to maybe help someone else not make them, or to feel better also making mistakes.

 

 

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Sick of Ninjas

Written on August 18, 2011 – 11:59 am by Ding

For a while now, as you might be able to tell from some of the comments I made about online broadcast technology a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been dying to make a video series of some sort, because I can’t quite work out why I haven’t already.

Today, I have taken a short break from clattering away at my keyboard to try and learn a few video editing skills, using the first few things that I could find near to my desk.  Two of those such things happened to be some LEGO figures, so that goes to explain this stupid little stop motion clip that I’ve created to try and teach myself the basics of video editing.

I found the music on a creative commons royalty free site called incompetech.  Creative commons licenses seem to be a wondrous thing that I’m going to have to learn more about, because it strikes me as the most incredible thing the internet is able to provide right now.

Things I have learnt today:  Stop motion is hard and time consuming and a real art form that I would love to dive a bit further in to and Creative Commons is the future.

 

 

Categories: Film, Learning New Things, Projects | Tags: , , , , , , , | 3 Responses

How to Make Comics Part 1

Written on August 12, 2011 – 1:30 pm by Ding

I have picked up my fair share of “how to draw comics” books that purport to tell you all there is to know about making comics in the vain hope that by reading about making comics, I will become really good at it.  These are the type of Teach Yourslef books that instruct you in the manner of creating sequential art and tend to start with the materials that you need and build from there.

Although I have several books that vary in quality, they all have something in common:  They have all universally intimidated me in terms of the materials needed to the point that it has often scared me away from doing any significant practise.

My message to anyone who wants to draw cartoons, comics or just general illustrations is to follow the only piece of advice that I have found works for me.  Practise.  Just get on and draw something.

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Listening Post

Written on August 4, 2011 – 9:09 am by Ding

Sometimes I’ll work on something and completely forget to mention it at all to anyone because it’s actually completed and completed work is something I’m so unused to that it somehow drops out of my brain and scurries away from my conscious mind.

This short film is something I wrote and starred in to help a friend over at BBC Research & Development in testing a new piece of broadcast technology (which I think ultimately broke, but in a way that was useful to the development process).  It was recently shown in a “BBC Shorts” short film festival and presenter Francine Stock  thought I might be an actor.

I can’t watch this without cringing because I wrote it and had a very firm idea of what Tim was supposed to act and sound like and this wasn’t it.  It’s a bit like if you’ve ever tried to draw something that looked so good in your head but came out oddly deformed on paper; a mocking and twisted facsimile that taunts your inability to produce art (cf. every comic I have ever drawn).

Despite this I am oddly proud of it because it is something I have worked on that is complete and Not Completely Awful.

By some odd coincidence, my friend operates under the banner of  Tortoise Butler Films and other things that she has done with various other artists can be found by clicking that link.

I’ve worked on several of them in various capacities, including some photoshop work for an amazing Portal 2 video.

I also did a little logo for her which I think is still being used.

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The Writer’s Quest Continues

Written on August 3, 2011 – 10:33 am by Ding

When this blog goes for any length of time without an update it’s normally because I have succumbed to my tortoise-like nature and become incredibly lazy, but this time it’s mostly because I have been incredibly busy.

What follows after the jump is a brief summary of my last five months or so, what I have learnt about myself, what I have done and what I am doing.

I am earning money as a freelance writer

If you want to employ a freelance writer, please drop me a line on davidDOTofDOThingATgmailDOTcom, replacing the capitalised DOTs and ATs with their relevant symbols.

At the moment I’m probably not quite earning enough to give up the day job, which is a shame, because I gave up the day job, but that just means I need to find another day job in the near future.

I am now (results pending) a fully qualified NCTJ journalist.

I did a full time course set by the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists:  An acronym that I still embarrassingly enough get muddled up whenever I say it) that finished a couple of weeks ago.  I met some fantastically talented people there, some of whom will undoubtedly be the next big thing in your favourite paper, on your favourite website or your favourite news broadcast programme.  The rest are probably sick of journalism right now and will need a break because the course is rather intense, unrelenting and tends to beat the journalism into you so hard that some of it will occasionally go right through and come out the other side.

Incidentally, if anyone reading this is interested in a career in journalism, do an NCTJ.  You won’t realise how little you know until you do.  I did mine at News Associates, who have centres in London and Manchester and although they are pricey by comparison, it is the first piece of education that I have paid for that I feel I not only got a good deal but probably didn’t pay them enough for all the work they put in.

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9 Second Lego Castle

Written on February 24, 2011 – 9:27 pm by Ding

Well, I like stop motion and I like lego…

I remember when I was young Lego used to make amazing adverts with everything building up in stop motion and flying around all over the place.  Maybe if I’m feeling ambitious I might try something similar, but for the time being I’m just proud I got this to work.  I want to try and make a little bit of traditional style animation using the same software so this has turned into a wonderful little test.

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CTS: Making background art and textures

Written on February 23, 2011 – 12:30 pm by Ding

Chaotic Tortoise Studios (CTS) is an indie games development studio that exists largely only in my mind.

I like this sprite. This sprite is not a problem. I will probably post this sprite a lot because I like this sprite.

I’ve always appreciated that to make a video game it takes a lot of work and mastery of several different disciplines.  Despite this, I’ve discovered that I never actually really appreciated just how much of this work and mastery goes in to making even the crummiest of games.  Never again will I outright dismiss a title as bad or worthless without first spending a bit of time checking the small minor details that I have overlooked. 

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CTS: Chaotic Tortoise Studios

Written on February 23, 2011 – 11:50 am by Ding

Despite being on the cusp of launching into my career as a profeshnul riter, I’ve been doing more work on fabricating my own computer games.  Putting the two together, I intend to therefore keep an ad-hoc log of my development process / journey / odyssey.  

 I’d like to say this is with the high-minded intention of helping other no-hope-want-to-be-developers like myself, but to be honest, it’s probably because I just like the sound of my own typing.

 Additional Notes:

All development-diary-like entries will now be included under the category Chaotic Tortoise Studios, and will be prefaced by CTS, because three letter acronyms (or as I call them, TLAs) are brilliant and everybody loves them.

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