I just submitted my Preselection Task responses to RMIT, it was an interesting exercise to do. It forced me to sit down and work on my ideas and follow them to see where they would lead. Anyway I did my best, will see what happens pretty soon.

The Melbourne Animation Festival is on, I have missed a fair bit of it but I am looking forward to see atleast the best of the festival on the weekend.

By the way I have uploaded a whole heap of my drawings to the website and I will be photographing my paintings and digitizing some more animation exercises I did years ago. So check out the gallery…

Just got a call from Kate at RMIT AIM, my application had got misplaced and just arrived! So I only have 1 1/2 weeks to do the test instead of 3! Arghhhh….alright stay calm, deep breathes….

I probably wont be posting for a week then, so here are the life drawings I did yesterday.

Thanks to John K. and ASIFA for offering this course, I am coming into it a bit late but I will try and catch up. Here are my drawing for Construction of the Head.

Here is my drawing for today:

I found that John K. of Ren and Stimpy fame has a blog! Isn’t the net great!

I started reading some of his posts about caricature and thought I would give it a go again. My first try wasn’t too good, I used to remember when I was in high school the distinguishing features of the face would just jump out at me , now I seem to be just trying to get things in the right spots. I need to practice drawing a lot more all this computer stuff dulls down the senses.

Here is a sketch I did today to get back into drawing faces.

The last week has been very hectic with getting a web host, moving my blog, doing a bit of design for the new site and getting Gallery to work with WordPress. But finally things are at a stage where they are usable, there are so many things which can be done with this new setup which I will probably explore a bit later. For now I am back to doing cartooning exercises, here is today’s:

Couple of weeks ago I put my application in for the RMIT, Master of Animation and Interactive Media, course and I received a letter acknowledging that my application has gone in but I havent heard anything more yet.

I have spent the last couple of days registering a domain name, getting a web host and transfering my blog and files across to here. There is a lot of work involved, the blog sotware that I was using before was different to this one so I had to do a lot of manual editing, lucky I swapped over before the blog got big.

Spent part of today changing the look of the blog, I am happy with it now, the animation thumbs on the side are working and I am thinking about putting little life drawing and painting thumbs on the side too.

The last week or so has been pretty technical, installing this and configuring that, so it was good to get away from it all and do some life drawing.

I have been going through some of the old animations that I did at VanArts when I attended the Summer camp program and posting them here. I have managed to put 3 of them up, you should be able to see them as 3 icons on the side bar. Unfortunately I couldn’t upload some of them because the free file host that I am using says they are too big (even though they are less than 10Mb).

That started me off on a whole new tangent, I need to have a little bit more space to put my stuff and expand, right now I am scrounging some space here and some space there and it doesnt feel organized and if I want to move things around then I think it would be a bit of a nightmare with all the links and stuff. So I started looking at different web hosts, the ones in Australia seem to be pretty expensive compared to the US ones. The best one in the US that I found is BlueHost but they dont do .com.au domain names. So I started learning about Domain Registeration in Australia and found that I could register a .com.au domain for $12 a year at intaServ. This way I can register a .com.au domain in Australia and then use a US based host to serve it out.

For a while now I have been thinking about getting my photos organized on the computer but it is such a daunting task that I have been putting it off and off. A couple of days ago I ran into a website which mentioned a photo library written in PHP for MySQL which could be used to catalogue photos and search through them.I did a wider search on the net and found a large number of other Open Source projects which were doing the same thing,so I sorted through them by looking for the ones which had been regularly updated and had the ability to store and search EXIF data and I ended up with the following candidates: Zoph, OSIC and LinPHA.

I started with LinPHA which looks quite good but had a lot of troubles after the installation. I am running Suse 10.1 on the Linux box and I think LinPHA was not developed under that platform, there seemed to be a problem with some of the files which needed to be included for PHP to connect to the database. Anyway after banging my head against this problem for a couple of hours I moved onto Zoph.

I had some login issues but eventually got it working only to find that the importing of the photos was very strange and not very nice to use. So I moved on to OSIC. It got this one working without too much trouble (probably because of the experience gained from the other installs) and it looks more organized than Zoph but it is still a young project and didn’t have all the EXIF features that I needed so after hours of wrestling with the Linux box I decided to get some sleep and to go back to LinPHA tomorrow and try to fix whatever it was that was breaking it.

It is amazing how some problems don’t look as daunting with a fresh mind. I did some searching on the LinPHA forum and found that someone else was having the same problem and there was a fix. Just uncommenting a line in that PHP file and commenting one in this PHP file and LinPHA was ALIVE! For a while anyway, it broke again when I tried uploading some images but this time I was better prepared, did some searching for include files and made sure they were all going from the TOPDIR of the web server and that fixed the problem.

Now I have started the huge task of going through all the photos, categorizing them and adding keywords to them, once this is done I will be a able to search through the photos by just typing a keyword and LinPHA will search the filenname, description and the EXIF data for a match. It will be great for my partner H as well, she is studying Graphic Design and they use photos all the time and it would be great to have her own searchable photo library. I want to use this database to make a travel website that I have been thinking about since we came back from India, but that will take a while…