A Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you all. This little video is something I shot yesterday whilst freezing my parts off on the balcony. Directing the two gnomes must have looked quite entertaining, and I could almost hear Cecilia laugh from the couch inside our apartment.

Of course, a christmas card wouldn’t be anything without a matching tune, so I had to compose my own version of Santa’s Coming To Town. Enjoy!

So, I went along and got myself a new Canon 7D. The mere thought about having the ability to shoot full 1080 HD video in 24 or 25 fps, using the good old canon lenses was just too tempting. The other day me and friend Martin Botvidsson took a stroll (or rather, stood still) in the central parts of Stockholm. Me with the 7D and Martin with his 5D mkII.

Now, the film is pretty boring in itself, mainly due to the fact that I didn’t plan anything but just tested the camera in low light conditions. Everything is shot handheld or ‘placed-camera-on-surface’ in 24p with a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens (left wide open). Shutter speed is 1/50 and ISO set to 500. No grading/coloring altered in post. The soundtrack is something I whipped together some month ago in Logic 8 when being ill at home. The best part in the video is probably the last 3 seconds (the end-credits or whatever that animation is called). I made that in Cinema 4D & After Effects).

For the next 7D experiment I’ll try to think out some sort of script/storyboard, and *then* shoot video. Or maybe not.

Here’s a small wip-sample of how one of the images turned out.

A black creature visiting the lawn.

BonZai 3D

A few days ago I stumbled on some news about a new 3D-tool. Appearently, creators of Form•Z – AutoDesSys – had released a first version of a lightweight modeller called BonZai 3D. The word was out that this software should compete in the same arena that Google’s SketchUp does with push/pull-modelling. I’m no die-hard 3D expert at all myself, and I have always been very frustrated whenever I’ve used software like Cinema 4D and tried to create bevelled edges, booleans etc. It simply just doesn’t work to model stuff the way I want to do it. If you for example want to create a dice with nice and smooth rounded edges around the dice as well as around the edges of the small holes on each side, you have to use quite extensive cutting & carving with the knife tool. Sure, you can use a boolean to create the dips on the dice’s sides, but you won’t be able to round the edges without having lots of artefacts of ugly edges.

So, I downloaded a trial version of this new software called BonZai 3D, installed it and booted the software on my Macbook Pro. After finally finding out how you move around in the workspace (rotating the scene is Cmd + right mouse button…) I started to model a simple dice, and found out that the boolean tools together with rounding of edges seemed to work really good. It shows that BonZai 3D is a 1.0 release since the interface is nowhere as polished as other 3D software. Speed is not as snappy as Google Sketchup, but everything seems to work as wanted. The only weird thing I experienced was that I couldn’t open a previously saved document, perhaps due to the fact that I moved it from one folder to another. Eventually I could get the file to open and could continue.

I then exported the model into 3D Studio format and from there imported the model into Cinema 4D. That worked perfectly too.

In short, BonZai 3D seems like a tool that I really could start to like. A quick & easy to use modeller with the same approach as Google Sketchup, but with the same precision and accuracy as Form•Z. I hope to be able to free up some time & create more complex models in the future.

3D-assembly and render made by Important Looking Pirates and sound design by Redpipe. The soundtrack itself might not be worth mentioning at first look/hearing, but it actually consist of more than 60 tracks of layered audio. Oh, and I’m the one behind the sounds of all signatures being written =)

Take a look at the result here.