Internet is usually a good way for me to come up with original ideas for my English writing works. It has got me off the hook many times. But in the latter case, I can’t say it was a resounding success.

I jumped between different websites I’m used to visit, relying on them to find some kind of amusing topics through the tremendous amount of information but I didn’t deemed any of them fitted to the kind of work I had to do.

I was hesitant about talking about two articles found on wikipedia. One of them was about a book given to the soldiers involved in the Normandy landings. It was called “112 gripes about the french”. The purpose of this book was to help the soldiers to put up with the french people and their strange habits.  Now we have a hindsight of 50 years I thought it was quite funny to quote this book. But I refrain from doing this because it was hard to put my phrases through quotations.

The second one dealed with a ceremony which closely mimics the Nobel prices awards ceremony in a humorous way. During this ceremony, the laureates receive an award called the Ig Nobel price for discoveries “that cannot, or should not, be reproduced”.

I really get a kick out of this kind of happening. So I started to write something about it but nothing came out. Even if of the two articles mentioned, this one was the most interesting, I was really not inspired. Inspiration really depends on the day !

Here they are:

BRAVIA PAINT – BEHIND THE SCENES

THE TRANSCRIPT:

First of all,  what we’re doing, what we’re really doing is filming a 66 second firework display.
missing word(s) firework being explosive with light, we’re doing with painting liquid.

We wanted to more … a little bit from the bottles… so we’re up in this place which was like fireworks, paint explosions, landmines of color.

DAVID PATTON: It’s a unique idea. It’s an iconic idea. And it’s never been done before. And it’s an attempt in a high scale.

RICHARD FLINTHAM: On the set for the shoot there were two hundred people. They can missing word(s) on the shoot. And now you get some idea of the scale of this.

There is no doubt Johnathan Glazer was absolutely the right choice for director

He knew what to keep from balls and what not to keep from balls. And he made, you know, a similar celebration expression which is much more punk with more attitude.
San fransisco needed the balls, Glasgow needed the  paint, I think.

PETER RAEBURN: This whole project is about formats and I think there’s an attitude that’s has to be very liberate or quite free. We were looking at this sort of music which is quite

CHRIS WILLINGHAM: I think Glasgow is a fantastic place but the weather is a little bit of a challenge.

SIMON COOPER: After two weeks of absolutely beautiful sunny still weather, we’re back to Glasgow weather.

CHRIS WILLINGHAM: When you’ve got an entirely cloudy sky and, you know, you’ve got one of the biggest shots and two days to reset it if it goes completely wrong.
It takes a quite extraordinary director of the photograhpy to call “action” when it’s probably a hole missing word(s) in this sky.

The days approaching the shoot, I was quite nervous and I guess it wouldn’t be missing word(s) about to blow up a building in Glasgow.

The fact that you are on the set and you’re all the time like thinking you know I fail. Touch that cable  that there is something go off you hope the building is not gonna be collapse in paint.

Is that a two weeks paint missing word(s).

Ok is everyone 100% ready ? missing word(s) you’re ready ? First team  you’re ready ? Colors you’re ready ? You’ve got the trigger, right ? You’re all

There was no room for failure at all, it was one take for evrything, it was kind of  high nerves  ,  but very exciting.

Ok Go us! Three…

woh woh woh!

You’re not ready ?

No ! When I said “action”, Alex !

OK

DUNCAN MCWILLIAM: we have a team of 6 of us working since middle april now. And that’s this week that is starting to be signed off which is four months and a couple of weeks later. And we’ve be working solidly on it every day. Because all that technologies advance, we are still pushing the limits.

A clown, I guess is an interesting element to this because it’s not paint blowing up, it’s sort of a human moment.

PAUL WATTS: This feeling at the end of the day was  that if you could set up the big moment when it missing word(s) and the whole building goes up in the rainbow colors it felt like it gave that moment even more wait and power.

We’re going through the color missing word(s) all the way to the top of the building. We’re using direct sunlight, backstreet water and it should be vibrant colored  spectrum available.

It’s like a missing word(s) of color like you’ve never found.

Stand by ! Keep throwling, you’re hot.

Three, two, one…

Penguins April Fool – The Making Of – BBC

THE TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker: In the world of special effects, anything’s possible espacially on april fool’s day.

Natural history presenter : Is that amazing !

Speaker: they wanted flying penguins for a TV trail. It will join a long tradition of BBC april fools. Stretching back to the nineteen fifty’s. But how did it happened ?

Richard Hall: What we wanted to do is create a hypothetical moment that might come from BBC natural history unit and use it talk about a sort of unmissable content you’ve got on BBC outlet.

Speaker: We’re going behond the scenes to see exactly how the impossible was maked possible.The first stage was to find some real penguins footage

Neil Riley: It started by throwling through XXX hundreds of stock footage to find our best penguins shots from the BBC librairies.

Speaker: It was then the job of the animators to create the flying penguins.

Darren Walsh: Our task was really hard to get a penguin able because they ‘re clearly not designed to fly. We tried several approaches. I think the very first was vertical take off. Most of it looked to XXX. During our search we discovered one specie of birds Gilmarked that seemed to most close resemble the penguins. That is pretty much what we based our flying penguins on.

Neil Riley: We started by building a very rough wireframe skeleton of the penguins. And then knot needs to be textured and leaked to get the realism required for then to sit well into the stock footage.

Speaker: with the animators on the way creating the penguins, it was time to film the live action and insert our natural history presenter played by Terry Jones.

Director: We’ve shooted Terry Jones on green screen and on a set of snow that we’ve got to made up to look like the antartic.

Speaker: To make him look like if he was really in the antartic, he was sprayed with faked snow and ice and wind machine created a breezer on his fur collar. The special effects people worked also on set to check that the shot would work with the real background and the animated penguins.

After the filming, the footage was send to the post production team to bring it all together. When an actor is filmed against a green screen everything that is green become cancelled out and replaced with the required background.

Composer: For a job like this which takes in all form of footage: we’ve got a stock footage, we’ve got a live action being shot, we’ve got computer generated penguins. There is an awful lot of details need to be taken care of to put together something that creates a believable piece of nature history

Speaker: So with the mastery of special effects the impossible was realised.BBC I player. Making the missable unmissable.

I went first ont Julie E.’s blog. It was almost perfect in my opinion. The only comment I’ve writed was:

Hello.  I’ve just started browsing the blogs to suggest my correction and how lucky you are ! You’re the first on the list .
But you’re lucky twice. I haven’t found huge mistakes. The only thing I have a doubt about is “to be indulgent with”. According to WordReference, it would be “to” or “toward”. But the rest is clean !
Enjoy your “holidays” .

Her answer was:

Hi Joris !

It seems there is actually a mistake with my sentence: “please, be indulgent with my grammar !” the structure “be indulgent with” is correct, but I should have write “be indulgent with me” and not “with my grammar”. So, we can remenber the following structure: “to be indulgent with _*sb*_”.
Thank you for your shrewdness!

On Julie T.’s blog, the only post was the transcription from the podcast The Linguist. That’s why I’ve left it like it was.

Julien’s blog seems to be clean. The only mistake was already corrected by Julie.

Karine’s one was well filled but it was also well written. I’ve just given my opinion in a fiery debate about the use of  “interest in” and “interest on”.

The main part of Laetitia‘s mistakes  was already corrected by Karine who did a great job. But thanks to my determination I found some little things to say !

Hi ! It’s hard to find new mistakes when Karine has already visited a blog. But here are two little things I’m not sure about.
First, I wouldn’t write “an interview about” but “an interview with”.
Then, (I know I’m niggling ^^) Spore is only one game. I think the “s” is not needed. But it’s detail !

It’s me again !
In my opinion, there is a little problem with the verb “improve” in your sentence. I think “to improve my english” would be more accurate.

My first reflex was to type “visual effects” as a search string. I thought it was a good idea to keep the link on the wikipedia definition which was the first answer in the list. The next ones were not really relevant.

My second search was on the video section of Google. I typed “making of” and I found the second link interesting. It shows the creation of the BBC’s april fool from a technical point of view. I didn’t keep the first link because of the french subtitles . Other videos were also interesting but sometime in french, or even mute (there was only music on them) or not really focused on the VFX. That’s why I’ve only kept this one.

Then I typed “ILM vfx” because ILM is one of the most famous visual effects company which has worked on many blockbusters. From this startpoint I found a video named “FXguideTV episode 20″ which lead me to the podcast of fxguide. Here is about 40 videos with mainly interviews of visual effects expert who explain how they work on different movies.

I think this three links are a good base to start working. I’ve also personnal resources but I can’t remember the way I found them. Here is the list:

• VideoCopilot
• vfxworld
• Matteworld

In this first post is a short record on wich I introduce myself.

–>here<–