The Personal Blog of Dr Banksy*.

ON A ROLL! This idea is really taking off. Today I've completed the third component of my deforestation piece - the glue bottle. As with the tree and scissors, I began by photographing a bottle of Gorilla glue (amazing stuff, buy some ). I went with the first image for tracing because it had a similar perspective to the scissors:                                           I then began the tracing process.  The trickiest part with this was again the position of the shadows relative to the light source, but it turned out very nicely. Here's the final outcome: I left a little gap in the shadow at the tip of the bottle so that I have space to put it an oil drop (which may be animated). I need to gather some reference first! Here's what the deforestation piece looks like at the moment. I love the way this is going! The white space needed to be consider...

Alright! FMP is really starting to roll out. I've had some crackin' new ideas and thought it would be best to detail them. For a while I've been interested in Geography and the way that the world is running (take a look at my previous post on Chasing Ice here ). I took Geog as an A-Level, in fact, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Anyway, a while back I watched a video that a mate of mine shared on Facebook and it really made me think. It was a piece called "Sorry" by rap artist/humanitarian Prince Ea (still got no idea how to pronounce that, but I do think he's a Christian), and it basically ticked all the boxes (seriously, check it out here - 10 billion times better than that Justin Bieber song). Rhythmic speech combined with a light music track in the background and some seriously cool 3D visuals (which look like they were made in Unity Web Player or Maya , actually); great stuff. Inspired by the freshness of the message he was giving, I've come up wit...

Welcome to the big leagues! It's time for my Final Major Project (fancy) and it's got to be good. Really good. So I've got an idea together for an installation-type piece, possibly on a wall, and possibly pretty big. I'm looking further into the work of David Bailey (who I've really enjoyed studying); in particular, into his Box of Pinups  (1964). I've discussed it previously - it's a collection of around 30 black-and-white portraits of many famous celebrities (including Michael Caine and the Kray twins). It's a monumental achievement for one man to photograph so many famous people, let alone to get away with his head after snapping Ronnie and Reggie. I'm also a longtime fan of Banksy, a street graffiti artist from Bristol who keeps his identity secret. I think the best thing about Banksy is that he just creates art in its purest form - he does what he wants to do, where he wants to do it, and always manages to communicate a profound message acco...

Well, that's the Super 8 silent film wrapped up. Unfortunately, due to blogger's 100MB file size limit, I can't show it to you here (I've tried compressing it to an .mp4, and it's still over 200 meg!), but to compensate, here's a step-by-step guide to the creation process... Step 1: Sex on Negs Alright, so here we have the raw, negative Super 8 film playing at the  Cube Microplex  (and looking great, well done team). As it was playing, this film was itself filmed using a DSLR so that we could get it into Final Cut Pro (FCP) for fancying up. Easy! Step 2: Double Negative Okay, so here's a shot of the DSLR footage in Final Cut Pro. Looking good!  Now it was time to apply the "Negative" filter to each scene, to return the film to its.. positive shots (ahem)? Anyway, this was the result: 100% negative was needed to reverse the colours fully, but even at this rate, it wasn't perfect. I came back to it later.  ...

Wow! Back from NYC and feeling extremely refreshed. The trip was incredible, I was amazed at how much we saw in just five days. Perhaps you will be, too - you can check out all of the photos on my Flickr here . Returning to Weston College, I've recently been working as part of a group to produce a Buster Keaton / Charlie Chaplin -style short film using Super 8 cameras. Suffice to say, it was a lot of fun to make, and I was really pleased with the negs when they were shown at the Cube cinema in Bristol . We're still in the process of developing the final film from negative to positive in Final Cut Pro, and the results of that will be viewable on this blog very soon. In the meantime, here are some images from behind the scenes at the Cube: No idea what any of this stuff does, mind you. But I do know that seeing our film screened was fantastic... We also watched some short silent films created by artists like Norman McLaren and Len Lye . The wor...