My buddy Stewie, from Incoherent Thoughts, mentioned ScribeFire in his latest post.

In a nutshell, ScribeFire is a Firefox extension that turns the bottom half of your browser into a blog editor. Once you set up a connection to your blog, you can pull this bad boy up and blog away, publishing directly to your blog — without logging in to your site.

The interface is simple, yet robust, and you can even work with images:

Powered by ScribeFire.

The future of digital art is about to take a quantum leap forward.

Pixolator has posted an announcement on the Zbrush central forum that on May 17th, Pixologic will release the latest version of ZBrush, their digital sculpting and painting tool. The announcement has a downloadable Quicktime that demonstrates ZB3’s capabilities.

If you create digital imagery of any form (stills, animated films, visual effects, etc.) and need detailed characters or other organic models, I recommend taking a look at it.

And take a peek at the Pixologic gallery to see some amazing art, all created with ZBrush.

Now that Dead Hunt is in the can, we need to make it available to had a pretty good track record with distribution–Don Dohler’s reputation plays no small role in that–but we’re hoping we have some choices, or at least one really good deal.

I asked Don if I could create the DVD screener that we send out (I’ve wanted to do that since I got my first DVD burner). He agreed, so I dove in. As I said, I already had a burner, but I didn’t like the picture quality of the OEM encoder (Nero), so I had to find a better encoder and an authoring tool. By the way, encoding as I use it here refers to converting the digital video of our movie, which is in Quicktime, to MPEG–the format needed for DVDs. After some online research, I found a solid and low-budget solution in DVD Lab and Tmpeg. Let the fun begin!

I wanted to have a really cool menu (see above–click on image to view the full-motion menu), sort of a collage of all the characters showing really cool expressions, and awesome music. I also wanted the movie to look crisp–at least as good as the edited master stored in Adobe Premiere (That’s where Tmpeg came in). And we all wanted the box art to look great, too. That job fell to Rob Long, who did a wonderful job. For the music, I picked my favorite segment from Justin Timpane’s score. It actually took only a couple of days to create that cool menu, with the cool music, and the crisp-looking picture. The rest of the month was spent trying to get the resulting DVD to play on Don’s DVD player–a first or second generation player. Oh, it played in my new player, all 15 attempts played fine in there; some even played fine in a slightly older player I have, but about 3/4 of the way through, Don’s player would choke and die.

So, it was back to the internet to find some answers. The makers of DVD Lab have a forum that provided a lot of help. And VideoHelp.com proved an invaluable resource, complete with some free helper tools. The deal, as I discovered, is that “burning” DVDs on a computer isn’t the same process used by mass distributors. They use glass masters, which are more precise. Not to worry, however, most newer DVD players easily play the DVD-R, +R, etc. formats; it’s just that older players may have trouble, and since we wanted to make sure potential distributors would be able to view our movie, it had to play on as many players as possible. That’s when media and hardware came into the mix.

If you look on VideoHelp, you’ll see a huge list of media reviews; that is, reviews of the various brands of blank DVD-Rs you can buy. Apparently, not all brands play well with old players, or with all burners. In fact, not all burners create media that plays well with all players. It feels like a crap shoot.

Ultimately, I discovered that my original burner (an internal Lite-on) was the culprit. When I burned the image to a newer external (also a Lite-on), it played fine in Don’s player. Problem solved.

The image above features the stars of Dead Hunt: Dennis Hill and Sara Cole, and the killer in the background.

As I continue to crank out more final FX clips, I thought I’d post a couple of stills. These shots, courtesy of Timewarp, show the creature in both an outdoor, nighttime setting, which is very dark, and an indoor setting that is lighter–though not by much. These renders, which I call “final” use a feature in XSI called Final Gathering to augment the base lighting with a global illumination. For my purposes, it serves to subtly fill in some light, and accentuate the creature’s surface details. The base lighting still dictates the key and rim areas on the creature, but Final Gathering augments the fill lighting, providing more depth.The actor in the second image is George Stover, who plays the sheriff. Hey, George.

Click on the thumbnail for a larger image.

I plan to use this blog to keep track of my progress with the seemingly endless list of creative projects on which I plan to work in the next few years. Whether it’s filmmaking, music, writing, martial arts, or even computer programming, creativity is in my blood—I can’t stop it. Whether what I produce appeals to anyone else is a different matter. I’d like to think it does.

At the top of my laundry list is Crawler. For the last three years, I have been working on the visual f/x for this low-budget horror movie produced by Timewarp Films. In particular, I’m working on the computer-generated title character. One thing I’ve learned in the last three years is that there’s a reason we see hundreds of names at the tail end of movie credits for visual f/x; it’s hard to do this stuff. It took at least a year to zero in on the best software to create and animate this beast. I finally settled on Softimage XSI—a godsend.

Currently, I’m on the 3rd to last scene involving the creature. After I finish the last creature shot in the last scene, and the 30-some shots of final renders, I have to address the miscellaneous f/x. For this I’ve recruited a few friends interested in f/x to help. That led to the next lesson learned (no, not “don’t hire friends”): I learned not to try to manage and do at the same time. You wind up doing a half-assed job at both. Thus, I had to concentrate on my stuff first. Once I finish the remaining creature shots, I’ll pull the gang (or what’s left of them) back together to finish the rest.

As a final note, I want to mention a project on the back burner, an amateur film project that is a mere 14 years in the making: Monster Planet.