Brant Bjork at the Bodega in Wellington New Zealand

Almost a year ago Brant Bjork played at the Bodega in Wellington, it was a great show and I'm a big fan, not as big as my brother who Named his son after Brant Bjork and also Josh Holmes. I took some pictures there and was stoked that one was used on the Low Desert Punk site,


I was loving the fish-eye on this photo, and Brant was cool enough to pause for me to get a good picture. Cool guy and a great show well worth checking out.

Red Bull Air Race Budapest 09

We went to a wedding in Hungary which took place a few days after the Red Bull Air Race in Budapest, who could pass up such a good excuse to attend since we'd be passing through the neighbourhood?
I went to one of the air races a few years back in London, the paid seating was worse than the free viewing spots in Budapest, I only had a point and shoot camera too and came away with no shots worth showing. This time though..

A different story. There was also an aerial display from the Breitling Jets, apparently the only privately owned team of the sort.

I was very happy to get pictures where you could see the pilots looking at each other's aircraft.
It's a crazy sport and very exciting to watch, suffers in the same way as Rally, or Downhill Racing does because there's only one competitor to watch at a time, you don't see one directly competing against the other, still it's insane, a four cross version would be unreal, and deadly.
daveshorty.smugmug.com/Events/Air-Race

Long time.

Blogging didn't really work well for me. Will try to do a bit more with things getting scattered across so many pages, lets see how keeping it a bit central goes.
I went to work at Weta for a year, making muscles for blue aliens on James Cameron's Avatar.
While there I shipped my old SLR camera and lenses, and wondered how I ended up with a digital point and shoot.
I went out a few times taking pictures around Wellington.

Taken with film

Switching lenses looking through a view finder had me itching to have a real camera, so I brought a DSLR. Even Rolled onto a smug mug account.
http://daveshorty.smugmug.com/
It's nice to feel you have some control of the images you take.

Nuts up!

On other occasions things work, and you make something that is ok, I managed to do that with this pic while working on squirrels for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It certainly didn’t top the accidental art page. For my vote Whitehurst won that one with Han Solo or Luke Skywalker riding a squirrel instead of a Tauntaun, Torn torn? One of the fuzzy kangaroo things that the guys rode around on in The Empire Strikes Back.

Telling that I can make a decent image when ripping off someone else, or at least in copying an image or look. I guess that is the actual job I have and the stuff on the side reflects it.

A bag of rats.

In 97 and 98 I did some work at Ratbag Games, (who were named Emergent Software when I started) who were working on a car racing game named Powerslide, there was a fair amount of merriment to be had about the place, and much silliness. Anyhow I had 2 weeks there where I was the envy of quite a few friends as I was being paid to design graffiti. I had to do plenty of other stuff there too, but for that 2 week block I made up some designs, coloured them, and then made them gritty so they could be used as in game texture maps. I don’t have any of the finished colour work, but here is some of the pen work before clean up.

Powerslide

Shwopshire. Now there's a funny story involving squirrels, a butcher and Shropshire that I must remember to add once I'm up to date.

Swine. For the words chosen I tried to use the Alias's of as many of the people working on the game as I could, or office gags.

Wabbit.

Napalm

Mighty Boot.

Git. N. Jiggy.

Munchie

Grimey. Er just a blockie, but you know, some variety is needed.

Mr. Almost

Logical Animal Pics 2.

Ah ha! At the Circus..

A Terrible accident during the Knife Thrower’s training..
*SOB* I didn’t mean to--*SOB* His foot got caught on the sign and-*SOB*
Trust me I’ve replaced him with one of the bears. His partner will never notice…

This is from 03, just a bit old. I remember a few of the subjects we had for the weekly comps. “At the circus” was one of them. “Now that’s Funny” and “Team Superhero” were others. The basic thing I think was Pab’s idea, every week people add a theme to a hat and a new subject is drawn every week.

I was amused by my version of Now that’s Funny. Which had a naked man offering a pot of honey to a cow saying “Cow that’s honey”, and if that pun wasn’t corny enough there was a girl with the guy saying “I think you miss herd”. It was so poor that I had to add a piece of corn standing by them officially endorsing the corniness of it. Sue told me it was bad, I was a non believer, I think I was voted last that week. Must find the other pics.

Logical Animal Pics.

I think it’s pretty common that many digital artists, or digital crafts people try not to embrace the computer nerd within. More over they deny the nerd the chance to rise, they suppress the inner geek. Unless you’re big enough to love the poindexter you are then it’s likely you live in fear like the rest of us. Fear of discovering you’re not cool at all, that all these cool things you do, embrace and love are not you at all, just a facade around your true computer knarly center.

Worst of all, here and there the nerd will get a good run on something, you’ll do something that’s cleaver, that a geek would appreciate, and you like it! The perverse pleasure of knowing that you’ve done something smart, and the sheer bending of your brain to solve it has given you a feeling of reward and joy that you know to be wrong!

In an effort to avoid succumbing to the darker joys it’s only logical that you should do more things to distract the inner nerd. Like arts and crafts.

When I was working at Animal Logic we had a few positive distractions to help us forget that we all spend most of our time in front of a computer. A cold shower of sorts to help save our fragile perception of self. Two of my favorites were a sculpting class, and a weekly drawing comp. Here’s a couple of pics I have of mine from then, I’ll have to see about getting some of the other Animals to post their stuff too.


I scribbled this at work whilst waiting on the computer to do something…
Just a fat guy looking a little tired and worn with his hand on his belly, it wasn’t too bad so I had a go at colouring it...

When the sculpting classes started and we needed reference I thought I’d try make a sculpt of it.
For scale reference his head is about 2.5 cm big, or about an inch if you like to make measurements in such ways.

I was pretty happy with the result as I’d not sculpted in years and had not been very good. I thought it was ok until someone pointed out that it seemed to be an old guy reaching for his crotch, and that they found it a little disturbing. Maybe I have more to worry about than being a geek, thankfully a tissue across his waist and it looks like he is pulling up the sheet and not going for a big grab.

Save us!

It turns out I'm as pathetic as everyone else on the web, and consequentially I now have a blog. Witness now as more of my life disappears.
If I'm any good I'll start posing scribbles and ideas and try to keep this as some sort of incentive to keep doing the shit I think I want to do, but tend to be too knackerd to.