Well, I'm pretty busy these days. Not that I haven't had much time to do things, it's more like an state of mind. It seems like I've been working on things all day but when I reach the time to go to bed and sleep some hours it feels like I haven't done much improvement. Things I have to do in the near future include: do more sketches for work (yes, you've read fine, work), make some tehet it tigit's strips to keep up, finish painting two forgotten drawings soon-to-be deviations that I have scanned and started, and make a special blog post showing my design for the cardboard lightbox, as it seems to be popular between the keywords that lead to this site. The two other popular (more popular) queries are happiest song and edward the conqueror. Unexpected amazing little things from our beloved internet.

I'm going to scan some tiny drawing I've made on the edge of a sheet one or two days ago, and pimp it up on PS... here you go.

Now that I see it it's like a prophetic high res version of the juggling many tasks emoticon.

On another train of thoughts I've been close to buying a cell phone myself, of course the cheapest plan on earth, from the now called Movistar, but as they don't give me the model I want (which they have on their ad poster and tv spot) they can shove it up their rear, if you know what I mean. At least for now. And what's even more, not only I don't have a cellphone, but also my land common line phone started behaving weirdly this week, for example, ringing before noon (while I'm still sleeping due to start at 5 am) only to get me out of bed and hearing nothing but annoying static. Yesterday was epic because it also happened while actually talking, it just took over my conversation for a few seconds two of three times. It's semi-alright if my cable modem keeps working as it should (or at least as it does now). I've discovered myself an unbearable and accustomed fan of on-demand media. Sometimes I feel like I can't even enjoy television anymore, with its ads and schedules, etc and etc. I'll post in the future about some shows I watch on a regular basis and than can be easily downloaded. Not that I do that, of course. I think it's wrong and illegal. And necessary. Like my friend Bassem would say: NYAHA!

Well, it's not precisely HDTV, but compared to Episode I it's a mayor advance, and as some days have passed since last post (and to leave the creepy x-files things behind) I've uploaded the first formal test for the next hoodfellows feature.

Click on the image to see the silent MPEG1 (at least half the original resolution). Take into account final video will be full DV quality, digital firewire transfer all the way, possibly MPEG2 encoded (ready for DVD) with sound. This is just a camera test to check framerate, lights, and a better workflow using a specialized stop motion capture software.

T H E  S T O R Y
Last year an entire life's friend of my grandfather passed away. He knew him since his thirties, he is 82 years old give or take, and his friend was at least 10 years older. He was very intellectual and fond of classical music, specially Wagner. He had not much of a family himself, only a distant nephew, so when he died, my family pretty much received most of his belongings. I got a handful of old records, and several photography related books, very old most of them, and mainly in german and french. He was a photographer, btw. So this didn't come as a surprise. My grandfather is a photographer as well, and that's where they knew each other from. What came as a surprise some months ago was his nephew phoning my mother, with a real surprise: she had found an old document on a forgotten suit on a dusty cellar, and a photo. The document was from my country, and has his photo as a very young man, but another name. In the photo is him in his twenties dressed on a white tuxedo on a kind of party, and you can see people in the back dressed like in the 20's fashion, clearly before inmigration. It is now when everybody realizes they had never knew neiter his parents nor anything about his life prior his arrival to Argentina. He had no sons, no wife, nobody.

T H E  B O O K
Yesterday I remembered the box with the various books, with titles like Traité Général de Photographie en Noir et en Couleurs, or Kompendium der Praktischen Photographie, etc, and started to read easy through some of them, mostly looking at the diagrams, because of my lack of language knowledge. Then I noticed one particular book that had no title in the old cover, only an engraved figure, it looks like a parchment, a torch, and some sort of olive branch. Inside it looked really old, and was all printed on a strange alphabet I couldn't recognize. Almost no punctuation, little bleed, strange. On the last page there was a ink drawing, also noticeably aged, of a hooded figure with the head of a bird, holding what seems to be a mirror, or what's even more freaky, a polaroid. The bird is standing on a stone path laid across grassy fields, that rises and enters a kind of hole or gate which leads to a place filled with spheres of different sizes. There are also two strange trees that don't seem to be of any known type. There is a sky in the back with curly clouds. In the bottom right there is a signature. Mine.

T H E  M I S T E R Y
It is my signature no doubt about it. The drawing even looks like one of mine. The freaky thing is that I didn't do it, and it seems to be like at least 90 years old., who knows if more. Later on I found out a small inscription, apparently made with a thin sharp object, on the back of the book. It says QRPEUD FRVDV in common latin characters. Hit me if I know what I'm talking about. This is the weirdest thing that has happened to me ever, no doubt. I'm tearing my brains thying to figure out what this image means.

If you have of find any clues or notice interesting things please comment. I thought several eyes would be better than just a pair of tired ones. You can see the entire scan of that last page at a higher resolution here. Please comment in case you found something you want to share.

I know this isn't a geek news blog, well, not usually, but this one might be a big one. As usual I was checking my feeds and found out Google is offering free unlimited hosting and obviously, indexing, for video files. So I took my google account and my first hoodfellows file, reencoded it on their preferred format and uploaded it. Now I'm waiting for their approval.

One thing that remains to be seen is the way they will use to display those videos. They're asking for MPEG4 videos (I suppose Xvid would be a free correct choice) with VBR MP3 audio, and that isn't directly supported on browsers as far as I'm concern. I hope they hit the spot again like with gmail's layout.

I was working on a illustration I have to do when some doubt rose in my brain. It was regarding how light coming through several windows would impact on a room filled with divisions. Specially because I had already painted the effect on the mentioned drawing and looked somehow odd. And I was right, there was something wrong.

I had done the wall with windows darker, that was right. But I had made the light beam coming directly from the window. Wrong. It's separated. Seems logic and obvious now. To prove it I made a quick setup inside a cardboard box (how unusual of me), cut three rectangles as windows, put some paper napkin over them, a spotlight in the back, and some simple desks, chair, and the first hoodfellow prototype (yes, it has arms) all pasted with an important amount of tape.

What you can see here now is not exactly what I needed, as the illustration has some hard midnoon cold light, but I already saw it, so started playing with warm tones and diffuse light. I gave him some cloth to be checking or working on (early cuts for hoodfellows hoods) and put the spot low and near, to achieve that early dawn look. Poor fellow he spent the entire night working until sun rose.