In common with vast numbers of people during the pandemic, I haven't been as busy with paid work as I would like, so besides filling the days with little projects, life-drawing and writing blog posts for www.lockeddowncinema.com , today seemed as a good a day as any to add more writing content to my website.
As stated at the bottom of the writing page, the intention has been to add examples of published writing as a resource for students or anyone interested in how commercials and short/feature animated films are made, from a technical standpoint.
The two most recent additions are for a VW commercial made in 2005 and directed by Mario Cavalli at Th1ng, London and where I was lead CG artist, and a review of an all-CGI short film for the long-defunct online publication, "F.P.S Magazine" from 2004.
Locating articles can be a challenge and it was rare for publishers to share PDF documents with writers so you had to buy the magazine - I have an archive of print magazine articles that would require scanning and conversion to PDFs in order to make them accessible, for example.
Luckily, in the intervening years, more and more stuff is stored in online repositories - the VW item was found this weekend after scouring the internet for archives of "3D World" magazine even though I have a copy of the physical magazine which is currently filed away in an inaccessible location in a box of magazines on top of a shelf somewhere at home.
As for the F.P.S article, this "arrived" as if by magic and totally unexpectedly as a PDF following a fruitless search of several hard drives and then locating a Word document of the original text as submitted to the magazine, luckily including a link to a PDF that I duly pasted into Safari....no result.
I cleared my internet cache, having given up hope of there being a PDF of the article online anywhere when suddenly it popped up in its complete form in the browser, almost an hour later !
The PDF had been uploaded to a server that hosted an older version of my website and it was clearly still there, buried in amongst hundreds of other files.
Naturally I exported the document as a PDF and then, as with the VW article, edited the PDF's to remove all but the relevant articles using the "Organise Document" option in the side-bar - this is to save viewers from scrolling through the entire magazine to reach the item.
*F.P.S Magazine was edited by Emru Townsend who sadly passed away too young in 2008 -
Thank you Emru.