Jonathan "Tempest" Phillips

Is there such a thing as a song that EVERYBODY likes? Working on a few video projects recently, I have been looking through my music collection and trying to find some music that would both fit well, and more the point, not put people off. So many times have i looked at demo reels or Gaming videos or even personal projects that people end my way that result in me having to turn the music off. There are some types of music that do not belong in a peice of media, that is going to be for a non musically targeted audience. For example. There are some song i listen to ALL THE TIME, That i would never dream of using in a video. No matter how much i love the song, i know that it is an aquired taste.

My musical taste can be discribed only as eclectic. My listening habits range from Very heavy metal, to swing jazz. From Prog Rock, to Industrial. From Opera to the blues. On one occastion, i went to a bikers festival and saw musical acts akin to ACDC and Black Sabbath, then the next day went to see Elton John live. How ever, i know that there is a wide selection of my music that most people just don’t want to hear. So that got me thinking. What type of music is the most accepted for people to hear, even if they don’t activly listen to it.

If i put some soft jazz into a video, people could still be entertained by the video, even if they don’t like the music. But if i were to put some Black metal into a video, it can be so offputting to most people that they will simply close the video. However i am currently looking for something in the middle. Before you start looking up black jazz metal (trust me, its out there) What i mean is I’m looking for a style of music that gives a video an UMPH but still won’t put people off. This seems like a musical chalenage that may never be compleated, but i will still continue my search.

So far this is the best kind of result I can find. Light EBM.

After watching Avatar, I’ve been wanting to photoshop somebody to look like the native Na’vi creatures from the film. It looked like an interesting photoshop to do. Mainly because at first it looks like just turning them blue. But the more you look at it, they have great features in the way of the eyes, nose and flesh tones, that would be great fun to photoshop.

After a long time at looking at pictures of myself, i decided doing a photoshop with a beard was not a good idea. So I found a female friend with an awesome picture, asked if she wanted to me made into a space smurf. Bouncing up and down, she said yes. Here is the resulting Images

I’m looking at creating a big ish graphics project in the future. something that will require me to use all of my Photoshop, Maya and Reall Flow Skills to create something unique and orginal. I’m hoping to at least start some concept designs soon. BUT in the mean time I need to know that i can pull off some of the effects that are going to be a key part of the project.

For this quick little test I took a image of an airship and added different styles of clouds. I would have added the lighting, but i already know I can do that and are too lazy to put it together.

This is the orginal Source Image

This Image is just to show its traveling through some dense clouds

This Image is to show stormy clouds.

Ref – Images took 30 mins to create.

It seems I’m reinventing my Website every week atm. But this time it is justified. I want a style to run through my work so that when I hand a potential Employer a CV and they look at my site for a brief view of my work, they see professional and stylized. So I have made a new front for my site, a new site for my Graphical work and changed my blog (your looking at it) into a personal project site……..well I will do when i get around to it.
I don’t know why I thought this was Blog worthy information, but hey.

Well when my Hardrive failed half way through UNI, I lost a lot of old work of mine….one thing I lost was a lot of the work I had done with indesign. So I decided to publish my comic book again only using indesign instead of Photoshop like I did before. That way I have at least something to show for my indesign skills.

It also means that I have slightly polished the text and layout for the comic.

Even though there will never be issue 2, 3 or 4…..here is issue 1 of Broken Emblem.

Broken Emblem Comic: Issue 1 Requires Acrobat or other PDF reader.