I chose to redesign this particular piece  as I envisaged that it would make for a great digital conversion, transforming the elements so that they appear to be in 3D space, and the elements themselves with correct lighting and shading would also appear to be 3-dimensional.

The piece will also be uploaded to DeviantArt today for peer review.

Now as I dont intend on doing the run every year, nor do I intend on making running a full time hobby,  and  especially as this was to be my first experience of taking part in any distance running event, I knew that I wanted to do it right. But the first hurdle was to get a spot in the first place, and this is a challenge as alot of people get turned away during the open ballot period, and there is always a big scramble to get places directly through charities, it is very competitive. Thankfully I managed to attain my spot through the ballot so I had an easy ride, however the friend that I had originally planned to run and also train with did not get a spot, and after this happened his interest in getting a spot in this years run quickly faded. So it seemed that I would be doing the run by myself.

But thankfully I was never truly on my own, as Julia my very supportive girlfriend was always willing to get on her bike and go running with me. And we both signed up for her local gym together so we kept motivated by trying to do the same amount of training as eachother, though her goal was to get fitter for her own sport which is Roller Derby.

So with me now feeling fitter than I ever have in these past few years, I then lined up some fundraising so that I would have a worthy charity to keep me motivated on the run itself to keep pushing me towards the finish line. I chose two in the end, CLIC Sargent for Children With Cancer, and Dogs Trust. For both I managed to raise roughly £200 which was shared equally between the two. The disapointing thing was that Dogs Trust contacted me around a week before the event to tell me that they wouldnt be attending the event themselves as they couldn’t get a tent from the organisers in the charity village. I was unhappy to hear this as I had bought a Dogs Trust vest especially for the event and was looking forward to meeting my fellow fund raisers to compare our experiences and laugh about the day. I remember it was only at the end of the run that I actually found one single other person who was wearing a Dogs Trust vest, but im sure there were other Dogs Trusters running around somewhere during the race. I know that next time I will definitly be changing my charity to Anthony Nolan. I have signed up to be a bone marrow donor myself this year, and those guys went absolutely crazy with their support during the race, and I definitly want to be welcomed into their charity tent for next time!

I completed my race in 2hrs 31min 2seconds, 1 minute and 2 seconds more than my target which I am really chuffed with. I dont know if I will do it again next year but it is very tempting to want to beat my current record, and try and compete more with my colleague DeanoB who finished in around 1hr 50mins which is very impressive.

Photos and videos of me in action, and also not so much in action (hobbling!) can be seen here.

I would highly recommend doing the run at least once in your life, it was the toughest challenge I have ever done, but I thoroughly enjoyed it!

For SyrupSyrup however I have gone back to the drawing board and have decided that what I wanted most from my site was convenience. I loved the design and colour of SyrupSyrupV4, but the task of adding new items to a static portfolio page everytime I wanted to create something new was very arduous. What I liked most from V4 was the use of WordPress to power the News section, now renamed the Blog. It meant that adding and cataloguing new features was done very quickly using a very nice administration area. And this I decided was what I wanted to develop on moving forward.

I now have a site that runs entirely on the WordPress CMS, and what’s more with its clever design I can seperate content into the correct areas whether it be news articles or portfolio based multimedia items, which all use the same jQuery interactions that I enjoyed experimenting with before.

I believe that community developed content management systems are what is driving people’s use of webspace forward today. When somebody wishes to have their own domain they no longer want to be handheld by a web design company the entire time they own a site, once they are satisfied with a look they want to be able to edit thing’s themselves in an environment they can understand. It is customisable profile sites like Facebook that have shown people what they can achieve with their own space on the web. And services like WordPress, Joomla and Magento are what is pushing these experiences forward.

Well to start with I already have the professional tools that most multimedia developers have on their machines, which includes the key DVD authoring softwares found in the Production Premium Suite in Adobe CS5. But due to the fact I was looking to just knock up a very quick holiday DVD for my friends and not want to put alot of thought into the menu or other design aspects I instead opted to install the cheapy looking software provided with the camera, thinking this is exactly what it was designed for so would do the job. The reality was that the software was indeed very cheap and was really a very low quality non linear video editing software and would not even create a DVD at the end of the project. So discovering this and the time it took to install and uninstall the software again I found the time I had put aside was all but diminished for that night. So onto Day 2.

Now a golden rule to getting things done quickly is to stick to what you know, so with all my video files still sitting in a folder on my desktop I fired up Encore. What Encore can do very well is ‘Transcode’ footage so it is ready for DVD, but what Encore is not good for is stability. I have used it for a very long time and I find that with large scale projects if you dont save regularly you will find that at some point with no particular warning the program will just completely close, leaving nothing but a little Adobe window asking what happened and the ‘Sorry about what just happened but before you use what little time you have to recover your work would you please take 5 minutes to tell us what happened’ screen. I have posted many things in this window to Adobe in the past as im sure many disgruntled developers have.
And low and behold in this particular project having so many video files loaded into the project bin, which each required a seperate codec program to read them as the HD codec off the camera is not one available in Encore, the program soon gave up. I believe that this is because Encore is not built to contain loads and loads of video files, I mean even if I produced the DVD this way it would contain around 80 seperate titles all loading one after the other, more practical is to have one main title movie which is chapterised to indicate the change in video/ time / location. This is what I then went onto do first.

So the fastest way I thought I could do this, rather than loading up Premiere and putting everything together in a timeline and render off everything was to try Camtasia first. This way I thought I could capture all the videos playing in sequence in media player, which would only take 30-45mins, and then the program would bash out an avi file in a few minutes which I could put into Encore. Bish Bash Bosh. Now what happened was the capture went well but the overall quality just wasnt smooth enough for what I would merit DVD quality, fine for the web maybe, but I just couldnt get the framerate right, even when I realised I’d only set it to record 15fps, changing this to 30fps and tweaking with some other values including the codec used to create the AVI just didnt give the quality I needed.
I do wonder how people like Andrew Kramer manages to create a smooth recording of his project screen when he’s demonstrating a video in After Effects, I believe the videos are rendered and added later and just pasted and cropped over the top of what he actually recorded  so it looks like its all part of the same video. A neat idea.

So now I have loaded Premiere and finally I feel like I am getting somewhere. As these are full quality 1920×1080 videos I am editing together, and there are around 80 of them, im having to edit about 20 at a time and then put those 4 videos together to make my final final movie to go into Encore. Not in Premiere CS4 I might add, but instead CS3. For whatever reason CS4 couldnt even import the videos properly onto the timeline, to give a description of what happened the audio would play fine at normal speed, but the video would in a couple of seconds woosh past, all the way to the last frame which it would be paused on until the audio clip had ended. WHY!!! I dont get it. An installation problem? Maybe. I just cant seem to ever get Premiere CS4 to behave well with anything other than codecs it understands, or files it has made itself. I dont know how CS5 might perform given the same task, but I will find out when I get a 64-bit computer built later on this year.

So to finish this story I can tell you that everything eventually came out in the wash. My friends recieved a copy of the snowboarding holiday DVD through the post today and they’re loving it. And if you’re looking to make a DVD from your holiday HD footage take my advice and dont use the software you get with your camera, try and get everything edited into one video before you bring it into your DVD authoring software.
Or actually just mail your footage to me and I’ll just do it for you, it’ll really save your sanity.

My newest original track which is a short bittersweet melody with a loud metal kick.

It was created using my Oxygen 49 midi keyboard and both my Ibanez and Tanglewood guitars.

The game was produced in Adobe Flash and exported as an Adobe Air format app, which was then finished as an android application using the official Android SDK.

For more details and to download: https://market.android.com/details?id=air.com.touchmobiledesign.puppypairs&hl=en

To play the Flash version now: Click Here

The game was produced in Adobe Flash and exported as an Adobe Air format app, which was then finished as an android application using the official Android SDK.

For more details and to download: https://market.android.com/details?id=air.touchmobiledesign.symboosays

To play the Flash version now: Click Here

The site has a regular visitor fanbase with dozens of click-throughs every day. The site’s Twitter Page also has over 1,300 followers to date and several of the site’s posts are suggestions submitted by the blog’s readers.

http://www.cutedogthing.com

The website was designed and developed to the client’s specification, giving them the functionality to process orders and what is listed on the site as they would please.

http://www.demonessdesigns.co.uk