Another time it’s been way too long between updates. Again much has happened, I was too busy to author a thorough blog post of general interest. And honestly, I still am. So I will give you a short run down on what I did recently. And if you want to see some shading/texturing going on, to witness the power of the almighty bump-map that still does its job well and without the annoying purple eye-cancer-causing colors of a normal map, read the rest…

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Berlin was calling. I had to go. Like the years before. When you’ve been to Berlin once before (and ain’t not sick of it already), you just have to return. Every summer this city calls me by a feeling or just by plain Austrian fatigue. Then I book a flight, make no plans and off I go.

This is a short photo-blog-post of my impressions.

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I watched another couple of CSI: New York episodes to research the cinematography and color grading (both much more subtle compared to the overly-saturated CSI: Miami), but the more episodes I watched the more aware I became of Bill Brown’s music. It didn’t sound terribly hard to compose still it captured the mood quite well and was terrifically mixed. “Can’t be too hard to do that myself” I pondered two hours ago and gave it a try by scoring an imaginary scene in Bill’s style.

I am quite happy with it, just had to give it an urban beat and more synthesizers instead of an orchestral percussion in the end. Hope you like it too.

EDIT: Didn’t like it how it suddenly ended so I composed a more proper and a little soothing ending. Refresh your cache and take a listen.

texx sound – City Scape Intermission. 2009.

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“Is this a computer film or a normal film?” I recently overheard a question of a girl directed at her boyfriend near a movie theater. The guy told her that they were about to watch Terminator 4 and it would be a “normal film but with lots of computer stuff”. The girl sighed. “Nobody falls in love with anybody in those movies…”

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Impulse purchase — yet another. I got me a WLAN router. I didn’t know that I needed one until I got one. Usually I am not that enthusiastic about new consumer electronics ¹ but this nifty router finally lifts the burden of ever too short LAN cables even in my cramped spatially challenged campus room.

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Finished! The fmx/09 posts are now complete with the photos I took and some video clips I captured. Be sure to check them out before I get asked to put them down.

Traditionally the last day of every fmx is the games day and this year I was prepared for it: Yes, I was wearing my Half-Life² t-shirt proudly in any Electronic Arts lecture I could get in. “They save the best for last”, as AIAS president Joseph Olin put it in the beginning. Yes, there was a lot to come. As always I just wish I had slept more.

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7:30 am and somebody walks downstairs. Good morning to me. My program for today was mostly about tracking and motion capturing and heavy duty compositing. You might have guessed: It was the day of Benjamin Button.

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Another night cut short at 5:30 by people walking downstairs. Or upstairs. So I already knew I would spend another evening on the floor of my car napping. But until then there was so much to see and learn.

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I woke up early. Too early. My room is located under the stairs to the third floor so it’s needless to say that it’s noisy. The day started off rather cloudy. But it got better along the way. The last two conventions where as sunny as California in any orange-juice commercial so it was okay this year that the weather took leak a break.

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