11-09-09
Giraffe Incognito Has A Makeover
Hey guys,
If you’re using an RSS reader or are just plain lazy – I suggest you check out Giraffe Incognito as I have just “pimped” up the website to give it a new look and feel.
Why? Because I want the website to be cohesive with my album art, which was designed with black, white and grey colours as well.
So what do you think?
10-04-09
My Whole Album In Just Two Minutes And Twenty-Three Seconds
Hey guys, sorry for the lack of attention made to the blog. But I’m almost there. I should be looking at getting the tracks mastered this week, I had Paul from Indie Masters check out all my mixes, and after some general feedback, I was suprised I had little polishing to do on my songs.
October is my goal, and even though it’s already hit the fabled month – I still have until November to finish it yeah?
But, because I know you guys are waiting (the whole 4 of you who check my blog!), I’ve decided to give you a nice little treat for being so patient.
It’s my whole album, every song, in just under 2 minutes and 23 seconds! I will note, that the full album is 53 minutes. So if you think about it, you’re listening to some sort of percentage…
09-13-09
Montgomery is REAL!
Ok, so for those of you who don’t know who Montgomery is, let me tell you something:
At university last year, one my subjects required me to create a flash animation using characters that had to have narrative. My idea was to create a story based on a giraffe and a bird. The giraffe was called Montgomery, and the bird was called Ferguson. The story of the animation involved Montgomery setting sail to New York City in his hot air balloon.
But, I don’t need to give you a full plot sypnosis, because the animation still exists! In fact I have a link to it right here! So why don’t you go and check it out:
Animation: The Adventures of Montgomery and Ferguson
Ok so that brings us to the second part of this story, as I’m not just going to post about an animation that’s a year old now…
I was adventuring about St Kilda town today, and found myself discovering this beauty in a shop (I can’t even remember the name of the place). It was some sort of concrete kinda thing I guess for kids to have on their room, or like on a mantlepiece. At first I didn’t see the connection of it, I just noticed the giraffe. Then on the second look, I was like “Oh shit, it’s Montgomery from my flash animation”, this was followed by a few air claps and a few hops about the joint.
So I took a picture of it, and here it is! (pretty creepy huh!)
I wonder who was first? Random giraffe on concrete slab or Montgomery?
It’s gotta be Montgomery, he’s really old and wears a really nice hat so he must have been around for a while.
08-28-09
Progress – It’s keeps getting deeper!
First things first, how awesome is this picture! It was by a guy named Jan Oliehoek, and he’s done some really cool photo manipulation work – you can check out some more of his works here
Haven’t posted for a while. But hey – been busy getting this nasty little cd completed so you can hopefully get your dirty mits on it by the end of … september (realistically).
I’ve been awaiting feedback from several reliable sources and am now going to give my music to the mastering dudes for some more feedback, so that’s all starting to looking promising.
I’ve also started work on my album art, this is one of the main reasons I wanted to make a cd in the first place! So it’s been really fun playing around with ideas.
I don’t want to give anything away but here are some teasers – it will most likely be black and white, be a font lovers paradise and there will be hidden giraffes for you to find!
As for the title of the album – I haven’t chosen it yet – and no it will not be ‘the prototype’ (that’s what I wrote on the draft cd I gave to people!).
Have a good weekend.
08-24-09
Inglourious Basterds
This is the first time I’ve actually been waiting in anticipation for a Tarantino flick. I was too young when films such as Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown were released. As for Kill Bill, I don’t think I saw them until a few years after all the hype.
A large coke and a classic Tarantino title credit scene to start the film, things were looking good. This wasn’t classic Tarantino in the way that he cuts up the plot and throws it about randomly throughout the movie so you have no idea what timeframe you’re in. Sure there’s a little bit of it, but the film take you through chapters, which I thought was a really cool idea and was a good way to seperate some fairly intense scenes.
It starts off with quite a few accents slapping you in the face, but once you get over Brad Pitt’s ridiculous accent you get used to the fact that it’s no monotone film and that dialogue between languages gel together smoothly.
Whilst I watched the film, sure I laughed, but I was mainly caught up in the suspense, especially towards the latter half of the film. But now looking back on it, you could almost class the film as a comedy. I guess you could say it will have the same replay value as Pulp Fiction, it just grows on you humorously the more you view it.
To wrap it up, acting was great, I thought the film wasn’t too long and that it’s definitely worth seeing, even if you aren’t a typical tarantino fan. Another big win for me was the soundtrack, but that’s something you expect with a Tarantino film, he chooses great music.
One last thing, why is Diane Kruger getting so much media attention for being ‘that woman’ in the film? Yes she’s attractive, but Mélanie Laurent takes the cake in this film (pictured above). Much more interesting character too…
08-18-09
A Collection Of My Favourite Album Covers
I’ve been checking out heaps of blog posts showing great examples of album art. Most notably these articles on Smashing Magazine; 35 Album Covers, 100 Obscure & Remarkable Album Covers, and these articles from Abduzeedo; Part One, Part Two.
Those posts mentioned above really show a great collection of album art. It’s a shame how this art has died away since music has mainly been assessed online. I love going through people’s ‘vinyl’ collection and staring at the album art printed onto a nice big sleeve. Some people say album art is dead, but I still make the album art show up on my computer when I listen to tunes. I even know people who will impulse buy albums just because they like the cover, without even listening to the music! So I still think it’s important to get good album art for your cd. If your album art is average, people will think your music is average and will most likely put your cd back in the rack and move on.
I decided to go through my collection and pick out my favourite album art, just to get some inspiration before I start on my own. Although the collections of album art on smashing magazine and abduzeedo have already done excellent posts on this, it was good to go through my own collection and pick out the album covers that I never seem to get sick of.
The list is in no particular order, in fact I went through my music collection, picked them out then randomized the list!
08-17-09
Album Progress Update + Tasmania Trip
Just got back from a short trip back to Tasmania, where I organised a demo of my upcoming cd with all the tracks in order etc. It was good listening to it on heaps of different systems and getting feedback from people as to how they think it sounded.
The general consensus is that most people are pretty pleased with it, which is a bit of a relief! One of my friends mentioned that I sounded ‘UK like” which I’m happy to take as a compliment! (I’d rather sound UK then Aussie… haha).
But, there is still alot of work to be done. Although all tracks are complete, there still is alot of polishing to do, especially on the second half where some tracks just need to be ‘punched in the face’ so to speak.
Meanwhile, the trip to Tasmania was filled with immense fun – plenty of drinking, gaming, photo snapping and flooding! Yes the cataract gorge in Launceston was flooding through after heaps of rainfall in the last few months – check out the pic below – this is where obviously a playground is (see the top of the swing set), there are also two pools hidden beneath there as well. Pretty cool!
08-13-09
Wordle based on lyrics of my songs
Since wordle seems to be the flavour of the week, I decided to make one based on lyrics from the songs I sing in that should feature on my next cd. The songs being Villains, Mr. Gangster Man, Tomorrow’s Past, Dreaming Again, Black Crow and Blue Scarf.
Pretty interesting to see my most popular words are don’t, even, just, like, please and growing. That’s along with the song titles of course!
08-12-09
Turn Your Last.fm Into A Wordle
So what is Wordle?
Well it’s a cool site developed by Jonathan Feinberg that makes nice images based on text that you input. The way it makes the images is based on how frequent the word is.
So I thought, it’d be cool if it can generate a ‘Wordle’ based on your last.fm, for example artists with more plays would be bigger in the resulting ‘Wordle’ image. But that would involve copying your favourite artists’ name several times and can be a waste of time, so I’ve made it easier for you. Simply enter your last.fm username, choose what charts you want and then click go.
Note: Results will open in a new window, you then must copy the text and paste it into the ‘Wordle create’ textbox.
Warning: Last.fm users with high playcounts on their artists (for example 2000+ on some artists!) may take alot longer to load the results. Be patient!
New: You can now select top track charts!
I’m not the world’s best coder. So if anyone wants to help me make this work better, shoot me up an email!
Here are some examples of last.fm + wordle:
08-08-09
Old Stuff That’s Actually Quite Awesome
So today I was looking for an old piece of music amongst my many unorganised folders of music sessions everywhere. This is when I found quite a dated piece – a song that I wrote when I was mainly just writing instrumentals because I still wasn’t confident enough in my singing. Now the thing is I remember exactly why I gave up on this song – it was random, not complete, all over the place and just didn’t make any sense. However, since I wrote that song my music has in fact being pushed towards matching that exact style (That’s right, I make music that’s not complete, random, all over the place and that doesn’t make sense hehe). I listened through the song today and just couldn’t believe my ears, why did I ever ditch this song?
Its true that its a good idea to leave things and come back to them, hell even leaving a blog post and coming back to it the next day makes you see heaps of errors in your writing. Most of all my songs that I’ve left and come back to have made me face palm when I listen to them again. Except this song. So today I built on it, went crazy, and it was terrific (I bet you tomorrow I wake up, listen to it and think – oh god, why did I blog about this? this is song is horrid).
And you know what? I’m actually going to put it on the album. Yep. There’s been songs that I’ve worked on for about 8 times the amount as this one, but hey, I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.
Oh, and to be a jerk, I’m not going to attach the whole song, in fact just attach an excerpt. The song title will be named “Flint’s Adventures In A Rather Dangerous Land”. This is dedicated to my soft toy giraffe friend Flint, who has unfortunately been adopted by me, and has been the only witness to all my rather frustrating, enjoyable and downright crazy bedroom studio sessions. Sometimes I feel that Flint would miss his friends back at the soft toy store. So Flint, this song if for you!
Flint’s Adventures In A Rather Dangerous World
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