Freelancing?

I've always wondered about sites such as ifreelance, oDesk and elance. Can these sites provide a realistic, legitimate source of income for motion designers and 3D artists? I've seen jobs posted on sites such as these requesting feature-length animated films for under $1000 asking the artists to look at films such as 'Ratatouille' for an example of the quality that would be required. What's more, these projects still seem to attract artists who continue to try and outbid each other in order to 'win' the project (Im sure finding themselves having worked well below the minimum wage once the project has been completed).

On the other hand, I have also seen people whose earnings have reached 100s of thousands of dollars, and seem able to make a good living purely off work gained through these sites. I'm sure its entirely possible to gain a constant flow of work through establishing good relationships with clients, who can appreciate the value of a good designer.

So, in order to gain a little more work outside of my full-time employment, I've signed up with elance, having seen a couple of small projects that particularly caught my eye. Whether I will I actually gain any projects this way remains to be seen. It seems that on a 'free membership' with the site I can only bid on a maximum of 3 projects per month (which seems incredibly low to be honest), whereas by paying around $10/month it allows a lot more. I think if I can win a job whilst on a free membership, I'll definitely consider becoming a full member.

I'd be interested on hearing anyone elses thoughts on these sites? Are they a good or bad thing? Are they helping to drive down the value of design work or bringing a wealth of opportunity? Maybe you have some experience with using them? Feel free to drop me an email or leave a comment below!

Pete.

The E4 E-Stings E-Party

"Channel 4 Studios, London".

The venue for the E-Stings 2009 award ceremony that myself and Natalie was invited to last Thursday. Not a bad building with cool semi-circular 'great glass elevators' shooting up and down the sides, funky coloured rooms, a bridge-walkway over to reception and a frikkin' giant 4 made out of umbrellas!

After we had 'mingled' for a few minutes in the reception area, we were led downstairs to a sort-of basement party room where we got to mingle some more, only this time with free drinks and canopés (much to Nat's delight :)! We then got to take a seat in a cinema room to watch all of the 15 E-Stings on the big screen and continue on with the more formal part of the evening hosted by Joe Thomas (The Inbetweeners).

The winning finalists were then read out - Cyriak Harris took home the grand prize and a rather neat looking trophy, whilst Ian Ball and Gareth Sayers (who unfortunately I didnt get a chance to speak to on the night) took home the runner-up prizes. The rest of us just drank lots more beer to make up for it :)

So, all in all a great evening and I suppose I'll be clearing some production time for E-Stings 2010 in 12 months time :)

2nd Round Concept Summary
2nd Round Storyboard

Pete.

AEFlame Tests...

I'd recently stumbled across a couple of images created using what is known as 'strange attractors'. I think Im going to copy and paste from wikipedia rather than explain myself...

"An attractor is a set to which a dynamical system evolves after a long enough time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed. Geometrically, an attractor can be a point, a curve, a manifold, or even a complicated set with a fractal structure known as a strange attractor. Describing the attractors of chaotic dynamical systems has been one of the achievements of chaos theory."

Sounds pretty cool right? Well, after a little digging I found that there is a free plugin that you can download for After Effects called AEFlame. In fact, this plugin seems to be a good few years old judging by the fact it'll run on AE4! Anyway, I thought it was worth a download and after a while came up with these...



I added a few minor effects on top of the fractal renders (essentially using a combination of 4 colour gradients, glows and vector blurs), but the plugin generates some great looking imagery. The controls are incredibly daunting at first, but there are several 'random generators' that you can keep clicking until you find something that works :)

Hmm. Dusty...

*Quickly sweeps the dust up that's collected on these pages since the last update*

So, I managed my half-marathon, coming in at a shade over the 2 hour mark! Apparently, next years half-marathon has already been provisionally booked for the 3rd October so I best not let my training slip too much :)

What else...
Well, I submitted my E4 final entry on a printed board and will be setting off to London for the awards ceremony next Thursday. I'm pretty happy with the submission and will post the images up on hitrender.com in the next week or two. In the meantime, look out for my first round 'E-sting', "Bird Likes Pop",currently being played on E4 during the ad breaks.

And finally...
Ive grown massively fond of Twitter in the last couple of months. At first, it seems little more than 'facebook without anything other than status updates', but by following the right people I've found it can be a great source of targeted information. In fact, the whole social-networking thing has made me wonder about my own site. I'd like to make it more updatable by having a small section for my latest twitter updates, incorporate this blog into the site rather than it appearing like an afterthought like it does now, possibly have a resources section with small tutorials and tips... etc.

So anyway, "watch this space". If nothing else, then I've got a few updates to upload to the gallery section and I've also decided that my showreel is well overdue an update.

Cheers,
Pete.

10 Days to Go!

So, the "New Balance English Half Marathon" is now somehow only 10 days away! I'm not really sure where all that time has gone since my last post but thankfully, I've managed to keep up my training and am almost feeling confident about the big day :)

I ran 9.5 miles at the weekend and am planning an 11 mile run or so this weekend, so I should e on target to achieve 13.5 on 4th October. Timing-wise, I've been pretty consistently running a mile every 10 minutes although I'd love to complete the half marathon in under 2 hours on the day (fingers crossed)!

As well as the marathon training, I've also been involved in the "e4 Stings 2009" competition. Crazily enough, my ident was one of the 15 chosen out of 800 entrants or so, meaning you can catch it on e4 over the course of the next year! I'm now heavily involved in the final stage of the competition against the 14 other finalists for the chance to win £5000 (and if nothing else, we get to go to a posh awards do in London at the end of November)!

Pete vs Half-Marathon

Wow, long time since an update :P
Well, at the moment Im in training to run a half-marathon!

Full details can be found on my sponsorship page (which is probably worth a read even if you can't sponsor me :). I've got about 11 weeks until the big day and I've got to follow a pretty vigorous training schedule to get up to speed, but I'll try and find time for more regular blog updates! I'm hoping to get a couple of new work projects uploaded to my website in the next couple of weeks or so as well.

Graphic Design Inspiration

A saw a couple of great links posted up on Twitter today and thought Id share the wealth...

First up: 50 Inspirational Poster Designs
A really great collection of inspiring graphic design going some way to prove that more often than not the simplest, boldest ideas are the best.

Next: Logo Design Inspiration
Logos, lots of logos. Good ones too, take a look!