SixSibs

Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I wasn’t making movies, my dad introduced me to a very interesting piece of software: Phun.

Phun was the first “real” piece of software I’d ever really used, and I spent many happy hours experimenting with it back when I was young(er). Blender came along, and I used that a lot more, but recently I went back to Phun and made a few physics simulations that I thought I would show you.

Phun has less features than Blender, but that is, for the most part, a good thing. John and Isaac can easily build things on Phun, without having to watch hours of tutorials and memorize reams of keyboard shortcuts.

Phun has no built in video export, but that was easily overcome with Quicktime screen capture software. All of the clips you see in this movie are run at what would have been real time if I wasn’t screen recording at the same time. The screen capturing hogs a lot of processor power, so there were times when I had to speed up the simulations that involved water.

Enjoy!

I was looking through my memorabilia bin and I found the adds page of the newspaper that was published on my birthday (thoughtfully saved by my mother) and I found this:

Yikes! Today you can get an iMac with a quad-core 2.5 GHz i5 Processor, 4 Gb of RAM,an 8x DVD drive,500 GB of storage and a 1080×1920 display- that’s almost 100 times faster with 500 times more storage and 250 times more RAM for $100 less than the 1996 computer in the picture!

Here are a few more particle simulations that I did:

Here is the video of a “lecture” that I gave to some of the boys at our church,I have had the video clips put together for about 2 weeks but I was just able to find the right time record it this morning(it’s kind of hard to record audio around our house because whenever it’s quiet (early morning,late night) it usually needs to stay quiet and whenever it doesn’t need to stay quiet there isn’t usually a solid 5-10 minutes of total and complete silence.)The movie making lesson was the longest “speech”(at about 10 minutes) that I had ever given (although having movies to show helped cut down my actual speaking time). The movie version isn’t near as long(less than 5 minutes)
because I did most of the talking in my lesson after I showed the movies, where here I do a lot of the talking during the movies, I also had a question and answer time afterward. The movie version was kind of crazy at times because I put together the movie clips before I recorded the audio, so sometimes I was kind of rushed. I hope you learn something about how we make our movies!
So here it is:

I am uploading a sequel to Stunt movie #1 and this is the the time that it is supposed to take before it is on the internet:
Argh! At that rate  it will take 19.183 hours before it is fully uploaded.

Here is some software that I thought was very good, I have used them all before and I use most of them on a regular basis (I don’t use   Windows Live Movie Maker very much because we have a better (and more expensive) video editing program at home). I hope you’ll be able to use at least one of these programs and all of them but Blender are pretty intuitive (there are lots of online Blender tutorials- for some good ones click here ).

Here they are:

Recording and editing sound and sound effects

Audacity

Visual effects, logos, and computer animation.

Blender

Picture editing, and image creation.

Paint.net

Video editing and some visual effects.

Windows Live Movie Maker