Lunch Thoughts # 61
Sixteen working days left (including today). It still feels incredibly odd to be leaving.
My study break ended a week ago but my first seven days back at Escape (entering my final 'term' of the year-long course) has not gone very smoothly. I was struggling to get a music video finished during my summer break, and I failed to get it all done in time due to technical problems. This meant that rendering time for my own project has now been interfering with my studying and yesterday morning things sort of came to a head; I came downstairs in the morning to inspect the results of an overnight render, but discovered my workstation blinking an unfamiliar red light at me and producing a burnt electrical smell, reminiscent of the Scalextric set I owned as a child. I panicked, thinking I might have worked the machine to a premature death, but I'm now reasonably sure it's just a faulty cooling unit and hopefully the damage hasn't spread to any other bits of the computer. It's still under warranty and tomorrow a Hewlet Packard engineer will visit the house and (I hope) replace the damaged components.
Computer or not, the coming weekend will not be a productive one for studying either, since I've volunteereed to join Marius's team for a 48 Hour Film Challenge. We are picking up our brief on Friday evenign and must produce a completed short film by the end of Sunday; I've volunteered my services as musical composer, VFX artist (circumstances, script and confidence permitting) and probably also extra and odd-jobs man around the shooting location(s). It will be fun and hopefully a good learning experience, although I am starting to wonder if I'm pushing myself to do too many things at once. We'll see.
My study break ended a week ago but my first seven days back at Escape (entering my final 'term' of the year-long course) has not gone very smoothly. I was struggling to get a music video finished during my summer break, and I failed to get it all done in time due to technical problems. This meant that rendering time for my own project has now been interfering with my studying and yesterday morning things sort of came to a head; I came downstairs in the morning to inspect the results of an overnight render, but discovered my workstation blinking an unfamiliar red light at me and producing a burnt electrical smell, reminiscent of the Scalextric set I owned as a child. I panicked, thinking I might have worked the machine to a premature death, but I'm now reasonably sure it's just a faulty cooling unit and hopefully the damage hasn't spread to any other bits of the computer. It's still under warranty and tomorrow a Hewlet Packard engineer will visit the house and (I hope) replace the damaged components.
Computer or not, the coming weekend will not be a productive one for studying either, since I've volunteereed to join Marius's team for a 48 Hour Film Challenge. We are picking up our brief on Friday evenign and must produce a completed short film by the end of Sunday; I've volunteered my services as musical composer, VFX artist (circumstances, script and confidence permitting) and probably also extra and odd-jobs man around the shooting location(s). It will be fun and hopefully a good learning experience, although I am starting to wonder if I'm pushing myself to do too many things at once. We'll see.