The Art of Digitised Suicide

It’s amazing what suicide can do for somebody’s career. You release a few mediocre albums containing a couple of half decent tracks (in my opinion anyway) and then gorily end it all at your peak, forever cementing your name in the legendary rock halls of fame. Without the shotgun, or the shock of a world, and you may just fade off into obscurity, never to be heard from again.

This week I’ve spent my working hours in Manchester on a training course for Adobe After Effects. Previously we have done all our adverts (the company I work for sell advertising space on a host of LCD screens across the world) in Flash, and previous to that they were done in Macromedia Director. Looking back at some of those old adverts it’s quite remarkable how they’ve evolved into how they appear nowadays.

During the week’s course we had to undertake an exercise in making a man look like he was actually blowing his own brains out. Now the footage provided was of a young bloke (I’ll call him Kurt) pretending to shoot some sort of automatic rifle at his head then falling over. We learned to digitally remove his head at the correct point, add gun flashes, blood splashes with accompanying sound effects of gun blasts and squelching sounds.

Strangely, the exercise proved to be quite worthwhile, and even though it won’t propel me into the aforementioned hall of fame, it’s helped me to get an idea of how this package works, and further my own skills.

The true test of this will be when we have to create actual adverts using it, as well as the yearly sales presentation which will be due in January.

Speaking of which, I need to come up with some ideas. I’ll try sandwich this in somewhere between my own work.

Now back kick starting the run up to Christmas 😀