A late September 08 update

Whew, quite a bit has happened recently.

I finished my 7-week teaching prac at St Laurence's College just last week. It was a good experience. Ended in a pretty fun way - I joined a bunch of grade 10 boys on an extra-curricular enrichment activity which lasted a week - Rich Tasks, it was called. The activity I joined was 3D Game Design. Pretty cool huh. We basically had a few talks on 3D animation and game design, and all got to design our own computer games using a program called gamemaker. I was gonna make a pinball game based on n-gage's mile high pinball, then I switched to a game based on popcap's mummymaze, and eventually created a game in the style of the classic tank game. Because it's a program I created, I'm completely free to distribute it for others to download and play. Might clean it up a little and showcase it on this blog some time perhaps. Here's a picture of a few kids playing my game.

This prac also saw me exhausting almost my entire repertoire of magic tricks - I showed the other prac teachers one magic trick each day as lunchtime entertainment. It kept them going, and it kept me going, really. Not sure if this link works, but I recorded my trick on the very last day: link.

I'm currently on holidays. Classes resume next week (I think) and go for a couple of months more, and then I'll be finished with my teaching degree! Quick hey. I only just started it 8 months ago. One big project I've given myself to complete over this week long holiday is the building of several video camera rigs. Namely a dolly, a camera stabiliser (like the steadicam), and a rig for doing low/ground shots. I'm using a book which I borrowed from my video buddy Andrew Gentle - Killer Camera Rigs That You Can Build. It's going well so far. I'll take some sample footage when I'm done and post it here.

Oh, I've also finally taken a ride on the Wheel of Brisbane!!! But I'll talk about that in its own post ;)