Fun GIF tweeted about my Mocking Jay 2 work

Check it out!

https://twitter.com/mikeblackbourn/status/667934539461718016

Stash article on the work for Disney Playmation

Great article on the spot I worked on for Disney Playmation with a cool behind the scenes video! Check it out.

Article:
http://www.stashmedia.tv/?p=24545

Video:
https://vimeo.com/131935624

Labyrinth

So I'm in the middle of writing a follow up to a short story I'm going to publish soon. The next in the series has a labyrinth as a theme, the location it takes place is set in a labyrinth like location... And there is even a question of whether a minotaur like foe lives at the core.

Interesting that I found there is a classicly haped labyrinth right near my house. I took my girls out to find it. Beautiful. It's pretty interesting walking the spiral that switches back on itself. A long path compressed into a small space.

Seeing your work in a bookstore

This is an amazing feeling. Checking a local bookstore that carries your book and seeing it displayed prominently and with less copies nearby than the last time. Books are being sold. New readers are checking out the work for the first time.

Very cool

Disney Playmation Trailer - Marvel and Star Wars combo!

Disney just launched the teaser trailer for their new line of interactive toys. Playmation.

I'm the CG supervisor that oversaw the creation of the 3d visual effects for the trailer at The Embassy VFX. It was a great project to work on and I'm proud of the result and the hard work our team put into creating the exciting visuals. The Star Wars shots are entirely 3d other than the actors on greenscreen, the Marvel sequences are built up on top of some great plate photography with lots of layers of CG characters and effects.

Check it out!

Spikes in the graph

Spikes in the graph, one of the most exciting things a self published author can see.

Since February I've been a self published author. I have one book up on Amazon as both a kindle ebook and paperback. Once every day or couple of days I check the sales report and see what kind of activity the book has had. Amazon graphs the latest days of activity and you get these spiky colored lines reporting how many books sold.

Cindercast: A Tale of Tides hasn't sold much and I don't expect it to, not yet. I really need to get a few more works out there so they can be discovered independently and then cross promote as people look to see what else I may have written. So the graph is usually a pretty flat line.

But every now and again it spikes. A fan is born. Or at least I hope a fan is born. From the reviews on Amazon it seems like it's being pretty well received. It's just such a cool thing to know another person is out there reading your words, sharing in the vision you created.

Today there was another spike. Thank you mystery reader, I hope you enjoy it.

ArtRage feature about me and Cindercast

Here's a little interview I did with the makers of ArtRage, a handy digital paint program. I used it for all the watercolor style shading in Cindercast. It was also where I painted the cover. Excellent software and available for low cost.

If you want to know more about the art process for the book head over and check it out:

http://www.artrage.com/artist-feature-michael-blackbourn/

Url and Backgrounds - Indie Yellow

Wow google can be annoying.

I was trying to add michaelblackbourn.com as a top level domain for this blog and the've changed their products in annoying ways in the last two years since I setup Cindercast.com

So after having to register at another company trying setting up redirect stuff we'll see if it works (It will take a day or two for www.michaelblackbourn.com to creep across all the DNS servers).

Now that I've hopefully parked this blog on a domain that is my name I can get down to putting some paint on the walls. For now I've assigned this intense yellow image. It was the least bad of all the choices blogger provides. It's also the color of all indie movie posters:

 So It's probably a good choice as a placeholder for an artist and indie author.

Stay tuned for updates. I'm 10,000 words into a sci-fi short story about the rise of an AI super intelligence and how it will effect the people about to create it.

Welcome!

New Blog for me. This will be a general purpose place to put cool stuff about my books, art, and work.

Blog for my illustrated kids book: www.cindercast.com

Where I work: www.theembassyvfx.com

Stay awhile, stay forever!