Others write about improvements. I simply improve!

Others may try to sneak changes slowly into their blog. I simply do them openly and immediately.

Sounds crazy after just another year of small and big changes? Well, this is madmind!

I know, I know, this sounds utterly ridiculous, like taken from a cheap action movie. But I am serious and here’s the meat behind the words or in other words…

Here’s what you can expect from this blog in the year 2010 (with some background information regarding the reasons)…

First and most important of all, I will start to write much more movie reviews than ever before. You could say, that madmind finally will become what it already claims to be: a movie blog.

In the past year or so I tried to find a niche in the vast sea of movie blogs while having a nasty time problem, meaning that since I live in Germany I am two months to half a year late until I can get my hands on a movie. This is simply because of the late release date compared to the US. What could I possible compete with the amazing sites out there with that drawback…Well, because of this I decided to go more for an industry approach – what’s hot in the industry, what’s shit and what movie/genre got some interesting statistics.

Although this was kinda fun I realized some weeks ago that this cannot be madmind. For one, posts for which I need many, many hours to prepare are simply too much too handle. For the other: those statistical posts are interesting, but also fucking boring!! Basically they give you some insight you can also gain on BoxOfficeMojo. The industry specific posts are not that great either, because they deal not with the movies themselves.

So, how did I circumvent the time problem? I didn’t. But I think I found two simple solutions that might be fun for everyone and interesting to you, my dear readers:

1. I will focus my reviews to those movies I really like, hate or care about.
2. I will widen the focus of my reviews: besides Hollywood movies I will start to do reviews of anime movies.

“Anime movies? Are you nuts?!?!” you might think. So, let me explain.

Although I will and want to increase the amount of Hollywood movie reviews there is the problem that I simply don’t give a shit for most of them. So often it’s the same shit with toned down writing, boring sequels with boring characters accompanied by boring stories from people that love to boast about the technical achievements (i.e. 3D). How possible could I then give you something funny or nice to read on a weekly or even daily basis?

Funnily enough, what I so miss from Hollywood I got from anime movies and anime series in the last weeks and months. As crazy as this might sound but I found some anime more entertaining, more interesting and more fruitful to write about than this stupid Hollywood shit. The only reason I didn’t write about anime was the focus of this blog and its claim “movie blogging with smyle” which basically meant “Hollywood movie blogging with smyle”.

To circumvent this problem there will be a change next week. Starting next week this blogs claim won’t be “movie blogging with smyle” anymore but “movie and anime blogging with smyle”. This change is not final at first, therefore I didn’t add the anime part directly into the claim but added this addition as an image.

This image thing directly leads to the last announcement: starting next week the design of this blog will change. Although I like the current theme the main problem is its somehow cold and technical feel. Because of this I did some redesign of the current style and since I am a sucker for minimalism I came up with something even more minimalistic.

Basically what you will get is the same visual structure with even less visual clutter and a more warm feeling to it since the main background is not white anymore but light grey.

So, as you can see I did a lot of thinking and coding during the last few weeks (sorry for my lack of posts during that time).

To sum everything up: madmind will be soon redesigned with a new focus on movie reviews and anime reviews while not completely ditching industry posts or statistics.

Let’s have some fun…

If you spent some time with this blog in the last few weeks you surely spotted all the small and big changes that occurred on this site. From new taglines to constant design changes it had everything. And although this blog is about movies of any kind I simply need to write my experiences down to get back to business and to help you prevent the same design mistakes I did.

The worst thing that can happen to a blogger or anyone else is the “shift of essentials” as I called it in one of my old 3D tutorials, before I went to movie blogging. It means that someone looses the overall goal and focuses on details that might be important for him but not for anyone else or the overall result.

Design ≠ Content

Basically, this “shift of essentials” happened to me in the last few weeks regarding this movie blog. Instead of writing good articles and posts (which is the content) I focused on the design aspect of this site (which is the presentation of content). Instead of thinking about the visions of this site, I changed colors, moved things around and anything else that was not textual.

Basically I was in a vicious circle of design, as I constantly changed everything, starting over again and again because I never was happy with the results. The reason for this is the fact that I consider myself a “wannabe designer”, the worst kind of combination one can come up with. It’s those people who have enough “knowledge” and gut-feeling to see that something is not right, not fitting, but lack any kind of background knowledge to solve the problems once and for all.

Change you can

Although this problem was obvious to me, I kept thinking that with the next design iteration I would be able to finish this process.

Yeah, sure!

It took me basically three iterations to acknowledge I had to stop doing this and focus on the thing that is important: writing.

What did I do to break this circle? I changed my design strategy: instead of being Mr. Genius Of Design, I admitted my defeat and simply searched for a theme on the various design sites on the internet. The one I found formed the basis of the current theme. The great thing about was the incredible speed with which I added modifications and “improvements” to the theme.

Some Closing Tips

So, basically I have learned this big lesson during the last weeks of chaos: don’t think you’re a designer unless you are a designer. Don’t waste your time designing everything on your own. Download a theme and perhaps modify it. The results are way better than anything you could come up with.

To close this post I present you a small list of things I have noted during the various design stages:

• For the love of god use images. This goes for minimalistic themes especially
• Details are as important as the overall impression
• Vast empty spaces need some spots of “chaos” to counter the emptiness
• But don’t pack too much into your site. The more chaos the worse.
• Big is not always good
• Use contrasts. If you have much white, add black to it so it doesn’t become boring
• Find a visual hierarchy from bigger to smaller and stick with it
• Forms with a standard design are functional but horrible to look at. A custom search bar is a chance to shine
• Fewer colors are better than a rainbow of them. But no colors whatsoever are as bad because it lacks interesting spots for your eyes
• Small differences from the norm (=standard) can result in impressive visuals

Boy, it’s a good feeling to have written down all the things that nagged me. Now, I can finally move on and write about movies again.

I swear I have to give up this “habbit” of mine – but let’s be frank: no Horror movie or Thriller can be as suspensful as a computer trying to crash itself.

Or a computer which seems to be on an infinite loop and trying to crash itself.

No script or movie can top this.

You know, I love CGI and creating an image of pure bits and bytes is wonderful. But I also hate 3D when anything I do needs a re-rendering of the image so I can see if I am going into the right direction. And the more I reach the final state the smaller the changes and the longer the render times. Hence, the more I hate those test renders.

And I frickin hate them even more when the renderer crashes constantly!!!!

What did i do wrong in the past??????????? *sob, cry*

And the name of the shop is Madmind.de

No, wait, that’s not completely true anymore. The name is the same. But the owner (me) finally got his ass together, moved the lower floor to the entrance and reworked his strategy.

When I look back to “ye olde times” it is almost too terrific to endure because I more or less had two worlds on this site. The first world was this blog here. Filled with posts and content, updated on a regular basis. Then there was the other world, the rest of my site with the homepage. It contained my best 3d images and 3d short movies but was presented in a gruesome way. The galleries not only had a cheap list of my images but also stupid one-liners aimed to be funny. God, I must have been drunk when I had this idea. Moreover, since it takes a long time to create an image there was really nothing going on. The homepage was deserted presenting only a small notice what the visitors can expect. Great thinking at its best I must say. But there was even more because I had two worlds with two distinct brands. One was madmind and the other madBlog. And to confuse visitors more I placed both names in the blog.

But this is all gone now. And as you can see, my writing about the biggest update ever was no joke. Since I don’t want to bore you to death, although I want to tell you what I did, I give you everything in a nice numbered list:

1. First of all I moved the blog from the back to the front. Gone is the lonely homepage. Simultaneously I will remove the name madBlog and rebrand it under the site’s name: madmind. One to rule them all you could say.
2. Originally I had two worlds on the technical side, too. While the blog worked with WordPress the rest was handmade coding. This is gone now. Everything is stored inside WordPress. The blog is the same, everything else are static pages.
3. Although it is the first striking change I place it under number 3 because you can change it easily: the design. The old side was dark, full of visual overweight and uselessness. That is gone, as you can obviously see. I reduced everything to the extreme. Originally I created two very own designs but they were too “art” and “design” – which doesn’t fit for a 3D and movie blog. Because of that I took a theme and partly changed it to my vision.
4. The galleries are completely revamped and for the first time really look cool.
5. What in for the blog? Now, you can browse from within a post to the next ones, you see the most popular posts and latest comments. And you can keep track of the discussion. I removed the Digg this stuff and replaced it with Share this. One button for everything. Of course I did not delete Similar Posts plugin. On the technical side I have a better visual editor, the sitemap gets updates automatically and have an automated contact form. Akismet still protects everything and the All in One SEO pack will hopefully please search spiders in every way possible.

The reinvention of madmind took a long time but is finally finished. I hope you like the new look and style and I also hope this was the last time that I look at my site and decide to change everything. On the other hand:

Change is the only constant in the universe.

Do you like the new design? Are there any cool gadgets out there that I missed and would make your day as a reader better? Or did you find any bugs that I missed? I’d be glad to hear from you in the comments or via email.

If you think I use this once in a lifetime chance to write something epic you massively underestimate the human capability to waste his luck for nothing.

So, the only thing I have to say is

YAY!

Since naming a movie is somehow similar to naming a child (in the poetic sense) I decided to accompany this milestone with a new design. Not only for this blog, but also for my whole website. Which is somehow reasonable since both use the same design. Or to be more precise, this blog’s design is inherited by the main page design.

Well, whatever. Enough techy talk.

Although I have to admit that from a functional standpoint the visual update is no groundbreaking new ground in website design, I think it is by far better than the “old” one.

If you have followed madmind for some time you might have noticed that with each new update, this site got more and more “standard” in terms of structure and format. This update is no exception. And while this seems to be a step in the wrong direction, i think it is by far the best design I have spit out in quite some time. Not only is the standard way the best way as I have learned but there are some small things that make this design at least good:

1. because of the bigger main navigation links and the red background on active elements, the navigation and orientation is far better for users than ever before
2. Since this website heavily deals with anything that is animated and/or 3D, I decided to add some visual elements, that connect this site with this idea. Some gradients here and there, a constant use of shadows and, of course, the menu divider, who seemingly let’s the visitor see what is behind.

Accompanied by this update I also reworked the main site pages (smaller images, less text), and last but not least updated WordPress to the latest edition (Version 2.5).

These were some hard but also fun weeks of evening and night works.

I hope you like the new design. If there is something that could be made better or something I have forgotten, don’t hesitate to post it in the comments below.

Thank you very much!

Yesterday I finally started to finish a long-going project of mine, a THX spoof short which saw its birth three(!!) years ago. The idea to this short movie came to me when I could’t stand the original one anymore after weeks and weeks of the same THX trailer I had to sit through. No sooner said than done I began to work on it. Yet at that time I wanted to make a full short movie of about two minutes length only equipped with the opening joke. Since I couldn’t find anything else I stopped the project and finally forgot it. Yesterday I remembered and with my additional wisdom I decided to use only this one joke.

Although most of the work went rather easy despite the fact I never did sound effects of that magnitude before, there was one glitch at the final step: encoding.

Boy, you most likely won’t believe how frustrating it is when you are finished with everything but the final result after encoding looks terrible or doesn’t work at all. The “funny” part is that the most advanced code in use today (H.264) went like a charm and the final result was perfect. What I am talking about is, well, MPEG.

Although I am the first one saying MPEG is the best supported standard it seems that MPEG hates me for that remark. In fact it despises me because I had to encode my 40 second short twenty times until I got what I wanted: a full resolution version with an adequate quality which plays on my media player. I still don’t know fully why it happened but my media player simply couldn’t play most of the files I gave it to feed. And since I have more than one computer (who doesn’t)  I checked whether it only was this particular player. Well, it was not.

So, when you are living in the high field of high art (screenwriting, movie making and the more) expect a harsh landing in the wet swamp of technology every now and then. And be prepared for it!

In the last few days I worked on my general webpage, generating more than 30 new sites for my various 3D images (character, scenery, sketches) and 2D images (cover designs). Before that, when you clicked on an image, it was simply downloaded. Now you get the image with some additional information in a design that fits the overall look.

Regarding my 3D short movie project I am still on track and the fact that I kicked the backstory to where it belongs really helped me. Nevertheless I still have the feeling that forcing me to think about it at the moment won’t do any good. Therefore I have taken the last few days off (again) and did some other 3D related works, like creating a new 3D character image and working on a cartoony 3D image which develops quite nicely.

Regarding this blog, I am currently working on the 4th part of my 2001 analysis series while the dialogue adds a whole new level of thinking and possiblities. But there is more besides this, as I have some nice ideas for new posts; the list is growing.

Oh, by the way: not forcing yourself to work on something can help you tremendeously. I for one might have found The Idea for my story, and it might actually work. Of course I will wait for some days to cool down.

But if I still like it then…well…

Stay tuned!