So it’s finally arrived and the Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate is due to open at the weekend. There was a time when I thought it would never happen, when £7,000,000 was spent without even laying a brick, but here we are, an exstimated £20,000,000 later and it’s actually happening. So 10 years in the making and here’s the history of its development:

• October 2001: £7,000,000 design unveiled and due to be completed by 2004 (link).
• February 2003: Planning permission granted and due to be completed by 2006 (link)
• August 2005: Work due to begin, and completed by 2007 (costs now £25,000,000) (link)
• October 2005: Projected costs rise to £29,500,000 (link)
• February 2006: Design Scrapped after projected costs rise to £50,000,000 (link)
• April 2006: KCC promises Turner Contemporary will cost no more than £15,000,000 (link)
• June 2007: £17,500,000 design unveiled and due to be completed by 2010 (link)
• February 2008: Planning permission granted and due to be completed by 2010 (link)
• November 2008: Work starts on Turner Contemporary and due to be completed by 2011.

Two years ago I wrote an article called “The Future of Thanet” and it was all very doom and gloom, but now that something concrete (pun intended) is in place then perhaps there is a future for Margate, and hopefully the rest of Thanet too. What is needed now is continued investment and belief in Margate so that the shops start opening again, Dreamland Heritage Park becomes a reality, and so that tourists start coming back to what was once a popular seaside town.

Hopefully the Turner Contemporary can be the catalyst for this.

Just popping along to tell you about a site I am working on. It’s called psdposters.co.uk and is a place for me to share fully editable posters created with Adobe Photoshop.

These posters have been made by me and are free to download and edit so if you need a poster for an event then maybe I’ve already got one there to help you or you could request a specific one from me.

Pop along to psdposters.co.uk and see what you can find.

As you can see (unless you are reading the RSS feed) I have changed the theme on my blog and I’m quite happy with it. There’s still some bits to tweak but all in all it seems to be working fine and I’m now able to adds some links to the sidebar now that I have a two-widget system going on. I still need to sort out my categories as well as adding thumbnails to my more popular posts (I’ll leave the others), and I’m sure I’ll stumble across even more things.

What do you think?

The Theme is called CrossBlock and you can find it here.

Following on from yesterday’s post about tilt-shift photography today I have some tilt-shift video to showcase for you which is referred to as smallgantics: “a digital post production technique to simulate miniature cinematography on full scale filmed sequences”.

Keith Loutit is a Sydney based photographer who employs this technique on his videos and they truly do look just like model miniatures. Here is a selection of some of his work from his ‘Bathtub’ series focusing around the Sydney ports:

Bathtub II

Bathtub V

If you want to make your own tilt-shift/smallgantics video and have Adobe After Effects then this tutorial will help you out a great deal with step-by-step instructions.

I’ve been playing around with tilt-shift photography which results in miniature style photos that are pictures of real-life scenes but manipulated to look like model photographs. I haven’t actually been doing all the hard work described here but have instead been using tiltshiftmaker.com which does all the hard work for you.

It won’t work with just any old photo but when it does work then I think the results are pretty good and really do look like snapshots of miniature model worlds.

Here’s some of my photos and I would suggest you click on them and view them full-size.

Model of Deal Pier

Model of Maritime Museum, Ramsgate

Model of boat on Vltava River, Prague, Czech Republic

Model of Canary Wharf, London

Model of Viking Bay, Broadstairs

I arrived in Chichester around 3pm on Saturday and had half an hour to spare before meeting up with Charlotte and so I took the opportunity to pop into the Otter Gallery, an art gallery located on my old University campus.

When I was at Uni I only ventured into it a couple of times, but now I’m a mature gentleman I can appreciate a little bit of art and so I had a look around and actually found it quiet impressive. ‘Cut It Out’ is the exhibition currently showing, featuring seven artists.

Cut It Out is an exhibition of established and emerging contemporary artists from the UK and Europe who are challenging the traditional boundaries of paper cut. They are exploiting the unique qualities of paper to make unexpected and unusual work, blurring the distinction between craft and visual art. Cut It Out seeks to explore artists currently working in this field, examining how their techniques and approaches are evolving paper cut into something uniquely modern.

You can read a bit more about it in this pdf or why not pop along to the Otter Gallery and see for yourself.

Now for a few photos I took on my phone:

'Digging Words' - by Oona Patterson

'Butterflies' - by Ciara Healy

'Ream' -by Oona Patterson

Apparently today, Monday 19th January, is the most depressing day of the year… or it could all just be a load of rubbish for a slow news day.

It’s a slow news day over here too and so I’m going to point you over to ‘The Play Coalition‘ to see some of their designs so you can go “I want that!”.

See this design and more at www.theplaycoalition.net

Following on from yesterday’s post about Jake and Amir on Vimeo I thought I’d give you another sample of some of the stuff on Vimeo. I know it’s not going to blow you away with this type of blogging but at least I’m blogging again even if it is with videos etc. At least I’m not doing and memes eh?!

The thing is that I’m loving Vimeo because of it’s mix between technology and creativity. They offer the technology (higher bitrate, resolution, and  HD support) and it’s users are supplying the creativity. OK not all the users are but as the site only allows user created content then a lot of what clogs up the likes of Youtube is excluded. Am I coming across as a bit of a Youtube snob? I guess I am and only visit when I want to see a music video that someone has more than likely illegally uploaded. Phew, glad that’s out in the open.

A nice selection of videos eh? The first video, Human Movement, sums up its title completely with some great… movement… both with the dancers as well as the camera work and editing. The second one you’ll be surprised to know is actually a collection of photos, edited in Photoshop and After Effects, and accompanied by a great soundtrack. Cool eh? And then in the final video it’s Sia with ‘Buttons’, which I think is a pretty amazing and unique effort fitting with the song and the lyrics (If you want to download a great remix (Jimmy Vallanc Edit) then go here).

I’m going to be developing a new website soon, and let me just say it’s very exciting. I can’t really talk about it at the moment as I’ve still got lots of ideas running through my head and don’t want to commit myself too soon as it might take a while to get off the ground. Sounds interesting? Well for some of you it will be, and for some of you it won’t. Not really grabbing you is it?

I spent the weekend doing some research on it which has helped me quite a bit, but do you know what the hardest bit is? Thinking of a domain name. Rubbish eh? I can get the site going, do all the work, but then when it comes to thinking of a relevant domain address that is easy to remember and type, and that is unique and identifyable then I’m stumped a bit. I think I’ll draw up a shortlist and keep looking at them and hopefully something will inspire me as we all know there are some terrible doamins out there.

I’ve gone a bit slack on the webdesign side of things and although things are ticking along I’ve not been able to put as much time and effort into things as I would like. I was meant to migrate all my sites from 1&1 hosting over to my new hosting, and although I’ve done this for some things, there are sites, like this blog, which I just haven’t got round to moving. In theory it shouldn’t be too much effort, but it ‘could’ take a while if I run into a few problems. I need to have a weekend on my own to sort this out, but if I do have any time I’ve more often enjoyed laying on the sofa nad watching TV. It is a rut.

One other thing is that I’ve spent quite a lot of time at my ‘real job’ working on a new website for the Students’ Union. We currently pay a company £6,000 a year to provide us with a website and frankly that’s taking the piss. The contract was signed in the dot.com boom when everyone had to have a new website and for the past few years I’ve been counting down the time to when our 5 year contract ends (May 31st 2008). At work, although it’s not in my job description, I usually take charge of the computing side of things, and so I came up with an alternative plan of instead creating and running the website ourselves and then using the £6,000 p/a to invest in the site through either getting someone to maintain it (maybe a part-time job for a student) or using the money to promote the site or invest in new software etc.

One of the irks with our current website provider is that if we wanted anything else added then it would always cost extra e.g an online shop would cost £2,000 just to implement it, which meant that we never developed the site fully. It just ticked along and was a disgrace.

I’ve now created a site using the Joomla CMS, and have installed all I need for free. In fact the only thing we’re paying for at the moment is the hosting (around £8 a month) and the domain name (around £3 per year), and that’s all. I’ve done all the work myself, and hopefully it’ll be ready to roll in a few weeks. It’s not just been a case of building the site though, as I’ve had to write all the content too which is quite time consuming, but will mean that it not just a case of re-hashing the old site, but actually a new site with completely relevant information on it.

I am proud of it and it seems to be working fine, but until the site goes ‘live’ we’ll have to wait to see what the feedback is. The site will also need to be promoted to attract visitors back which will be hard, especially as it’ll be in the second half of the academic year when students are less succeptable to new things.

I’ll keep you updated on the site and maybe you’ll get to have a sneek preview! Excited eh?

Update: See the site here.