Rough Cuts Ltd Blog

A few people have said to me recently that they'd like to watch Star Wars, but they don't know where to start. I get this, instead of a neat 4,5,6 part trilogy, (as it was last century) it's now grown arms and legs and my attempts to simplify it (I made a spreadsheet) only seem to cause more confusion. But recently, I saw things slightly differently that may help the saga become more understandable to an outsider. So here's a brief summary of the stuff that happens and how you might want to watch it (Rated OK through to EPIC). It's assumed you know what a Jedi is, but a Sith (you may not know) is the Dark Side equivalent. I've tried my best to be ambiguous to avoid spoilers. Before we start - Clones, Stormtroopers and Droid Army's.  This can get complicated. 1) The Droid Army we see in the first films belongs to the Trade federation. They're used to enforce an illegal trade war against a small planet. 2) The original Clone army (the first to l...

The EU just passed legislation aimed at increasing revenue for news sources and decreasing copyright theft. This  effects of this directive (not a law yet anywhere - but it will be) are as yet unknown. But change is inevitable. The main impact of these regulations are two fold. Copyright theft responsibility shifts to the platform (IE Twitter, YouTube, Facebook), not the user who uploaded the material.  (Memes, are exempt). Links to news articles will be liable to a tax.  The upshot of this is as yet unknown, many things could change. But the implications of copyright theft on the scale of operations like the social networks above are impossible for them to ignore. It's possible they may put in place charges to keep their services the same as they are now (to cover news link costs etc). It's possible they may block all links to news articles unless the user pays a fee. It's possible that they may halt all media uploads, or put in place measures to recov...

MOMO, Blue Whale and Slenderman are all quite frankly sick. I've just this morning read a post from a mother who is distraught that her young child has been exposed to Momo and is now struggling to sleep, living in fear and causing distress with other children in school. If you have young children and they mention any of these, you do need to intervene. Having now finished the end of this blog post, I think it's probably best to talk to them about it or at least clue yourself up, before they suffer the same. So what are these new modern urban legends?  In a nutshell, they're all pseudonyms for bullying. Anyone can, in reality, pretend to be the Slenderman, Momo, or the operators behind the Blue Whale challenge. I guess that's the frightening thing is that anybody could chose to be any one of them by changing their Whats App name and profile picture. The Momo character is based on a vulgar sculpture called Mother Bird by Japanese effects company Link Factory. ...

I know how difficult it is to get a good shot at an event, this weekend, I was at an event where we took around 500 images in 2 and a half hours and 2/3 of these were not used. It's easier where there are more photographers 'camped' but this increases costs. Once ISO, Aperture and shutter have been set up, the 'camped' photographer can wait and capture images quickly and efficiently.  Here I was adjusting all of those settings on the fly for different light, poses and action shots (clarity over quick focus/fast shutter) a real challenge, but a rewarding one as the images we got, for the most part, I'm happy with. But there are a number of things I really dislike about current event photography set ups*. Firstly, the all round cost for participants and photographers. (*Ignoring the issue that a number of event photographers look like eyesores in tatty jeans, unkempt beards and old T-Shirts) . The session we ran was a specific photography afternoon, the cos...

Rough Cuts make video content for others to enjoy. We also make commercial videos as well as videos for local schools that are creative and fun. You Tube is our number 1 sharing platform for these, we can create private videos, unlisted videos or public and we can choose whether it's ok or not ok to use copyrighted material. For anything commercial it really isn't ok. We respect that, it's part of our T&C's and with the exception of one client, for the most part, so do our customers. But occasionally, sometimes, for non-commercial videos, someone else's song has to be used. Case in point, in the week before last, I helped Ysgol Maesglas create a video. They raised over £200 for Children in Need and created a video to celebrate it in their school assembly. The song for Children in Need is Jamie Cullen's "Love is in the picture". For the video, the children held their drawings up in front of the camera and told us what they loved, for the most ...

People think 'techy' people are great with complicated processes and that we enjoy fixing problems. While that's pretty much 100% correct, we do prefer it when technology just does what it's supposed to. While the complicated problems do give us a challenge to overcome, on a day to day basis, when we're just trying to get work done, we prefer it when things are simple. Very simple. Where the skills come into their own is when we're looking for the easiest way to do something. Tomorrow I'll be working in a office which hasn't had a 'tech' visit or upgrade for a number of years. It's clearly been run on a budget, and at the time the best solution for 'sharing' might have been the Western Digital drive that they're using now. Sadly the network that they had has been decimated, and they're leaning on powerline adaptors for network access. Network access that is hampered by something electrical in the system which is causing one...

Many people, myself included, were both excited and fearful of contactless payment. On the one hand buying a few spuds by simply wafting your card close to a terminal, is convenient, on the other hand, worryingly easy. Indeed it wasn't long before the media cottoned onto our fears and started feeding us stories of 'skimmers'; people with erroneous card payment devices like Square and iZettle, and people got worried. Having said that, here's the latest story (at the time of writing) from 9 hours ago. So the fear is not without justification. Companies have been selling NFC secure wallets, bags and purses, for some time so the signal won't emanate too far. So advancing this technology into smartphones would surely be more risky? Not at all. Because the NFC chips in Android phones sit dormant until they've been enabled. They're only enabled when your phone is unlocked. So skimming isn't possible. If your phone is in your back pocket (far more likely than ...