Alex Weatherston’s Photography Blog

For those wanting to watch my AMV but don’t want to download the huge 100+mb file, you can now find the video on youtube.

So after many nights of hard work my first Anime music video (or AMV) is complete. I decided to name it “dousa” which means action or movement in japanese. Feel free to leave comments - I always like to get feedback. I’ve also entered this amv into the 2006 Anime Evolution music video competition and I hope it does well.

Click here to download

There’s a funny phenomenon outside my apartment building - the monthly crash. Without fail there has been an accident within 2 blocks of my place every month. While watching the news tonight, the following accident occurred. Luckily nobody was seriously hurt, but the passenger of the Mazda was taken to hospital. While it’s hard to tell what exactly happened, all I saw was the Mazda driving on the lawn of the apartment building, and the front of the light silver car completely smashed in with airbags deployed.

Stats:
2 Fire engines
3 Ambulances
3 Police cars
Response time: 4 mins
Time it took to clean up: 1.5 hours

Well Vidfest is officially finished. It was a great 3 days packed full of information and new ideas. I was lucky to be able to volunteer again this year, and found my running all over the place making sure the AV equipment was working. I will also note that I now officially hate water bottles, especially in heavy box form. I do however enjoy making art out of them, though like an ice sculpture, it’s only temporary as when the event doors open, it’s quickly destroyed by thirsty convention goers. Vidfest, as always. is a great place to network. I saw a few familiar faces, and met a great deal of new people from the various industries.

Out of all the master class sessions, I think my favorites are tied between the Machinima seminar with Paul Marino and the always entertaining Brooke Burgess’ broken saints presentation. Other notables included the keynote speech featuring Don Mattrick and Terry McBride. Both of these gentlemen offered their insights into the future of content in the year 2010, and had some unique ideas on how the community would play a larger role in production aspects. I also got to ask Don a question (*cheer*) before he was whisked away by executives.

Last nights party was also a blast. While I could barely hear anything over the music, I was able to meet Jim Ballantine who worked on Ren and Stimpy and a few people from the various local game companies (Radical, NLG). I did speak with 2 great guys from the company that’s doing effects work on the next superman movie (sorry guys I forgot again!) and also got to explain the epic Electronic Arts QA process to some of the guys from New Brunswick. All in all, a great success.

I’d also like to thank Kirsten and all the girls for allowing me to volunteer and I hope to come back next year.

A neat little trick i picked up today:

1) Open an empty notepad file
2) Type “Bush hid the facts” (without quotes)
3) Save it as whatever you want
4) Close and reopen the file.

Weird huh?

For those looking for my pictures of Sakuracon, you can find them in my photo gallery or you can go directly there by clicking here.

I’ve finally got my gallery working after spending all evening trying to fix a missing file problem. I’ll be posting all my pictures here from now on so they aren’t scattered over the web. Click here to visit the gallery in a new window.

and the blog section of the site is finally up. That took too long…

I am currently residing in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia. I grew up in this wonderful city, and have been here all my life. After finishing film school, I went to work for Electronic Arts Canada, where contrary to the norm, I actually enjoyed being a QA Tester. My goal is in to work in the video game industry, and perhaps someday produce a few titles.

Photography

I have always had an interest in photography. My first “borrowed” camera, the near 30 year old Pentax K1000 is probably still my favourite. It was heavier than a brick, but took amazing photos. My next camera was a 2.0 megapixel sony P-51 with an astounding (for the day) 2x optical zoom. I was one of the few kids in my school to own a digital camera, and I took well over 10000 pictures with it - and yes, it’s still working almost 9 years later.

My current camera, the Canon 20D, is my favourite. I decided against buying a car, and went with the canon, and I have never regretted it. Armed with an ever expanding array of lenses, I take it with me almost everywhere I go. I currently own a few lenses including a 70-200mm F4L, a 17-85mm IS and a 50mm F1.8 Portrait.

Other Interests

A big passion of mine is anime. I can remember watching shows like Dragon Ball (the origional, not Z!) and samurai pizza cats when I was little - I was never really fond of north american style animation like bugs bunny etc.  I didn’t really become a fanatic until later in high school, as I found a few friends who shared my interest and things took off from there. I attended my first convention in 2005, Anime Evolution, and have since been back every year. I also co-admin the website (www.animeevolution.com) and the forums. In 2006, I ventured south and worked on staff as a photographer at Sakuracon, which was a very enjoyable experience. I also have the pleasure of returning in 2007 and being on staff again! I have plans to go to other cons when I can afford airfaire (which is quite expensive).

Why this website exists

This website started out as a place to host my photos and larger files, but is growing to include this blog among other things. I hope to keep it updated and will try to add more in the near future.