Color & VFX Reel, March 2015 from Conrad Hughes on Vimeo.
My site is at conradhughes.com.
My prices for color correction start at $17.50/minute of footage, while I offer very reasonable rates for object removal, stabilization ($20-$60 per shot), motion graphics, rotoscoping, matchmoving and composition.
I've been working with DaVinci Resolve for around 3 years now and shooting for four or five. I recently traveled through Indonesia and have settled in Cambodia where I am working full-time as a colorist, VFX artist, editor and cinematographer.
I use Resolve 11, Fusion 7, SynthEyes and Mocha Pro and the above reel contains clips from cinema, TV, indie film and my own work.
“And isn’t it the case that you were sleeping with your wife’s cousin at-“
The show continued and Lyle sat in stasis. A functional scoliosis in his thoracic spine slipped an extra degree as he slumped deeper into the sofa cushions. His neck crooked at an uncomfortable angle against the bony headrest, but for some ingrained and unknowable reason he didn’t correct his posture.
“I never done it, I swear,” stated the television.
The lack of expletives in this particular episode led him to believe he was watching paid actors. A friend of his, whom had lied to him in the past, stated once (in a bar) that most of the episodes of this show—and others—mixed actors and extras looking for work with members of the public. Lyle liked to play a game whereby he would attempt to calculate which stories were real.
The show continued to blaze. “You told me it was over!”
The game was interesting to him because it possessed multiple levels: his friend—which was a strong word, come to think of it—was no verist: perhaps paid actors weren’t involved in Larry James’ daily chat show.
“More, after these messages from our sponsors.”
However, whenever Lyle found himself swayed by some wind of thought that his acquaintance—although, he’d known him for years, he was definitely a friend—was lying to him, this then evoked a sense of horror, horror at the idea that such people as seen on the daily ‘Feud actually existed in some dark corner of a world that he had never wanted to consider.
“Dr. Pepper. What’s the worst that could happen?”
This horror would fade as he applied a more cynical wash to the show, safe in the belief that he was watching plain entertainment. But this raised further questions: who were the target audience for the show? What demographic? If these people truly existed, then it was them. If they didn’t exist, and the show did employ actors, then, Lyle realized: he was.
“Every day’s great at your Junes.” A large department store loomed on the flat-screen panel. The ‘Feud jumped to local during ads—daytime air was something the state companies could actually afford.
He perceived himself as being outside of any focus group or target audience, his job as it was, but perhaps the network executives were insidious enough as to cultivate a demographic that included those who believed they were unclassifiable; outliers on a graph. The more he thought about this, the stronger the dichotomy formed in his mind, a split at times equally 50-50 and sometimes weighted one way or the other: which was the best—or least bad—possibility?
“And now, back to Larry James’ Feud.” Camera 1 pulled in close to Larry James, exhibiting his receding hairline. He looked ex-military in demeanor.
The least bad possibility would be, of course, to turn the show off. But Lyle persisted, with the quiet curiosity of the amanuensis, in his thought experiment. If he were truly the target audience, it followed that there were significant numbers of people playing the same game, at home, all with an unreliable friend sparking the actor/existence of awful people argument. Lyle considered writing this paradox down on occasion, but underneath a surface he could not perceive he believed that it would not stand up to scrutiny, as the chances of thousands of people sitting at home thinking exactly the same as he was almost exquisitely improbable.
“Next up: rape baby meets father for the first time, live on television.”
What if—and this was difficult to consider—there were actors in the employ of the show, but those actors were brought in, were bought in, to represent people so volatile that they could not be brought onto television: that both options in the dichotomy were true, and worse, the actors presented a diorama, a toned-down version of the truth. That they were ugly actors portraying uglier people doing ugly things. Ugly was a word that when he repeated over and over in his thoughts, lost all meaning. He was grateful for the brief respite. The idea was exquisitely improbable because it remained wholly possible while surreal enough to precipitate silence at, say, a dinner party.
“I have dreams about my own conception. My mom, God rest her soul—I see her face, all terror on it; I see blood running down her legs.” This was far too dramatic to be real/This girl was crazy and for damned good reasons.
Today’s game had no winners. Another non-mutually-exclusive possibility reared a cuneiform head and drove itself into his brain. A figure appeared in lum on the screen. The colorcast didn’t normally contain in lum colors but there were occasionally outlying waves picked up by the television cameras, so to see an entire figure was noteworthy.
“And do you feel like you’re ready, twenty-two years later, to meet the man who haunts your dreams?“
It was possible that the people whose stories surcharged the show were paid by the show itself in much the same way the actors were hypothetically paid. Once in the paid employ of the show the members of the public became professional actors on a technicality and therefore both options were fulfilled at the same time. The figure overlaid on the television screen approached the camera and withdrew a wine bottle from inside some sort of jacket.
“I’m ready.” The girl in RGB continued to prepare herself, unaware of the overlaid in lum image.
While this new possibility would allow for both options to be true together, it opened a whole new series of questions. Once paid, would the show provide them with scripts for their own stories? Would the show embellish or create a type of three-act structure for them? The figure carefully sat down and placed the bottle between its legs. Lyle watched both shows concurrently, but if there was a connection between the two he was unable to pinpoint it. The figure—he thought it was male but there was really no way of telling with only a single color to work with—unscrewed the bottle methodically. He passed it forwards, towards the camera.
Fixed this up and made it a lot less like it was written by a dickhead...
I teach English as a Second Language, or ESL, which essentially means that I don’t teach English at all but rather phraseology in its most simplistic form. I teach English as a Second Language to around 200 children ranging from the age of four to eleven. I teach English as a Second Language at two exquisitely rural elementary schools, in the considered-backward province of Gyeongsangnam-do in the South East of South Korea. I have been in the position of Native Guest English Teacher at these two elementary schools for the past two years and I plan on being here for approximately 12 months more. I am a professional, unqualified[1] teacher of phraseology of The English Language, having come here with no teaching experience, bar the short semester of seminar leading I undertook for a disproportionately high hourly rate at the University of Kent in order to supplement my Master’s level study of logic. My University teaching career was short yet I was just as qualified as the majority of the tenured professors: if we even have tenure as a thing in the further education system of the UK. This has been mirrored in Korea; my position as a contract teacher sees me equally qualified ceteris paribus with the true Korean-native contract teachers in operation throughout the whole of South Korea.
Korean education does not seem to have, as far as I can tell (from a decent amount of research too) a regulated body that views a series of actual classes in the wider context of rating a school for its educational worth and efficiency, etc. as a whole. It could use one -- although the standardization of national education begs a couple of questions viz. the standardization of evaluative practice: measuring our standardized evaluation practices against the standardized tests that students take is sort of like judging a an automobile garage on the number of safety inspections it passes or fails, without taking into consideration what kind of cars the garage specializes in.
The Korean way then is to have every teacher do one specific ‘open class,’ for which any number of Government Board of Education employees may or may not come to your school[2] while you perform your lesson to them. Clearly the kids don’t learn anything during this elaborate show and so it follows that the adults don’t gain anything from it either. This appears to be the educational equivalent of a dinner party: don your best suit and tie, prepare a nice showy dish and be judged on this w/r/t your performance as a teacher for the whole year. This is so indelibly a fallacy of distribution that it isn’t so much modo hoc as it is plainly stupid. Judging a teacher on the basis of a forty minute lesson that is scored on a standardized scale out of thirty, where the maximum score is thirty and the minimum score is around twenty-four, is such a beautiful example for the rest of Korea that it’s almost impossible to imagine this on a daily basis. The fact of the matter is that if you can spend three hours or, if you feel like it, thirty minutes, preparing a class that will all-but guarantee your continued employment for another year regardless of the standards of education you choose to employ as a gainfully paid member of a civil service for the other 364 days, then it stands vigorously to reason that it would be inefficient and frankly unnecessary to do any meaningful work[3] in terms of progressing and innovating above and beyond the precise level at which you have been employed. And when the level at which you are employed increases automatically each time you re-sign your contract[4] it’s not prescience to picture a negative Pavlovian response.
In practice: what this means is that the Native English Speaking Teacher in Korea will necessarily produce their hardest day’s work on their first day on the job. Working hard, in Korea, is hardly working.[5]
This circular approach is common throughout the education system. Take, for example, the whole NSET program, designed to promote immersion and encourage the students to participate in the use of the language. The large number of well-thought out and extremely useful benefits the Korean government has in place to bring Western blue eyes and blond hair into the classroom can be used to predicate that there exists a certain desire to entice the children -- who are, lest we forget, the future -- into being excited about learning English and presenting them with an opportunity to use it.
This manages to pose and somehow simultaneously completely fail to realize it is posing an important question, viz. what are the students actually learning English for? Because certainly in the majority of schools it’s to talk to their English native teacher, whom otherwise they would not typically be able to converse with. And if they couldn’t converse with them, they wouldn’t be able to understand the class taught entirely in English. And if they couldn’t take part in the class; their parents had better get a second job in order to send their kids to the hagwon where there’s a true honest-to-God foreigner to teach their kids English in English. For those wondering why this is able to take place please remember how the Korean Government Board of Education has seen fit to continue the ongoing evaluation of its entire teaching staff. I know there’s a key-shaped, important something missing in the argument I’ve just detailed but when you are dealing with an education system that teaches -- irony-free -- first order logic to its middle-schoolers while at the same time prioritizing learning answers by rote rather than creative thinking then it’s no wonder there’s a multi trillion-Won industry based wholly on a circular argument. Keep on working hard.[6]
The open class requires a lesson plan, unlike regular teaching work on the peninsula.[7] The plan, regardless of file format, had a number of concessions made post-hoc that I found rather distressing. First of all, I was required to put it into a Korean standardized format of lesson plan. I was informed last year that I did not have to do this by somebody who makes a lot more money than anybody I directly work with. Yet: it’s just the way it has to be done. Next, after considering a large number of potential lesson outcomes, I picked three that related directly to the material we were covering and served a purpose in the topical context of the six-lesson chapter of the textbook we were working through. When the lesson came back to me, after being treated in some way by my non-English teaching handler,[8] it had, in addition to my three outcomes another one written in Korean. When the time of the open class came, and I saw the actual plan that had been given to everyone coming to watch, it was this learning outcome in Korean that my co-teacher for the day, the otherwise wonderful and kind and efficient man, had elected to write on the board. Our conversation went something like this.
“What learning objective should I write up? I have to write it in Korean.”
“Why do you have to write it in Korean?”
“I just do.”
“Is it important?”
“Yes, very.”
“But surely a good lesson will [simply enable the students to pass whatever evaluative checks you have built in to the lesson itself to ensure the lesson objectives have been met rather than telling them about it before and while they are learning it]?”
There was a long pause at this point (and I hope you will excuse my paraphrasing).
“It’s just something we have to do.”
“Ok, in which case, can you write my three objectives there?”
“Well, it has to be in Korean.”
My outcomes are in English and don’t appear to be too easy to translate. One of them is something like ‘to be better able to use possessive pronouns in the construction of a sentence.’ This is difficult for a fifth grader to understand. Hence, this is why I have built into the lesson some evaluative checks in the form of – oh – a worksheet and a game in order to test the subjects i.e. the students against the outcomes viz. telling me what their favorite subject is at school and, here’s a hint: it’s P.E. like every kid in the rest of the world, too. I always liked math.
“Well, can you just put down, spelling and making sentences?”
Long pause #2.
“Okay, just write down the Korean one, but, tell me again why we need to write the objective down? Especially [note here I didn’t give him time to answer because I already knew the answer and was asking for effect and before you criticize me on that one let me refer you back to the fourteen hour day primarily for effect and suggest to you that sometimes you just have to fight fire with fire] since we’re not actually writing down the real objective of the lesson, but are just writing down what the lesson is about.”
I’d neglected to put a question mark on the end of that one but, since it wasn’t really a question I left it at that because it was two minutes before the start of the open class and everyone was sat there, clipboards in hand, waiting to evaluate me as best they could.
The class went fine. It was uneventful. The kids behaved really well and obviously I picked them because I thought they would be the best behaved out of the four grades I teach at that school[9] and I’d already been through this process before so I knew what to expect. Half way through the class, while I was busy giving kids points on ClassDojo left and right, I wondered what the idea of constantly subjecting children five or six times a year to the open class regime actually does to them.[10] Does it teach them that the whole thing is pointless and it’s just something they have to get used to doing once in a while, or, does it teach them that in order to get where they want to go in life they only have to pay attention when other people are watching them? I try to be one of those teachers who always catches the students just as they aren’t paying attention or who don’t do any work when they think the teacher isn’t watching them in a probably vain attempt -- in all senses of the word -- to instil in them a sense of genuine-rather-than-perceived diligence. Yet I find it difficult to think that the open class and all it represents offers nothing but a careful retrograde step to those good intentions of some excellent teachers throughout the country.
After the open class it’s normal to receive a degree of feedback from the other teachers who have come along to watch, areas to improve; things that were particularly well done; that sort of thing. I took great delight in the game I had created for the day but apart from that it was fairly standard and certainly didn’t break any ground. However I was lucky enough to have a friend of mine, who is an excellent Korean speaker come to my class, he was also kind enough to let me know how these things actually work.
I work in two very rural schools as has already been established but what I haven’t mentioned is that sometimes it is difficult to hire teachers who will come and work at these rural schools as they don’t want to live away from civilization. I take a bus for forty minutes each way to school every day and I think that’s a reasonable distance to commute as it gives me a goodly long time to think, read et al. and while I don’t get home till twenty past five in the afternoon that certainly gives it the appearance of hard work; I’m really just fitting in in my own special way. My school in particular has had some problems in the past viz. a man who degenerated in front of the eyes of those responsible for him, chain smoking in the teachers’ lounge and subsequently a nice man who actually did work hard but had to leave his contract a bit early. So someone who generally shows up on time and every day and doesn’t miss class or take too many sick days is a commodity worth holding on to. I learned from my friend that the school’s principal had told all concerned that I was to be given full marks in every category. Thus, my only piece of feedback came from a nice young lady who told me, in Korean, in front of the five or six other travelling teachers that I was handsome.[11] That was the only comment she had, and was the only comment that actually anybody had, save the vaguely awkward thumbs up and smiling and nodding from the panel. I thought this was a bit strange at the time but it was requantified by the information I learned i.e. they all gave me top marks. I know that had I been in their position I almost certainly would have wanted to mark me down in some small or moderate way and while it almost definitely wouldn’t have been enough to prevent me from re-signing:[12] it’s frankly the principle[13] of the thing that led hand to keyboard in the first place.
There you go then, a summation of the Korean Education System in all its discordant beauty. It is hard work and hardly working, people who sit doing nothing until 7pm who are promoted above those who efficiently complete their work by lunch time. But there's no struggle in efficiency. No cause. Nobody thinks you’re diligent if you make it look easy. And I’m not saying I’m diligent -- that’s emphatically not the point I am trying to make. But there are some wonderful minds crushed by this endemic, backward system that rules not only the education industry but whole multi-national corporations like Samsung, LG and the big Korean car manufacturers which also make soap and it’s all running at fourteen long, sweaty, boring hours a day and at thirty-one frustrated and misunderstood suicides per hundred thousand people, and there is absolutely no need for it to be anything like this at all.
Conrad Hughes
[1] Unqualified: I have an online-obtained TEFL certificate promoted to me in return for a disproportionately low sum of money and probably an appropriate amount of work when contextualized by the value of the certificate. I consider myself unqualified and unless an establishment able to award at the very least verifiable college credit tells me otherwise, I will continue to see myself as such. Bearing this in mind, I note that I am probably a better teacher than many operating in the profession and probably a worse teacher than many professionals. Example: I try to stop my students playing with Stanley knives or scissors at the very least during my class and I would dearly like them to be able to at least apply auxiliary verbs in a general conversational sense but, I’ll show Tom and Jerry to a group of five year olds at the end of a long, hot summer’s day of teaching. Or a long, cold winter’s day of the same. The fact that this puts me on a certain level should be indicative of the education system in the country which; I will now finally go on to talk about.
[2] and drink some complimentary juice and sit at a chair in the back of the room with a clipboard
[3] Whether or not they choose to do this is another question entirely and I am definitely not passing or intending to pass judgment.
[4] and your co-teacher/handler at the school breathes a sigh of relief that he or she doesn’t have to trawl through the entire world of seven English speaking countries to find someone suitable to replace you who won’t touch the kids and knows the correct usage of capital letters and maybe periods too
[5] This idea of working hard is something that I wanted to bring up later on in this essay but it seems to me that I’ve fallen upon a fortuitous point to slot it in. Working hard has its own special verb that generally well-meaning or otherwise men above a certain age will end every conversation with. This can be applied in a number of different ways. 1. As an interjection when leaving the room: ‘I worked hard!’ 2. As a farewell greeting: ‘Work hard!’ 3. As a question: ‘Did you work hard?’
I may be misunderstanding the last one: it could be people asking me if they have been working hard, making it a question of existential value; which certainly fits much better viz. Korea.
Regardless of the context upon which it is applied it remains difficult for anyone with the remotest shred of self-awareness to answer it as it should be answered: ‘Yes, I have been working hard.’ Hard work is endemic in Korea but iff we define it as the appearance of working hard, for instance, spending 14 hours at work every day and sleeping for twenty minutes during your lunch break because you have been working literally so hard that it is impossible to remain awake. Who can keep a straight face while doing this? The endemic quality here is dishonesty in working practice: keeping up appearances for appearances sake. Tautological and elegantly, effortlessly pointless.
[6] And what does this teach the kids? Work hard for forty minutes a year and you’ll go far?
[7] I presume (perhaps fallaciously) that the North Koreans also don’t do lesson plans.
[8] Who is very nice.
[9] five if you count the Kindergarten kids, yes, the man who wrote this also happily teaches four year olds the heads shoulders knees and toes song with extra elaborate dance moves
[10] Which reminds me, I need to buy them some to say thanks for being good sports. Which if you’ll remember is their actual favorite subject; certainly not English. English is difficult and doesn’t make rational sense without several history degrees (none of which I possess, I assure you).
[11] humblebrag?
[12] we have to be careful with the hyphenation in that one when communicating electronically, we expat teachers
A Digital Painting and how I got to the finished result. Originally based off a 200x400 jpeg of the Street Fighter II Dhalsim background for a beer called Yoga Fire. We're going to go in a different direction for the finished label to allow for the presence of more typography but the illustration was fun to do, so here it is and a little bit about my process as captions for each of the images. I used a Wacom Bamboo Touch&Pen model for this on the CS6 Master Suite.
This will probably see the light of day in a label for a beer-based habanero hot sauce in a couple of months time.
You can read more about the excellent work Totem Fermentation does at their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/totemfermentation.
nb. I know this is probably copyright infringement on several levels but the beer is not expressly for sale so it's a hobbyist project.
Programme for The Foursome. Done in three and a half hours with another 40 minutes for text corrections and rearranging that evening. Quite happy with the time taken vs. quality of the end result.
The play opens tomorrow, if you are in Changwon. Check the details on the programme!
I wrote this as an example of a triptych which it turns out is quite difficult to write. I like posting snapshots, though. I'll post each column in order, here. My Tumblr layout is too narrow to display all as it was intended, but here's a dropbox link.
I'm not that happy with this but I think for a first attempt at a format, it's okay.
I haven't posted much here recently because some of the longer-form pieces I have been writing are being published! Namely a travel essay on Japan; there's a joint article currently under submission about homebrewing in Busan, finally I have the 48 Hour Film Project coming up and Groove Korea are getting me to do a write-up on it.
Good things.
LEFT COLUMN
TOXICOLOGY REPORT JXXX TXXXXX
Battery of tests indicate no presence of ethanol (0 gm/dl, vitreous); significant presence of barbiturate-class (540 ng/ml); significant presence of amphetamine-class drugs (1750 ng/ml); significant (verified prescribed) presence of selective serotonin reuptake-inhibitors (citalopram verified IL-6 shows 9 pg/ml). NOV 5
AUTOPSY REPORT M. COULTER (selected extracts)
Ethmoid bone dislocation and subsequent fatal penetration of dura mater and brain haemorrhage; traumatic renal failure inducing pre-mortem micturation; compound fracture tib/fib on left leg; severing of the platysma leading to rupture of spinal column pia mater; ventral root of second thoracic nerve; punctured right lung; et al. NOV 5
AUTOPSY REPORT J. COULTER (selected extracts)
Cranial fracture at inferior temporal line leading to fatal penetration of dura mater and haemorrhage; partial separation of mandible; tear of isofemoral ligament w/ sacrum dislocation, acetabulum fracture; et al. NOV 5
PSYCHOLOGICAL REPORT G. COULTER
Significant bradyphrenia, borderline disorder, PTSD following loss of parents. JUL 12
CENTER COLUMN
My father always used to call this Mischief Night, with the implied capitals and everything, and every Mischief Night we would go, me and mum and dad all together we would go up on the moors and have a little bonfire and cook some cheap sausages and eat them in those soft buns that we would get on twelve-pack at Tesco when they were on special offer with a mega-dose of off-brand ketchup.
So this one Friday, Mischief Night, after school; we waited until the sun was falling into the sea and we went out, walking along together, I was still young enough to kind of swing on my parents hands then, so we’d already crossed the road and remember I said I’ve forgotten the firelighters and that’s always my job because I was pretty into my fires back then so we walked back across the road and the man who was not toxicologically sound to operate heavy machinery done both of them I’d already crossed I didn’t see the car come I just saw it stop after and tarmac is much, much harder than you think it is when you’ve never had your face smudged across it.
The man was screaming in the car and I sat on the kerb I didn’t know what to do I didn’t look at the man I figured once we both confirmed what had gone on it would be a verifiable thing and you ever drop your keys and think well how did that happen! that was unexpected etc. imagine that but if you couldn’t bend down and pick them up again.
RIGHT COLUMN
Friday 4th Nov. potensh dates: 2011, 2005, 1994, 1988, 1983, 1977, 1966, pattern not distinguishable within sample size owing to leap year calculation difficulties, bradyphrenia or no.
Nov 4th holiday possibly rendered superfluous by extraordinary levels of mischief on subsequent Nov 5th.
Barbiturate-class drugs popular among physicians: pentobarbital; mephobarbital; secobarbital; amobarbital, distinguished by bright colors.
Barbiturate-class drugs popular among users: any; all.
Max, Jane Coulter: lives unremarkable. Conceived via IVF on NHS following seven barren years.
Black pudding contrast w/ white pudding: blood content of black: 19%; white: 0% (trace).
The highest recorded amplitude of keys scattering is only 15.4dB lower than that of an RTA; that said, not many intersections have decibel meters on them I have noted.
yousharknotpass
romaincrisis
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
kianamaiart
jimmyeatworldofficial
origamiaround