What's The Blues Crab

What is The Blues Crab?

An experiment in engaging artists through involvement and how much more they will contribute, how much more anyone in any field will contribute when they truly feel they are part of what’s being produced, and not just a hired hand, dispensable and forgotten.


In Shapes Of Sin : Anti-hero’s, Outcasts & Rebels

When I was young I endured one failure after another. I skated around C’s, D’s and E’s on report cards from grade school through high school, unable to interest myself in anything I was being taught.


The Illusion of Inherent Worth : Loan Sharks & Lemonade

I play a little poker but by no means do I have much skill at it, the card game that is. I do however absolutely love poker as a metaphor for life, as every hand played, or not played, and every gesture symbolic with some corollary in the circumstance of our lives.


The Invisible Art : Compositing in Animation

The Invisible Art : Legends of Movie Matte Painting is a great ole book which has absolutely nothing to do with this post. Well, except that it refers to Compositing techniques in film which are so well done that the audience miss them altogether.


Dustless Digital: Deep Way Down

From spring of 2016 until the film’s premiere in Autumn 2018 I was charged with providing all sound and music for The Blues Crab. I worked very closely with director Ari Rubenstein to craft the sound to his vision from my studio ‘Dustless Digital’ in Cambridge, England with the help of two talented musicians, Chris Hooks (guitarist & composer) and Thomas Lydon (composer).


Who Are You

“I stretched back and I hiccuped, and looked back on my busy day, eleven hours in a tin pan, god there’s got to be another way” Pete Townsend (The Who).


The Artist as a Business, Independent yet Connected

Back in 2017 I went to Bournemouth England for my 2nd round at being a guest speaker for the BFX Festival. The prior year I had given a presentation of our work on “Ice Age 5 : Collision Course” (Blue Sky Studios / 20th Century FOX), and this year I had to pitch an idea that had always been, for those who know me well, part of my professional philosophy.


The Ghost of Xaos in Bournemouth

Back in 2016 my old friend Nicki Morris called me from The Foundry and asked if I’d be interested in representing my company Blue Sky Studios as a guest speaker at Bournemouth, England’s BFX Festival. I jumped at the opportunity as we had just finished the film “Ice Age: Collision Course”, (the 5th in the Ice Age series), and was proud of some compositing tools a colleague and I had developed for the film, whose inspiration had come from tech I’d used at Xaos Inc. nearly 2 decades earlier.


No Substitute for the Real Thing

When we travel to new places in the world, most of us at some point will go and 'see the sights'. On my recent trip to New York City... I listened to them. A fascinating sensory experience to concentrate entirely on the complexity of sounds around you as you move through a new place.