Color Me Done

I finished color correcting the Demo last night and should be able to view the DVD later today. It took a long time to balance everything out, and there may be a little more to do eventually. I also fixed some transitions and cleaned up how some of the stills move on screen. Millard’s flying back into town today from L.A. and I suspect over the next day or two he’ll want to get together to see the progress since he’s been gone.

During the color correction process, I’ve learned that the process needs to improve quite a bit. Right now, all the color correction is being done manually in post, but it’s very difficult to get everything uniform and “natural”. I got some software and will be ordering a color chart that will be used at the beginning of each shoot from now on. This should make things much more bearable in the editing tomb room.

The Sir Millard Mulch Instructional videos from the DVD are doing well up on Google Video. Lessons 3, 4 and 5 are still awaiting verification but should be up soon.

Sick Thought of the Day: Choking on the goat nuts.

Editing, Migrating, and AJAXing

I’m continuing the work on the Demo each night. I’m now in the process of color correcting and adding visual effects to each scene and still. It’s going smoothly, and I’ve decided on the exact parameters I’m going to be using for the various scenes. I should have the entire thing finished Saturday afternoon, including rendering the edits out and generating a viewable DVD. I have two projects slated to begin after that that are directly related to the Demo and DVD, but you’re not going to get me to talk about them until the very end! Muwhahaha!

After testing for the last two months, I’ve decided that the new Suncoast Studios server that I built is ready to be integrated into the network. I’m going to be working on that for the next couple of weeks, migrating the functionality off the old server on this one. The goal will be to retire the old server by May 1st.

Another interesting little tidbit is that I’m not using Microsoft Word to type up this blog entry. Michael Robertson (MP3.com and Linspire fame) has come out with ajaxWrite, which is a Word clone that will read and save Word documents as well as other formats including PDF. It’s free, it’s web-based, and it’s easy to use.

Sick Thought of the Day: Man-handle the man handle.

Out From Under

Well, I haven’t posted anything lately because I’ve just been too damned busy. This past week I spent a lot of time working on the Demo. Millard’s flying out to L.A. tomorrow and taking it with him – I’m interested in seeing what Will thinks of it. He’ll be the first person to see the footage outside me, Millard, and Shauna. Tonight I’m marrying the cleaned up audio track to the footage and will master it all down to a DVD.

Millard and I drove over to Melbourne on Saturday and shot our last set-based scenes with HisCheapMoves. Afterward, we went to Orlando and watched V for Vendetta on the IMAX screen there. Pretty cool movie. I’ll probably want to see it again.

Starting today, I’ve decided to get back on track with my life. Principal photography for the project has pretty much wrapped, and I’m preparing to go into the final editing soon. This will offer me the ability to return to doing my normal, mundane, repetitive errands and chores that I’ve been neglecting lately. It’s really amazing how those little things can help balance your piece of mind, and set the tone for your everyday activities.

Yesterday Shauna and I decided to go to Perkins to get some breakfast for lunch. While we were sitting there, a guy walked up and told us he was a balloon bender / artist / blower-upper. He made me a motorcycle and made Shauna a butterfly, complete with a hand-drawn face. I tipped hip a whopping $2.00. I’m so fucking generous.

Sick Thought of the Day: Macaroni hammock in my mouth.

Sore

I’m fucking beat. I spent thirteen hours at the office yesterday tearing our entire server room apart and rebuilding it. All so that the servers would be more organized, the power, network, and KVM cables could be cleaned up, and we could plug them into our new Liebert power conditioner and battery backup unit. My feet hurt. My back hurts. My shoulders hurt. My throat hurts because the air was so incredibly dry and there was so much dust kicked up. I’m a big fucking baby, I know. Regardless, we completed all the work necessary by about 8:30pm last night, which was utterly amazing as we anticipated it taking all day today too.

So, anyway… I’m sitting here relaxing, watching TV, and decided to pop Stan Lee’s Mutants, Monsters & Marvels in the ol’ Digital Video Disc player. Great stuff in there. I hadn’t seen it before even though I’ve owned the DVD for a year or two. I was really inspired by the creative group at Marvel with Stan, Kirby, Ditko, etc. These guys were just a bunch of kids with some ideas – they got together by happenstance and began one of the most enduring entertainment phenomena of the 20th century. At the time, they thought nothing of what they were doing. They just had fun – they loved what they were doing (imagine that!). And they worked hard at it so much so that sometimes they had trouble completing all the work because there was too much. Mind you, this was not “too much work” in that the boss needed a ton of stuff done and piled it on their shoulders to complete – this was “too much work” because their creative minds were just hemorrhaging with amazing stories and art to a point where they had a lot of trouble executing their ideas! Amazing.

Tomorrow night I’m going back into the editing room to continue working on the demo Millard I and I started last week.

Sick Thought of the Day: Squealing pork snot out of the anus.

Busy, Busy, Busy

The last couple of days were pretty taxing on me. Making movies is definitely hard. There’s a lot more work that goes into it than people believe.

We went on location to two places of business on Monday and Tuesday and we got a lot of footage. There are some seriously hilarious takes that will really add some levity to the film. I’ve recently been pretty happy with the production quality, considering that this whole shoot is being done on a shoestring budget. Millard and I talked about that tonight, as a matter of fact, and I’m starting to really believe that I’m getting to a point where I’m running up against limits on the equipment I’ve got. Not that I didn’t do my due-diligence on the gear before I bought it, but it’s just that I’m learning so much so quickly, that I’m outgrowing what I have. Which is a great thing. The next project will definitely merit an upgrade to a few key pieces of the inventory.

We’ve begun assembling what we’re referring to as a “Demo” of the project. That is, we’re going into the editing room to put together an excerpt of the show so that we can approach some voice actors for the part of the narrator. We’ve shooting high on this, and we hope to be able to announce in the next several weeks who we’re considering.

We’ve also nailed down the fact that all principal photography will be complete by March 31st and we’ll officially go into editing on April 1st (no, that’s not an April Fool’s joke). With any luck, we’ll have a rough cut by mid-April, and the final edit by May 1st at which point we’ll do some private screenings.

So, yeah. It’s been busy. Oh yeah, tonight Shauna and I went to a Cingular wireless store and transferred our phone numbers from T-Mobile, since their service is non-existent at our home and work. Which constitutes where we are about 90% of the time. Hopefully the Cingular service will be much better. Already I get signal at home. Yea.

So, off to bed with me. Tomorrow’s a big day full of editing the Demo.

Sick Thought of the Day: Twin brown babies covered in gravy.