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Another week (more!) has gone by and another update is due…

This past week has been pretty rough on me. I’ve been more tired than usual. I think that I need to sit down and really regiment my working out (it’s been slipping a lot lately) and the whole “eating habits” thing. I wolfed down shitloads of Taco Bell last night. Not good. I mean, it was GOOD, but it’s not good for me. On top of all this I’ve been sleeping lightly (read: poorly). I think some of my problem is that I’m starting to get more involved with projects I normally wouldn’t. I’m in the process of developing a web portal with some people I know, I’ve got the feature to work on with Millard and then there’s the little side projects like updating chewbode.com and such. I think I need to re-organize my free time to allow for the personal things that I need to do (working out, eating right) and then prioritize my projects. Well, after I go see Superman Returns tonight, I’m gonna do all that. Get my shit in order.

What’s been happening this week? Well, I put together my new PC and it runs pretty awesomely. I still have this intermittent problem with the system just outright crashing (not even a BSOD – it just shuts off). As soon as I figure that out, I’m golden. Anyway, I tested the system by playing some Half-Life 2 and a few other games, and it’s smooth as silk. The new video card just does the work it needs to do – no questions asked.

I think I need to spend some time tonight getting ready for the D&D campaign tomorrow. I need to get all the stuff set up for the miniatures and need to get re-acquainted with the story a bit.

Well, time to head home (at the office now)…

Sick Thought of the Day: Naked men standing at attention; milk flowing heavily from the nads.

Week In Review

Man, am I ever a lazy mutha. I haven’t posted up here in over a week. A week! Sick. Well, this post should make up for it…

The last time I posted I mentioned that the editing began on the feature Millard and I am working on. Well, the first rough cut of it is now done. I toiled away at the keyboard for quite some time (about 35 hours or so – it’s like another full-time job!) and produced a 65GB AVI file. All day today I’ve spent converting it to a 500MB MOV file and am currently uploading it for Millard so he can see it. I imaging he’ll look it over for the next couple of days and send me his thoughts on the edits. There’s still a lot to do: hire the voice talent, create the commercial bumpers, and create the teaser. Of course the final feature stills needs to be edited down and the music and stills, etc. will need to be added as well. In due time, I suppose.

Wednesday Shauna and I went down and picked up Melissa and she stayed with us for several days.

Friday was our first full D&D session. In attendance was Brad, Diana, Millard, Shauna and myself. Shauna cooked up some Mexican food and I introduced the players to the story (Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics #1 – Idylls of the Rat King) and the party actually made it into the dungeon and is now just beginning the quest. We finished up pretty late – around midnight or so. I think that we may go ahead an decide to cap the night around 11:00pm or so, as by the time we ended the session, everyone was pretty glassy-eyed. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. The only downside was that the miniatures we ordered on Monday hadn’t arrived yet. So, I improvised and grabbed a bag of the little green plastic army men. We got four out, grabbed a Sharpie, and put the first letter of each character’s name on the helmet of the soldiers. I then took a handful of army men and that same marker and colored their helmets totally black – these were to be our monsters. I then designed 1” x 1” grid paper in Photoshop and printed out several sheets. Using a green highlighter pen, I drew out the landscape each time the party encountered some creeps. All in all, it went well.

Saturday was a beautiful day. A couple days prior, I had reserved four seats on the LeBarge dolphin sightseeing cruise. The LeBarge is this big old party boat the docks at Marina Jack’s in Sarasota Bay. People can rent a seat on the boat for a few hours and go out on the water and have fun. We chose the dolphin trip since Melissa’s a huge dolphin fan. Millard, Shauna, Melissa and I went out and, of course, I had to be Mr. Director and try to get some good footage on the camera. And I think I succeeded to a degree. Melissa took some footage on her camera as well and we also got some stills (I’ll post shortly). We saw several dolphins that day. I’ll eventually edit the footage and burn a DVD for Melissa before she leaves to go back home to Scotland.

Sunday we went down to John’s and then I came home and began testing different output methods for the feature. I also decided to upgrade my PC and bought a dual layer DVD burner, some blank discs, an AMD x64 Dual-Core 4200 processor and accompanying mobo, 2 gigs of RAM and an nVidia 7900GT SLI graphics card. This sunofabitch will scream! All that shit will be in this week and, time permitting, I’ll assemble the new machine Saturday.

So, that’s what I’ve been fucking around with. I think I’m going to go play some GameTap now. Peace out, beotches.

Sick Thought of the Day: Penis pimple bursting blood.

Editing Begins

I officially began editing the feature tonight. It took a while to set the project up in the NLE software, as the system needed to conform the audio from all the video clips, which took a couple hours. After that was all squared away, it took about an hour to get a good rhythm down on the editing. I’m going off a shot log that Millard put together in a spreadsheet and am applying those in and out markers to the actual footage. So, I’m bouncing back and forth between Premiere and Excel, which takes some getting used to. Anyway, at this point I’m about 15 minutes into the feature. If I can keep up the pace, I should be done with the first rough cut by then end of the night on Thursday.

Tropical Depression 1 upgraded to Tropical Storm Alberto today. The most recent advisory says that it only has maximum sustained winds of 45 mph. The storm looks like it will veer east and head up near the panhandle of the state, all the while remaining a Tropical Storm. It’s been raining all day as tufts of storms peel off the main body and weak feeder bands move across Florida. I welcome Alberto. We need the rain.

I watched the original 1968 film The Producers today. I’ve decided that, if I want to see the new version of a remake, I would do the film more justice by making sure I see the original first.

Sick Thought of the Day: Crab claws hanging from the asshole.

Oh How The Time Flies

I haven’t posted in awhile. Shame on me. I’m a fuckin’ jerk. This past week has been a whirlwind of activity.

Millard, Shauna, Diana, Brad and I all decided it was time to dust off the manuals, open our bags of dice, and sharpen our pencils and play some Dungeons & Dragons. I know, I know. Totally geeking out, but some of the most “gaming” fun I’ve ever had was playing D&D when I was a teenager. It brings back some fond memories of creativity and was one of the reasons I wrote The Yellow Emerald and now am into films. So, late last week we all decided to start playing on Friday nights. While Millard finished up his adjustments on the script for the feature, I began combing through my DM’s Guide and Player’s Handbook trying to convert my Second Edition rules over to the newer 3.5 rules. And it’s hard making that immense leap. I also ended up building a D&D portal on my site (sorry, only registered users that are playing with us (ha-ha) can gain access). This is what kept me busy through Tuesday night.

Wednesday night Shauna’s niece, Melissa, flew in from Scotland. We went down to Venice and picked John up and came back up to Sarasota to pick her up at the airport. I think Melissa is in town until July 8th or so. Obviously, she was pretty wiped out after being on planes for some 18 hours. We dropped her off with John (she’s staying with him for the month) and got home and got to sleep by 2:00am.

I had originally planned on beginning the editing on the DVD Thursday, but it made no sense to start that and then not work on it for a few days. You see, Shauna and I invited Melissa up for the weekend, so we knew Friday night would be D&D night (we rolled our characters and played a little bit to get everyone used to the system) and then Melissa would be here Saturday (today) and we’d want to hang out with her and take her to see the sights and so on. So, I figured, why would I start editing Thursday and then wait until Sunday or Monday to continue? Yeah. So, I didn’t do that Thursday, but worked on the D&D campaign instead.

Editing will begin tomorrow afternoon after I visit John and deliver Melissa back to his house.

With Melissa up here, we took her out grocery shopping and all and then came back home. She went out and sunned herself by the pool for quite a while this afternoon. Afterward, we went downtown and had dinner at Two Senioritis (I got the marinated chicken burritos… again) and then we walked around City Park hoping to see dolphins playing in the bay. We didn’t see any, but got some great photos, which I’ll post here soon. We came back and watched House of the Dead and The Gospel.

I’ve also started an Action Figures section in the Digital Archive.  I’ll continue to update over the next few weeks.

Sick Thought of the Day: Yellow diarrhea in the toilet.

X3

Well… What’s been up lately?  Hmm… Lemme see…  Oh yeah!  I forgot to say that Shauna, Millard and I all went to see X-Men: The Last Stand last Friday night.  I really liked the movie a lot.  I’m a bit of a fanboy in general, but I never really got much into the X-Men.  I dig them and all, but it really just wasn’t my thing.  So, going into the movie I really didn’t have any strong convictions about what was happening in the plot, etc.  I kinda figured that the actors would perform well and that the script would be decent, since everyone has had a couple of movies to get things right. Brett Ratner, however, was my biggest concern.  I’ll say that he did a pretty damned good job, however the movie was a bit lacking on the personal elements with the characters that Bryan Singer was so adamant (pardon the pun) on getting on film.  Speaking of that, Superman Returns looks amazing.

I’ve decided that I’m going to begin a movie review section of the site.  Not sure exactly how all that will work, but look for it in the next week or two.

What else… Millard is finalizing the script elements and I hope to have the script in hand in the next day or two.  We’ve decided to add a lot more footage and the DVD will be a two hour extravaganza instead of the initial one hour disc.  I think you are all gonna like it a lot.

I’ve got tomorrow off work to go run some personal errands and all.  I’ll get to relax for about half the day.  Yay for me.

Sick Thought of the Day: Slamming it in the car door.