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.