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...
Category: General
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...
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...
Gaming
Last night I signed up for GameTap once again. I was a beta tester for them back in August or so of last year, and I really liked their service, it’s just they didn’t have a huge library of game titles at the time. So, I decided to give them another try and to my surprise there are tons more games up there now. I ended up playing some classic games like 1942 and Pac Man. I then veered into some video slot machines. After all that, I downloaded Conquest and fell in love with it. It’s a real-time strategy game like Command & Conquer or Star Wars: Empire at War. Except it friggin’ huge! And multiplayer. So, I ended up playing until 2:00am. I haven’t been that excited about a game in a while. I’m even seriously considering cancelling my WoW subscription now since I haven’t really played in...
Script Finished
I finished the first draft of the script tonight. Fucking A. It’s a really good feeling to have this damned thing done. It ended up being 35 pages long, which isn’t too terrible. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be heading down to Millard’s and we’re going to spend a few hours reading it and editing it, changing it as needed. If we don’t decide to do a total re-write on it, I should be able to get all the changes made Monday. Er… tomorrow… Damn. It’s late. Millard swung by tonight and we were going to head over to McCurdy’s Comedy Club to see a show. We got there and the line ended up being pretty long. After maybe 10 minutes waiting in line (and only moving about 15 feet), we decided to head back to my place to play some Vice City. He’s crashing here because I noticed his headlight was...
I Continue To Pen
Well, I worked more on the script again tonight. I'm really happy with it so far. As I've been writing, the story has been gelling nicely. I know I'll need to go back and tweak half of the first page, but other than that, I'm very pleased. Here're the current stats: 8.2 pages 4,300 words 25.5 minutes Time to go sautee some onions and garlic for the 15-bean soup. Sick Thought of the Day: Piss smells like warm celery.
Writin’ and Cookin’
Well, I’ve been working on the script for the DVD project the last few days and am at a point where I’ve got five pages written. In the grand scheme of things that doesn’t seem like a hell of a lot, but it puts me about 15 minutes into the video. This project will likely be about 50 minutes long, so I’m about one third of the way done. I made a timeline for myself, and the first rough draft should be complete by Saturday night, after which I’ll have one more week to hash out all the details and adjustments to the script before the final version is due. Tonight, I finished a bottle of Famous Jake’s Chipotle Hot Pepper Sauce. It was a bottle I got for Christmas. I really enjoyed it, even if it was a bit mild for my liking. Good flavor. I’ve got a package...
Server Serves No More
My server took a big, brown, stinking shit last night. Drive C: failed finally (the server’s only 6 years old for God’s sake). Luckily, all my data is stored on a D: and E: drive in the machine, so all I lost was the installed software and basic server configuration. I went to restore the data from my backup to find… the backup was corrupt. I suspect that the server failed in the middle of the backup. No biggie. I had a new server in house already, but was procrastinating the migration of the data over to it (I was going to retire the dead server soon anyway). So, last night I just accelerated my plans and started installing and configuring everything on the new box. E-mail is back up and running and some basic things like antivirus and such. I’ll be tweaking it more this weekend. The goal will...
Demo Done
OMFG, the Demo is finally done! There was a lot of hard work to get this thing just how we wanted it. I’ve added the video (MOV) to our Production site, burned the DVD master, and have begun archiving the Premiere project. With the Demo out of the way, I can finally begin looking at the full movie. I plan on spending some time finishing up some photo scanning tomorrow, then I’ll be diving right into the script and storyline, which will take be about a week to pound into shape. What else has been going on?... Well, I’m reading an excellent book that I borrowed from Millard called Whole-Brain Thinking (Ballantine) which is great. It’s a “self-help” style book that talks about people that are left-side of the brain vs. the people that are right-side of the brain, and discusses techniques on how one can successfully blend their two...
The Cleansing
"Dum loquimur fugerit invida aetas. Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero." -Horace, 15 BC It has begun.
