Well, it looks like tomorrow night I’ll be finished with erasing these spare hard drives. I’ve decided that I’m going to donate the 10 GB, the three 40 GB, and the 80 GB drives to work. We have plenty of computers that are constantly dying on us, usually because of hard drive failures, so these will be nice to have around. I’m burning a DVD for Millard right now, and after that I’ll start installing LightWave. I need to jump back in the job for Eman. I want to knock it out of the ballpark. In the meantime, I’ll work on the Suncoast Studios Publishing site. Shauna and I watched Lost (Season 3, Disc 3) last night. I sent all the NetFlix discs back today, so we may have more episodes to watch this weekend. Assuming I’m not working, which will likely be the case. It’s gotten cold here in...
Category: Studio
Oraganizing and Updating
I’ve been busy at work here in the studio. I’m not really doing any SCS work, per se, but I’m getting things organized, cleaned, fixed, etc. I’ve been shredding a bunch of old paperwork that means nothing to anyone anymore. That, along with organizing the paperwork on my desk, should put me in a much better mood today. I hate clutter, especially in my work area. I reorganized the closet in the studio and got all of the 1K lights back in there that I leant to work while our new office was being built. Other than being a bit dusty and having a little paint on them, they’re all still in great order. I’ll find time at some point to clean them up; most likely by the time I have a new production about to be shot. After years of using the application, I finally purchased DVD Profiler today....
Sick and Weak Week
I’ve been battling a cold for the past week. It hit me the night before Thanksgiving, and got progressively worst through Monday night. Even though I took the day off from work Monday, Tuesday I felt well enough to head back into the office. Unfortunately, the aching, soar throat and congestion caught back up with me today. So, in general, Thanksgiving went off well. I went and picked my mom, sister and brother-in-law up and they stayed up at our place for the entire day. I dropped them back off later that night. We had the usual turkey, stuffing, pashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole and rutabagas. There was delicious pumpkin and apple pies for dessert. On Black Friday, I took the day off, partly because I needed a break from work, partly because I was sick (I still did work from home most of the day). I ventured...
Send In The Renders
Ah, the weekend. I am ever so glad it's here. It's a time to wash away the stresses of the week and turn your energies inward, hopefully accomplishing some housework, finishing some projects, or just being entertained. I'm about to lay out my master plan for the next two days... Here we go... I'm currently outputting the final 35mm render for Tangible Entertainment. Some interesting specs on the project: 467 frames of animation 24 frames per second 19.45 seconds of footage Final output resolution: 4,096 x 1,968 pixels 1.85:1 aspect ratio (Flat/Academy Aperture) Current total render time (approximated): 6 days I've been contacted by another filmmaker out in L.A., who wants me to do a title animation for him as well. I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag yet, but he's pretty well-known in certain internet circles, and I'm sure people in Hollywood know him. We're...
Lights. Camera. Action?
I went to a lighting shop in town today and got four new 250 Watt, 3200K tungsten floods for Suncoast Studios. I also picked up another aluminum case and tear-apart cube packing and have built out the carrying case for all of the bulbs I have. I also tested them all to make sure that they're working fine. These bulbs are great lights, but only last 20 hours each and the color temperature starts to change after only three hours. I'm currently sitting in the studio sipping a Diet Coke blogging, taking a break from working on the Tangible Entertainment project. I think I'll have a 95% correct version by the end of the night. After I ship the low res animatic off to them and get approval, I'll render it out at full 2K film resolution. I may be doing a shoot all next week. I'm not 100% sure...
Long Night
Well, it’s another one of those nights where I get (read: must) stay late at the office; an all-nighter. It all started with an update to the routing of one of our client’s VPNs. That started at 11:00pm tonight and finished up around 1:30am. I could have gone home then, but I needed to stay and work out a problem with our new Windows 2003 domain. Evidently, the two domain controllers (one in Tampa and one in Canada) decided to go out of sync. Well, their AD schema did at least. So, that means that there are going to be e-mail problems soon. I have to fix it, but it appears that the hotfix I need has to be requested from Microsoft (which I’ve done). Just lovely. So, I’m keeping busy updating the DCs with Windows Updates now. I got up around 7:00am yesterday (21 hours ago) and won’t go...
Welcome Ryan!
Early this morning my good friend, Ninel, delivered her baby boy, Ryan Matthew (excellent name) at 7 lbs. 14 oz. I’m so incredibly excited for her and her husband Alex. I talked to her around 9:00am and she and Ryan are doing fine. I’m going to go see them all tomorrow at the hospital, as I wasn’t able to get away from the office today. In a recent fit of rage, I destroyed my iPaq 6315 phone. I hope to be able to get an iPhone in the next couple of months, but right now I’m using an older BlackBerry 7290. The good part of this is that I’ll free up a USB connector on both my home PC and my laptop at the office as I won’t need the cradles anymore. My editing workstation in the studio decided to start reporting bad clusters on the hard drive last night....
Keepin’ Busy
I just finished playing Tomb Raider: Anniversary. I recently decided to re-activate my GameTap account and I was surprised to see this game in there. GameTap has begun to add several great games to the service. I started playing Tomb Raider a couple of weeks ago, and decided to just go until it was done. I’ve been doing a lot of work at the office lately, as we’re in the process of getting ready to move. A lot of my time will be devoted to that. Right now I’m working on the electrical needs of the server room. I hope to have that finished today. In Suncoast Studios news, I’ve been keeping busy with Jeff’s book and have also been trying to help out Millard from time to time. I’m almost done the cover design for the book, then I have to move on to the interior illustrations. For Millard,...
SCS Update
Our transition to Tampa is now pretty much behind us. We now have about 75% of the boxes unpacked and the furniture set up for the most part. I can now begin focusing more and more on Suncoast Studios work, which has begun to pile up over the past few months. We’ve got a ton of projects going on. Currently, I’m finishing up a wedding video edit for a co-worker. I’ll be delivering that tomorrow on DVD. I then need to move on to finishing the graphics for Jeff’s book, then I can finally move back into the new television project and the rendered graphics for Millard. There’s going to be a lot of structuring/restructuring for the studio. I have to get a new business address in Tampa and as soon as that’s done, incorporate. With the documentary for Millard just about ready to get back in to action, I...
he Middle of Everywhere
Wow. I haven’t blogged in about a month and a half. That’s not good. I think the reason I haven’t been writing much in the past six months is largely due to the fact that I had to drive an hour and fifteen minutes to work every morning, then an hour and fifteen minutes back in the evening. You couple that with long hours (60-70 hour weeks), you get one tired Chewbode; one who wants nothing to do with the computer when he gets home. That’s not good either. Well, all that is about to change. This past week Shauna and I finally moved to Tampa. The apartment we got into is really nice and we’ve got a lot more room. So much more in fact, that I’ve decided that I’m re-building the studio to be more suited for a production company. I’m looking into getting a new desk that...
