Last night I finished up our itinerary for Dragon*Con. Everything’s booked and paid for and the roadmap laid out. I found this great website called TripHub that I’m trying out to see if it makes the vacation any easier. So far it’s pretty basic, but allows you to aggregate your flight info, hotel info, and trip itinerary all into an easy to use Web 2.0 interface. Friday’s D&D session went really well. We started late because of some errands I had to run that evening, so we only played from 9:00pm to 11:00pm or so. There wasn’t much action, but it was still pretty fun. I need to start being a bit more assertive on getting the players out of “dead-end” scenarios – I need to force the story line along. Well, I’m sure I’ll get better about this over time as this was only our 4th session. Anyway, I...
Category: Studio
Dragons, Sluts, and Spaceships
Friday night’s session went well. We all had more fun, I think, since I adjusted the rules. Shauna wasn’t up to playing due to a rough week at work, so her character, Aydan, stayed at the tavern while the rest of the party ventured back to the silver mines. All-in-all, the players kicked some ass. The rules are a bit more balanced now that I’ve adjusted the encumbrance limits, the encounter possibility frequency between Silverton and the mines, and the fact that I added a magic shop in town. This allowed them to buy some healing items that would otherwise have made it really difficult to go back into the mines without a healer. Saturday night Shauna and I both enjoyed several red-headed sluts. I met with Millard Monday and we went over the remaining tasks for the DVD feature. I was able to put together a CD with some...
Catching Up
It’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged. Mostly, that’s because I’ve been lazy, but some of that is because there hasn’t been much to talk about… I’ve been doing some editing on the feature and have delivered a second rough cut to Millard. I’m also working on another part of the DVD now and expect to have the first rough cut of that done this weekend. The script’s been finalized as well. I have a big stack of stills to scan in to bring me up to date too. I really plan on stepping up this next week to really start hammering out this project, as it’s starting to slip too much and drag on. Speaking of “drag on”, I booked the hotel and flight for Dragon*Con the last couple of weeks. Shauna and I will be heading up there on August 31st and will coming back September 5th....
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...
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...
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...
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...
Done Transcribing
I worked on transcribing all the footage yesterday and finally finished it around 1:00am this morning. The next step is to compile the script and story line and prepare to get a complete script to compliment the Demo. That way Millard can go and do what he needs to do while I work on editing the feature. We edited the Pleaseeasaur DVD for MutantMall.com on Thursday. He wanted to put together a sampler video for people so they could see the DVD before buying it. I added it to the Screening Room on my site, even though all I did was assist in the editing. Pleaseeasaur is some weird shit, but it’s pretty funny too. Sick Thought of the Day: Fingers in the chipper.
Short Done
I’ve just submitted my short film "My First Job" to the Tribeca Film Festival’s 15-second Short Film competition. I found out about the contest late Friday, and brainstormed with Millard Sunday. After solidifying the concept, I edited it all on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (hey, that’s tonight!). To watch the short, please visit the new Screening Room located in the navigation area of the site. With the short out of the way, I’m going to start in on the full length DVD movie again. I’ll start that Friday night, as I’ve decided to take tomorrow night to watch the Lightning get trounced again by the Senators. I shouldn’t be such a dammed pessimist, but I’m not feeling the playoff vibe like I did two years ago. Hopefully they’ll prove me wrong, and whip the shit out of Ottawa. Millard’s flying to Philly on Friday, so I’ll be spending all weekend...
