Well, Christmas is now behind us by a couple of days, and I'm reeling over the fact that I gained four pounds. That's probably from all the candy, since I only really had about one and a half plates of dinner on Sunday. I've been eating a lot of salt the last few days too. Maybe that's it. I dunno. Maybe I just need to hit the gym and shut up. Ok. I'll do that. I'm going to spend some time today cataloging the tapes from the shoot last week and trying some samples out. Millard gave me the raw audio tracks, and I'm going to spend some time syncing things up to see how they sound. Sick Thought of the Day: Worms in the ear.
Category: Studio
Chewbode.com is Back!
The site's back up and running! Chewbode.com is now hosted with 3essentials. A big thanks to Doug, Stacy and Russ for their help in getting the site transferred! In other news, Will's in town and we all congregated this past Tuesday to shoot several scenes from the new production. The day's shooting went very well and we got a lot of coverage. Afterward, we all went out and had a bite to eat at the 24/7 Restaurant. I've got the day off today and will be finishing up some Christmas chores and getting the bottom of the tree filled-out. Shauna’s going out with my mom tonight to finish up some last-minute shopping and Millard and I will probably get together and hang out and do the weekly deflate. Sick Thought of the Day: Razorblade chew.
Makin’ and Watchin’
The script is coming along well. I'm still in the brainstorming stages of it, but should actually be writing the full-version shortly. I meditated for four hours on Sunday to try to spark the ol' creative juices. I'm at an impasse right now in that I can't decide how to end the story. Hopefully this block will clear and I'll dive into the first draft in the next few days. I saw War of the Worlds finally last night. I have to say that I'm really wondering about Spielberg. The last several movies he's made he's made he's decided to go with that washed-out, grey-tinted look. I'm not sure if it's me, but it seems like he's been overdoing that a bit lately. That was really my only gripe about it, though. I also saw Elephant and Batman Begins and I also watched Anchorman again. I also set up one...
The Aftermath
Thanksgiving was a belly-busting success. We ate about a third of the food, send anther third home with people, and had about half of the final third left over in the fridge. Mmm, mmm. The whole day yesterday was about deflating mentally, eating tons of leftovers, watching movies, and sleeping. It was great. However, today I'm gonna be more productive. I've got my Mountain Dew and bananas (heh...), and am ready to jump back into script writing. Will is coming down here around Christmas time and he's agreed to collaborate on a project with me and Millard. I'm also going to be doing a second small script for this, and we'll see where it goes. I'm not sure if I'd like to do something structured with Will or maybe go more improve. I think I'll take the structured approach and see where it goes. Sick Thought of the Day: Cajun...
Organizing
Today I added a project management area to the website for anyone who works on a project with me. It allows us to add tasks, files, and related information to a project outline with due dates and the like. This should really help me get stuff in order and finish some things. Everything in the "Projects" area of the site has been added in and will be managed through the new system. I got the motherboard for the new server back yesterday and have been working on getting it up and running again. After a shitload of grief with it last night, I finally found out that there were two problems with it (no, the motherboard was fine): The power supply was bad (it was second-hand) and the IDE cable that connected the CD-ROM drive to the motherboard was bad. I've since replaced both and the system is now (finally!)...
After The Rain Has Fallen
Well, it's finally over. For the past few hours the sun's been out, the temperature's 72 degrees, and there's been a light wind. It's absolutely beautiful outside. I've decided to go and clean out and re-organize the closet in the studio and get rid of a ton of junk in there. This should make room for the render farm, which I'm still researching how I'm going to build. The goal will be to have several machines in the closet, with some good ventilation. Millard got back into town last night after being up at Mumpdase's wedding. Exhausted, he napped on my couch for a bit, then woke up, grabbed the hard drive with his audio masters and headed home. Hopefully we'll begin working on the DVD tomorrow afternoon. Sick Thought of the Day: Pig urine in the milk.
Wilma Advisory 31
Here's the latest on Wilma: No Image Available. Advisory 31: 11:00 pm EST, Saturday October 22, 2005 Today I joined the American Film Institute. Since I was young, I've loved films and have been drawn by the creative spirit behind not only large studio directors, but the independent filmmaker too. I feel that being an AFI member will enrich my love and understanding of film, and will give me a stronger foundation in my pursuit of the art. I've put together some sample DVDs today of the SMM Instructional DVD in both 480i and 480p versions, and hope to sit down with Millard and discuss them as soon as the storm blows over. Until we can discuss this, I'm planning on working on some samples of the title animation and menu design.
Tests, Logs, and Configs
When my editing workstation's capture drive failed a while back, I lost a couple of projects. When I say "lost", I really mean that the captured video went bye-bye, and I lost maybe a total of 3 hours of work (beyond the time it took to capture the video, which was maybe 2 hours). So, now the drive's been replaced, and I have a secondary drive in the system as well, which now gives me almost half a terabyte of storage space for rendering, video and film work. That said, I've re-captured then next project and recovered the scene logs from backup tape. So, now that the project's all set up, all I need to do is edit. I've done some tests with multi-pass VBR MPEG encoding, to see what settings I like the best and am happy with the results. The 3D models for the Transformers game (we call...
Milked
I've finished the remastering of An Essay on Milk. The video quality was extremely poor (very grainy, overly red and pink like old film) so it took some time to do some color balancing and sharpening of the picture. I rendered the video out and ran it through the compressor to make a nice DVD of it, which should help preserve it for a while. I'm also archiving the digital capture and project so that we can go back to it again in the future if we so desire.
Milk
I've added another project to my list of things, which is remastering/restoring the original An Essay on Milk footage directed by Jared Whitham for Sir Millard Mulch back around 1998. This is an internal project that probably will never see the light of day, but I'm posting it in the Projects section nonetheless.
