Kevin Kangas Kickstarter

C'mon. This is hysterical.

7-minute workout

If you like things that are hard, there's this 7-minute workout. Yeah. It uses science. Thing is, that it's scalable. So basically you're doing each thing as hard as you can do them. So if you're in great shape and doing 40 pushups in 30 seconds, or just doing 6, you still work out a whole bunch.

You may also need an interval timer.

Untitled Round Timer

Create your own interval timer or download our interval timer app

Party down.

Fatigue, Boxes, and Color

I find that I get hearing fatigue really easily when I'm mixing music. I lose all perspective on a mix within about 15 minutes of starting. Usually when I come back to a mix the next day I hear what's wrong with it. Well, usually. The big problem is that I'm typically too focused on some aspect of the mix like the drum sound or the bass sound. I've found from experience that my first mixes have little in the way of effects, then I do some mixes way over-compressed, and then... I just have no idea what's going on.

I find that I get fatigue from color-correcting too. I can really get lost looking at color-correction options in a movie. Then I look away for a few minutes and look back and... everything looks different.

Kate Britton, no color correction. Camera set to 10K.

Man, I cannot tell you how thankful I am that we do everything "in the box". If I couldn't instantly recall mixes and color-correction looks I would be completely lost. I just need a whole lot of time to figure out what's going on.

Same light, other side, color corrected GH2 footage 25mm lens.

But the most important thing to me is to be able to get notes from other people. Because, sheesh. You just need those extra eyes and ears. I find that the notes I get back frequently lead me to places where I figure out things even better than (what I did before)+(the notes I just got).
And mixing in the box makes taking notes a dream. Guitar is too loud after 2 minutes? Easy. Just turn it down at the 2 minute mark. Dude is way to blue through all of act 2? Just dial in a bit more warmth in the color correction and walk away.

If we upgraded our camera

So. If we had a new camera we'd need an HDMI transmitter for it, no?


(Only $99 refurbished.)
Which would, in turn, require a micro HDMI to HDMI cable.
 
Now, of course, we'd need a camera like the Panasonic GH3 (which performs better in low-light but has a bit more aliasing and moire in some conditions than the GH2).


And a really bad ass lens.
 
(You can actually save a couple hundred bucks by getting that lens used.) With, you know, a UV filter for the lens.
 
And spare batteries.
 
And a pair of SD cards.
 
And some sort of power supply for the transmitter.
 
Although honestly I don't know what the power draw on the transmitter is like. Surely this is overkill, no? And for that matter, how would we mount the battery and the transmitter? I'm inclined to just tape them to the handheld rig. I'm sure there's a more elegant solution.
Lastwise we need a monitor with HDMI inputs. I think I've bought three of these monitors so far. They work great:

Two Draft

David Twohy can do no wrong. In fact, even if he ever did wrong I'd just say "no, he didn't do wrong, I don't believe it."


The Chronicles of Riddick has my favorite dark ending of any movie ever, with a veritable Shakesperian denouement. So say I. So say we all.

+++++
This writing tool called Draft is kinda neat. A new thing is that it allows you to embed videos from YouTube and Vimeo for transcription. As one of the things one must do when delivering a feature film is to deliver a transcription of all the dialog, it might be worth looking into.
+++++
Via Indifferent Cats and Amateur Porn.

Do Yourself a Favor

Press "play" on this video:

But watch this .gif:

 Repeat.

Your Thingues For Today

Enduring Mysteries is... a sci-fi musical. Hmm... I got one of those too! ;-)
Black Swan Theory.

The order of front-title credits.

Jack-o-Orange

But I'm Suffering

Do I have to be an overweight middle-aged white guy? Really?


Hoo boy. I can't even begin to tell you how depressed this Zack Galifianakis fake ad for New Balance made me. Especially as I looked down at my New Balance sneakers.
Ugh.

Defy This

So I'm actually enjoying the new SyFy series Defiance. Honestly there are parts of it which are cringe-worthy (alien '80's techno acts for instance.) But there are a lot of it which is quite good. It's weird when you go from a really dreadful soap-opera-y scene to one which is actually kind of good and Battlestar worthy. The visual effects do the same thing. Some of them are perfect. And some of them go right out the window.

Groove To

My pal Ernest Abuba's show, Dojoji, has a matching grant from the NEA. Donate here. It's like doubling your money!

My Dad's Inbox

31
Thousand
Emails
In. His. Inbox.

Duck

Via.

Software review

Holy cow. Do you want an extensive review of screenwriting software? The Huffington Post can help you there. In our shop we use Celtx. It's free and makes scripts that look like scripts. That's pretty much all we used to need it for but it will also generate (with some caveats) call sheets. It might even generate them accurately.

Oblaviated

As your duly appointed Kinge I have but one Mandate which with my Sword I shall protect; it is this Thinge:

• Science fiction films may not contain or allude to classic rock songs

Braak over at Threat Quality Press is hysterical in his take on Oblivion. More than that though, he's pretty accurate.

One thing I find odd about these sorts of movies is that there's always a place where they run out of money for visual effects. The space-pod thing? Always looks great. I mean, it looks fantastic. It's photo-real in every darn shot it's in.
But every time we drive across the Brooklyn Bridge on a motorcycle everything just breaks down visually.