More Stuff To Buy

Even though we haven't cast the darn movie, it's time to buy some costumes.

It's Not Safe

So for all of my life, my, er, relative has been an outspoken opponent of OSHA. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

But the reasons aren't as cold-hearted as you might at first think. Nope. He opposition to OSHA was the bureaucracy and needlessness of it.
Now the thing to understand about the kind of conservative my, er, relative is, is to understand that he will not comprehend anyone in his position doing anything he wouldn't do. So the argument "But relative, if OSHA didn't exist, employers would never provide safety equipment for their employees" was moot. Because of course employers would provide safety gear.
The problem is that workers don't want to use it. (And yeah, the long history of abuse of employees by employers didn't happen because my relative never saw that.)
Instead what he saw, back in the day when there was no real foreman at his company (we're talking nigh on 40 years ago) he would go into the shop and yell at everybody for not wearing proper protection. Like eye protection. Which was sitting right next to them. They just had to pick it up. They just wouldn't.
But, like seatbelts, they'd say "Oh but I'm just doing this one little thing/driving across town, I don't really need it."
So to my relative, safety became an issue which the employers were more concerned with than employees.
And honestly I'm still shocked whenever employees are cavalier about using safety gear. I've also noticed that a foreman's job is to be a jackbooted thug when it comes to safety. Because even if you have management (like my relative) who is pro-safety, the idiots who work around power tools aren't.
Heaven help you if management doesn't care about your safety. Because if they aren't, and your co-workers aren't, you're in big trouble.
+++++
My big problem on set is that I am almost literally blind when I'm working. Well, I do literally have tunnel vision because it's virtually impossible for me to see outside of what the lens is looking at. And stuff outside the lens is exactly where something's coming from that's going to whump somebody.
I try to make sure our fight choreographers are vigilant about making things comfy and safe. In a fight scene anybody can call "cut". (If we're doing a straight up dramatic or dialog scene I will throw something at you if you try to cut while I'm shooting.) But if you're not comfy doing a fight we have to stop immediately. And there I'm relying on fight choreographers to be my "foreman" on set.
For Art and G&E, well, those departments tend to do stupid stuff like get themselves cut or zapped. One thing I love about shooting in high ISO's is that the lamps we use can be much lower wattage. We don't have to do crazy stuff like run three-phase or 220v (that's right, it's amps that kill you but it's the voltage that gets to you.) Most of our lights can be handled without gloves. But if you're playing with incandescents, or worse, you just have to wear gloves. Or I will smack you. See? Since you're not worried about getting hurt by whatever you're doing, you'll at least be worried about what will happen to you if I find out you were doing something stupid and dangerous.
For the Art department all I can do is tell them that I'd rather not have a set than somebody get hurt.
If somebody does get hurt it better be because I was handing out spankings. And that's that.

Armor Armour Amore

Looking at armor for spacesuits.
This one below is amusingly almost girly. But you know if we covered up the maroon parts on the front and kept the embroidery it would totally work.



Soon, using motorbike armor as futuristic spacesuits and armor will look, well, like using motorbike armor. Sort of how using Nerf guns in sci-fi movies is outre.


And I'll tell ya I'm a bit surprised they went that route in the new Prometheus. But I figure if they can do it, we can too.

Dolls, Rent, Quotes, and Cat

The "Ground Zero" "Gentlemen's Club" "New York Dolls" has a free admission coupon you can print out. There's a free buffet with that.
My rent didn't go up! I'm still at $893/month for my (what would have once been called) "Junior 1-bedroom".

I'm using a lot of "quotes" in today's post.

Pushkin was a special kitty.

Computational Malarkiks

The Brads - Buying a Computer
Hey, what takes 17 minutes on my quad-core computer and less than 4 minutes on the dual-quad-core Mac? This freakin' render, that's what.
But I can't get my new computer because the darn CPU is backordered. It's a Sandy Bridge i7 and apparently they had to change something about the production on them to fix some bugs. Or something.
In the meantime it's being a major league snarfle to get these renders out. Because you know that new computer would be bonking these frames out in less than two minutes.
Oh look. Tomorrow is the first. I get to pay rent. I may as well do laundry too.

Android Issues

So let's see. We're late in delivering Android Insurrection. And I feel very bad about that. We're waiting on the last act to be delivered by an outside editor. And we have some more visual effects to render. I'm rendering a robot right now.
We have a script by Steven J. Niles for The Prometheus Trap. You can read it here.

One of the problems with being late on Android Insurrection is that it makes our distributor less-faithed that we'll be able to turn the Prometheus picture around in time.
But we will. I promise. We will. ;-)

Today's Bunnies

Why do a case study of a movie that hasn't made its money back yet?

Lighting a sharkstooth scrim.

Notions

Today is thinking about spaceships and spacesuits day here in the Pandora Machine.
It's also robot rendering day. But let's just face facts, every day is robot rendering day. I'm doing a closeup of the dang 'bot right now and he's taking 2:44 a frame. And that's just for the Blender render. Afterwards we get to do the AfterEffects render.

By Philip Drawbridge.

So this new Alien movie. Spacesuits. Actually, the spacesuits look to me to essentially be bodysuits with motorcycle armor.

Online Backups

So. iDrive is $15/month for 500GB. You can backup multiple computers (but not both PC's and Mac's on the same account). And it doesn't automatically delete data after a set period of time. Right now I have two iDrive accounts (one for PC and one for Mac).

The only thing I don't like so much about iDrive is how the interface sometimes "forgets" which folders you want to back up. It seems that the server holds onto the files online, but that you just have to re-click the checkbox next to the folders you want backed up every so often. At least on the Mac interface.
Sugarsync is $15/month for 100GB. But the interface is a tad more clear. Its purpose is different too -- it's great at syncing files and folders across multiple computers (and platforms.) So I use the free version to essentially backup my documents.
And that's how it is.

Moar Notes

For our new Prometheus movie I have the following locations/sets:

This is the monster. Scary, right?

1. Space
2. Vulture -- bridge
3. Vulture -- corridor
4. Vulture -- cyro compartment
5. Vulture -- airlock
6. Caucasus -- corridor
7. Caucasus -- observation deck
8. Caucasus -- cyro compartment
9. Caucasus -- bridge
10. Caucasus -- engineering
11. Caucasus -- cargo room anteroom
12. Caucasus -- cargo bay

That's 12 sets and six characters. Our sales rep was questioning whether we could actually finish this movie in time. I think we can.

Mah Notes

Kevin Kangas grooves you to the new good cheap LED light.


Haskin - F Captain scout ship
Rhodes - M Lt scout ship
(Are they both officers? Does that make a difference?)

My older brother's new dog, Maggie. She has an ear.

Inverse Kinematics in Blender. Because you completely understand Forward Kinematics and Inverse Kinematics. Completely and fully.

I'm looking at coveralls as spacesuits.

How to write 10K words a day.

Dope zebra dance is dope.

Miranda

You know, I really liked the "steampunk opera" Miranda. It's an opera which was being performed at HERE. But it was very flawed. The biggest flaw was in the sound. All of the vocals were mixed just under where they needed to be. And that's the fault of the music being too loud, not the voices being loud enough. The mix was loud enough that the room itself could just barely handle it without becoming just a harsh icepick aimed at the audience's head. Or about 85 - 90 dB SPL.
But that meant that, even without worrying about gain-before-feedback, there was no way to make the voices louder than that because they'd just become strident and irksome.
Although the show was produced by HERE, a Kickstarter campaign was used to pay the musicians. To me that sounds like a pretty smart way to use Kickstarter.

(Note this video is not from the recent performances -- the performance I saw ironically didn't sound this good although this may have been a special mix from the board rather than a mic sitting on the camera.)
Continuing the problems with the sound, the romantic lead was singing way below his range. And the only way to deal with that is to turn up the volume (see problem number one, above). And although she's a pretty good singer, Kamala Sankaram doesn't do that necessary thing where you sing quieter as you go higher. Instead she uses her support for volume rather than, you know, support.

You Like Random Information

Verizon's high-speed DSL is $40/month. Their low-speed DSL is $25/month. They charge you $20 to install the thing. (We're having so much trouble with our Internet at the new office that I'm considering just bailing out and getting our own DSL line.)

+++++

Chance Shirley is a world of information about spacesuit helmets. The sphere's he used for his spacesuits came from Complex Plastics. I've written to get a price from them (I actually called but they said to email them -- go figure.)
Here is Chance on the helmet itself:

I believe we used 14" diameter spheres, and we had them cut a 10" holeat the base.

And I think that's a good size for space helmets. The trick, which Inever quite figured out, is how to make a collar to keep the helmetcomfortably/consistently attached to the actor's shoulders. Ourhelmets tended to lean forward, resting against the back of the actorshead. So we put a little strip of foam in the back to at least make it more comfy.

Because Things Chance Says should be on permanent record on the Internet, I include some of his advice (without his permission) right here. This is what he has to say about how the gasket was attached to the helmet:

We glued a wooden hoop (painted metallic) to the gasket, then gluedthe helmet to the wooden hoop. I'm surprised they stayed together aswell as they did. Probably would have been better to build some kindof working mount and attach to the helmet with screws.

I considered a back piece, a la "Alien," but couldn't figure out agood way to do it. If you let gravity keep the helmet in place, watchout for light leaks (which the back piece would help with, too) thatwould give away the fact the helmet isn't really airtight.

And definitely get some lights in there. I figured you could get somekind of cheap LEDs these days...

++++
All this time I've been whining about how expensive Cedar noise reduction systems are. But rather than buying one for five grand you can just rent one for eighty bucks a day. Considering the fact that we'd only need it about six or maybe eight days a year, that's just $640.

If you don't believe me here is a duck.

Dreamhire also rents Cedar but their ratecard is substantially higher than Audio Rents in CA.

Palm Flower Blinking

You make a cartoon referencing Logan's Run, I am amused.