Two Months Behind

Man, I just feel like I've been getting lots of work not done. I am fighting to recover yet another crashed hard drive. That's two in the last month and-a-half. It's not a disaster if I lose this drive but it sure is annoying.

Most of our bluescreens in Clonehunter were lit and photographed well. Not all of them though. The first few on the first day have a problem wherein they suck. So I'm working on one and I just can't get it to key out and it's really irritating me. I'm thinking "but Maduka got the previous shot to work, it's the same piece of footage (just earlier)." So I open up the AfterEffects file he used to get the matte and he's just done every little thing with a gazillion masks and keys to create the alpha channel on the footage. So I replace the footage he had with the footage I'm struggling with and viola. It works. Man, that keying nightmare must have taken him hours to deal with. Sorry!

Today's Quote(s) of the Day come from The New Yorker (I'm almost exactly 2 months behind, which for me is pretty good.)

From Outsmarted:

A common mistake of very smart people is to assume that other people's minds work in the same way that theirs do. This is a particular problem in economics. Its mathematically based models and assumptions of rational conduct can appear, to non-economists, like toys, entertaining but, by definition, of limited utility.

From the review of Terminator Salvation:

If you arrived late for “Terminator Salvation” and missed the name of the director, at what moment would you realize that you were not watching a Mike Leigh film? I would nominate the scene in which a rusty tow truck, armed with a wrecking ball, is pursued by a riderless robot motorbike, armed with automatic machine guns. A wrecked car falls into the bike’s path, at which point we are given privileged access to the display screen inside the robot’s brain. We get a blood-red projection of the obstacle ahead, and with it, for a second or two, the words “Analyzing alternatives.” Slide under the wreck, crash through it, or skirt around the side? I felt sorry for this anxious bike, which may have been having trouble at home, and it certainly delivers a more measured performance than some of the leading actors.
Nonetheless, that brief digital readout gives the game away. The business of the film is not to tell a cogent story or earn the devotion of our sympathies but to analyze alternatives, and, when in doubt, pick whichever is louder.