Saturday, June 12, 2010

Queen of the Early Afternoon

PFC (Plug Fire Cartrige) guns. Prop weapons where you screw "caps" into real-sized cartridges. So if you need the blast and the blowback, but don't want the power of a full load (and you have a lot of money to pay for the guns), this might be the way to go for realistic prop weapons. The only seeming downside (outside the price) is that they eject the entire bullet rather than just the shell. Not that many people would notice. But you could even use them in theater as they aren't as loud as regular automatics.

Here's a video of an M4A1 with grenade launcher(!)



My man Greg Bodine turned me onto these.

Moby Dick guitar video lesson (DADGBE)from Bob's Guitar Lessons:


Comfortably Numb guitar solo:


As it turns out there are a lot of on-line lessons for both these songs:


For whatever reason, half of the rhythm section of Tyrannosaurus Mouse has an extreme prejudice against Mozart opera so we're not allowed to do the Queen of the Night aria no matter how much I want to.

Today I had to reacquaint myself with the use of multiple tracking points in AfterEffects. Luckily, Video Copilot shows you how to track when your tracking points go off the screen.

6 comments:

DAVID FREY said...

I want one of those PFC's

Kangas said...

Yeah, AE tracking gets shifty. What Andrew needs to show is how to track when your shot is in THE DARK. The tracker has an enormous amount of problems in low light, where all his shots are during the day...

Andrew Bellware said...

I find that with most compositions you need to have some piece of light at or near 100%. Y'know, darkness -- it's shown by light. Normally just a little shaft of light, or maybe a peaking somewhere of a little pinpoint of light.

And in that case, of course, we'd track the light.

Kangas said...

Yeah, that might work if you didn't need to also track rotation and/or scale...

Andrew Bellware said...

Rotation is two lights. Scale is a bit more trouble. Honestly Maduka does a LOT of tracking in our shop manually. Manual tracking drives me nuts but he has the patience.

Kangas said...

Yeah, I've done most of my tracking manually. Or sometimes I'll try the auto, then have to frame-by-frame refinement.