How To Shoot A Martini

We're headed boldly into the last day of shooting Dead Residents.
Lessee. We still need a robot. We're low on zombies. We have a million pages with ten million lines of dialog all in one small apartment set. To which I say "eek!"

Ian Hubert made our CG robot. It looks rather photo real. Here it a version of it on an alpha channel.

I am (I hope you're sitting down) actually storyboarding this series of scenes. Good grief. What has it all come to? I need to make the scene:

• Good
• Easy to edit
• Easy to shoot

In about that order. 
I always get concerned about annoying actors by doing a stop-and-start version of a scene where we are continually stopping, going back a line, starting up right through to when another character talks at which point we stop, back up, and start shooting the new character until another character speaks. It's very herkey-jerky. But it's very effective in the edit room.
A substantial amount of the movie has been edited. It looks good. I'm happy with how the story works.

Organic Armor

Organic Armor makes some cool and elegant and, well, organic -- armor pieces.

They make pretty inspiring stuff.

Post-Christmas

I wanna go scuba diving in Iceland. I just do. I do.

Dune Mountain Dew Parody Commercial from Byron Merritt on Vimeo.
Don't Shoot the Costumer on what to pack in a truck.
So. Translights. We really should use such things on our movies. 
Check it out: Ryan's Reviews -- dude reviews no/low-budget movies.

Brother Dune

My eldest brother's website.

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Jeff Somers depressed me with his end-of-year review. I've read everything of his except for Lifers and Chum. He's pretty brilliant. We even named a character after him in Day II.

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On the eye effect in Dune (2000).

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Speaking of Dune. Does anybody else notice the allegory of Dune to Vietnam? The way the Harkonen deliberately wait out the war in such a way that they figure the Empire will have to escalate it? I mean, for a book that came out in 1965 that is alarmingly prophetic because essentially the US military waited out the war expecting that they'd be able to get full political and public support for a massive invasion. That, of course, never happened.
Ho Chi Mihn isn't the Kwisatz Haderach but I think you see where I'm going with this.

Nowlike

Looking back o'er this year of our Lord 2013 I've done the following. I wrote a book. I released two albums.

 And that's about it. Well, when I say the word "done" I mean "finished".
I "wrote" a book in that I liberally parodied another book.

I finished two albums which were primarily recorded in previous year(s). One by Tyrannosaurus Mouse. The other by Diatomaceous Earth.
I have two movies sitting on drives whilst we are finishing another movie. The releases of these movies next year will make next year seem very productive movie-wise even though most of the work is/has been done nowlike. 

Imaginary Operation

You may be asking yourself "What is The Imaginary Opera? Isn't that just a song we do?" 

It is. 

But it's also much more. 

There is a "book" (words and lyrics) to a 45-minute/hour-long operetta. Do you want to see it? Of course not, nobody will read it. The story is based on Apocalypse Now, the "world" is Blade Runner, and the characters are multifarious but the lead is from Escape From New York. The book needs a re-write. In fact, it needs a re-write from someone who isn't me. But I haven't found anybody who wants to do that (yet.)

Most of the opera's music has not been written -- that we know of. But the fact is that most of the opera will be the actors talking and over their talking will be some "space rock". So that's pretty easy, right? (Other than the band, which is presumably Diatomaceous Earth, there are two actors and one soprano who plays the "Chorus.")

So what is that piece of music we call The Imaginary Opera? Well, we'll probably do a number of versions just the way we do them now, but there will also be a version which will have a melody (with words) sung by the soprano "Chorus". Do we know what those words are? No. Do we know where it goes in the whole Imaginary Opera piece? No. Do we know what the melody will be? No (although I have some ideas.) 

So. You're thinking to yourself "Drew, this whole Imaginary Opera idea is pretty half-baked." Yes, it's almost exactly half baked. But I'm pretty good at completing things like this. And we're at the halfway point.

But The Imaginary Opera is a separate thing from a regular Diatomaceous Earth concert. At least I think it is under normal circumstances. 

Now we need to find a puppet maker.

Drum Preamps

I watched the Dave Grohl directed documentary Sound City. The movie is primarily a love story about a Neve mixing console that was owned by a Los Angeles recording studio and was subsequently sold to Dave Grohl.
There's a couple things in the movie which might confuse a less sophisticated viewer -- like that Pro Tools is analogous to a tape deck more than a mixing board (although it can do that too). And also I'll be more than happy to be "that guy" who points out that if you're trying to proselytize that 24-track 2" Ampex machines are some kind of holy grail that a 2" 16-track Stephens machine is far closer to the holy land than any Ampex and that's just that.
I can make a ProTools rig sound just as good as a 2" 24-track Ampex by adding a bit of noise to the whole thing when I'm done. 

In any case, yeah, a lot of great albums were recorded on that Neve mixer. The two that blow me away the most are Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and Nirvana's Nevermind. Oddly the documentary talked quite a bit about how nice the room sounded but for much of the life of that studio the preference was for very dead rooms -- and very dead drums.
But truthfully, I'm not that super excited by the drum sounds on Nevermind or even the more modern Foo Fighter's stuff. Sure, I get bummed by the papery drum sounds of early Zeppelin or even Cream, but the constant explosions without dynamics of modern rock drumming just make me depressed.
And, as far as I know, ABACAB was recorded on an old SSL console. SSL's are not known for their preamps. Indeed (and I'm just pulling this out of my ear) I think Nevermind was mixed on an SSL.
And ABACAB may have been recorded on an AMEK.
So wait, where was I going with this?
Doesn't Shock the Monkey seem to be a bit fast tempo-wise? I want it to be slower and funkier.
Oh, I know. I'm not 100% convinced of Neve's inherent superiority in recording drums. I do seem to like them as overhead and room mics. I know I know, everybody is all about API's for drums. They're snappy, I'll give you that. Still I'd rather have a drum kit that I liked the sound of in and of itself. You know. To start with.

Hannibal Montana and venues

Talking with Mike from Cavallo yesterday. He said they were going to open for a band called Hannibal Montana.
 
Instrumental rock. On the prog tip. Check them out. They're pretty awesome.

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Here are some music venues in New York City
Spike Hill
The Grand Victory
Lit Lounge

What I think about Katy Perry

You know, I really dislike much of Katy Perry's most popular songs. In particular I feel that the end of the hook (the "answer" to the beginning of the phrase or the "subject") squanders the build-up from the verses through the bridge and into the chorus. And it does so by leading you up and up... until she finishes off with an "oh aeh oh eh oh" like nobody could figure out what else to put in there. No, man, that's the part of the song that has to deliver -- that's not the place to cop out.
Anyway, so yeah. Drew has issues with the bulk of the Katy Perry oeuvre.

I did, however, enjoy "I Kissed a Girl" The answer to the subject in the chorus is adequate. And, you know, it can be done in different styles which is also amusing.

It's my Internet and I can rant incoherently if I want to

There are some things I'm good at as a director. There are things I feel "need improvement". I'm good at finishing movies, obviously. I'm good at shooting wide painterly vistas.
I'm less good at building tension and suspense.
I know people who are good at that. Like Jim and Chance.
Sometimes I feel like this will be the best movie we've made. Sometimes I feel like I'm way over my head on this movie. I wish I made Westerns. I can do Westerns.

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There's quite a bit of action in this picture.
I do wish I were better at directing thriller scenes. There's a lot of what I think of as details which need to be shot in order to build a scare or make a tense scene. Or an action scene. I suppose if we really had a solid idea of what our sets were like before we shot in them we could storyboard the whole movie to give a notion of how the movie would get edited and then we just shoot the storyboards. That sounds perfectly luxurious to me.

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This thing here is called a "section sign". § I like it. I want more of them. I want a sideways one.

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I've worked on a lot of indy pictures. I mean I worked on a lot of them before I just gave up and started making my own movies.
The funny thing is that so many of these indy pictures shot in New York are identical. They have identical and interchangeable scripts and they're shot the same way, making the same mistakes, every time. They're long and talky scripts about someone from a particular ethnic group who wants to be more mainstream but then learns something about their own culture and embraces their culture instead of trying to find "success" the way they've defined it up until page 60 or so. C'mon, seriously. It's every single freakin' movie.
Also, they're all shot the same way.

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The standard shoot on these low-budget operations is 18 days. That's three 6-day weeks. 

Why work 6-day weeks? Apparently the reasoning is that your rental items are weekly, and you think you (as a producer) save money that way. Turns out you don't. Why? Because production doesn't get enough sleep and starts making some stupid decision or some non-decisions.
On a typical picture where you're bouncing around from location to location each day you're going to lose at least two locations. But now the director and producer(s) don't have time to look for new locations because they're working 14 or more hours a day for 6 days. So by the end of the shoot the whole crew ends up being parked somewhere just waiting for someone to make a decision.
No sleep, bad decisions also means:

• The movie instantly goes into massive overtime.

The director has no idea what's actually important and what isn't important in editing. They insist that entire takes be good rather than  making sure that they have something that's editable. I suppose this is a "first-time director" problem but I'm shocked at how much I see it happen.
The DP is shooting their reel rather than shooting the movie. Setups which should take 15 minutes take an hour-and-a-half. Why? Because the narrative of the picture doesn't matter to the DP. Getting their next job and using all their toys matters. This is, not surprisingly, not good for the movie at hand.

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Presumably this is a list of the movies Stephen Spielberg expects you to watch "before you work with him." What's missing? Well in my little world it would be the following probably. How about:

• Alien
• Aliens
• Blade Runner
• Forbidden Planet
• Logan's Run
• Planet of the Apes
• The Road Warrior
• Serenity
• Silent Running

TV Series:

• Star Trek
• (New) Battlestar Galactica
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Firefly

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See? I just like that thing.

Things 4 Today

The VB3 is considered to be the best modeled Hammond organ. I have to say, it's pretty nice.

This is the kind of thing you get when you look up "guitar mouse".

Arf! Mastering is Alan Silverman's place. He's doing some Russian Chamber stuff I recorded.

The Playroom doesn't seem to do single-day performance rentals.

The Tank is a theater.

Abby Singer Day II

... because one Abby Singer Day isn't enough.
That's right, we've done our penultimate day of shooting twice now. But at least that means that schedule-wise we're right on time.
You know, if you don't count the fact that we added a whole extra day.
We shall begin the illustrative portion of this blog post with a series of pictures of our Martian Queen.

Today we shot almost entirely in my building super's office. And he gave me some coquito he made. And all I can say is ho-ly-cow. That was some good stuff. Rum and coconut milk. Cinnamon. It tasted like there was some cocoa in it.
Oh man. I'm glad I had that toward the end of the shoot day rather than the beginning. I'm also glad I have auto-focus on my camera.
Ho. Ly. Cats.
That's some good stuff. Not good for one's diet.

The lovely Virginia Logan.

The. Er. Lovely Virginia Logan.

 Did you know that Virginia is in Sleep No More? Because she is. And it's awesome.

Virginia Logan, Steve Deighan, and Mary Murphy after the nanobot release.

 Today we shot almost entirely robot POV. You know, just like it is in the script! ;-) I love this cast.

Maya Graffagna after being shot by Virginia. We kill Maya twice in this movie. Ha!

Virginia had to be her own camera operator for this shot of being hunted by her own robot.

 The very ambitious goal I have is to have all of the movie cut together except for the scenes we need to shoot on January 5 by January 5. We absolutely must do it though, as we have to be done with all post-production (animation, composites, sound edit, music, final mix, color - correction, commentary track) by February 1.

The Marsian Queen does some robot acting for us.

Cancelling Christmas

That's it. Forget it. I'm cancelling Christmas.
Remember when I was all excited because the TSA would allow pocketknives on airplanes? Well thanks to a bunch of whining by know-nothings, it's not going to happen.
My already anti-Christmas family had this whole idea that they were going to give money to charity. I mean for Christmas. Like to the Philippines and such. When I had the brilliant idea that I'd give everyone knives. You know, thinking that the TSA wouldn't take them away anymore.
Well now my brilliant idea has gone to pot and now there's only charity. Well "tphthth" to that.

I'm cancelling Christmas.
There. It's done.

Just some notes

We have two more official days of principal photography on Steve Niles' Dead Residents. I'm enjoying the way this picture looks. I don't want to say that it looks good because we're shooting on a GH3 instead of a GH1 but the GH3 certainly helps. 

I find that in post I'm lifting up the tones which are just above the black levels. The image below is a bad example because there's so much black in it to start with. But yeah, basically, we've been lifting the bottom part of the image. Note that we're just blending Magic Bullet Looks with the un-color-corrected image (about 64% color-correction in the "power mask" in the Magic Bullet Looks controller in Final Cut Pro).  

This scene where we fight the robot has been the one scene which has stressed me out the most. I've been worried about getting it to look right. 

My super has been extremely awesome about letting us use the basement of my building. I mean, it's really really nice. Every room down there looks art directed. We have one or maybe two more scenes to shoot there. We'll have to see. 

So far we're behind schedule by one scene. Which, you know, isn't too shabby for being 10 days into a 12-day shoot. 

Virginia Logan shoots robots in Dead Residents.

We did our first shooting with CO2 cartridges. The handguns offer very little kick when they're belting out CO2 actually. In that shot above we've put baby powder in the barrel and we get one frame of floof coming out of the gun. That's kind of funny because we're muzzle-loading. But I don't feel scared about crossing in front of a charged paintball gun. I mean if there were a paintball inside and if I were shot at close range it would hurt. But my eyes are protected by the camera itself (the lens would not be a world of happy if a paintball were shot into it point-blank).
The only charged and loaded paintball gun is the one we use to shoot at actors. Ha! No. We don't actually shoot at the actors. We shoot near them, sure, but not actually at them... er... all the time.
If you hit the right surface with the dust pellets you can kick up some nice fun stuff on walls and such without being nearly as dangerous as using something crazy like squibs. Yes, I do sound cavalier about the gun safety on our sets but we're actually sort of particular and we take some time making sure we're not going to get hurt.

Three Movies§Three Things

I have three movies sitting in post-production right now. That's less than awesome actually. Two of the movies have picture lock, or are close to it. But the one I have to get out right away has only just begun being edited.

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We're not going to make any major changes in our post-production process just yet, but a couple things have come up of late. Final Cut Pro is, of course, becoming creaky. Old age is getting to it. I haven't heard any whispers of Apple updating version 7 or making version X actually, you know, work. And that leaves us with Premiere. Yeah, we could go Avid but, er, no. We won't.
The other thing is that Samplitude, which we use for audio, has cancelled its Apple port. So Samplitude is going to stay PC-only.
The other main programs we use are Blender (which is PC/Apple/Linux), and AfterEffects (PC/Mac).
You'll notice that if we jump off the Final Cut Pro bandwagon we won't need any Apple computers in our studio.

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This dude, Stephan Bugaj, has a blog and he's been writing on the production and post-production process. For a nano-studio like ours some of the steps are fairly delusional but overall it's a fairly accurate overview of even how we deal with things. Things we don't typically do include an iterative process between sound editing and picture editing. We lock picture and then deal with sound. It's more old-fashioned the way we deal with it.

111213

This is Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.

Rehearsal last night. Diatomaceous Earth.
The Hammond organ you hear is actually the Chapman Stick played through an Electro Harmonix HOG2 and a Strymon Leslie emulator.

This recording has Lily using the Jazz fretless through a Fender Twin which is then recorded with a Rode NT1 and a Neve 1272.
This was a "find ourselves" rehearsal -- break stuff down to try to figure out how it's going to work live. 

All You Need Is Better Dialog

We're working on a mockbuster of the Tom Cruise sci-fi movie Edge of Tomorrow. So I figured I'd read the book it's based on.
I'll go ahead and call it.
All You Need Is Kill is a touchstone of military sci-fi.
Does that mean it's well - written? No. Not at all. I suppose it could just be the translation, but all the dialog (even the title), the metaphors, etc., is/are just... terrible. I mean embarrassingly bad.  On-the-nose bad.
And seriously, the red woman? She only needs one nickname. And "Full Metal Bitch" isn't it. The "Red Valkyrie" would have been more than fine. "Full Metal Bitch" is just... stupid. The title of the book is just... stupid.
But the story is pretty cool.

I like to believe it's the translation. But it could be that's where Japanese novels are at.
Fun fact with our mockbuster -- we already blew our wad with a Groundhog Day story with our Prometheus Trap. So this time we're going in a very different direction. We're pulling out the time travel elements altogether. Wish me luck on that one.

Joshua James Project

Josh James, who wrote Alien Uprising, has published a book of his plays. Check it out.


 A thing that's cool about this collection of plays is that they're royalty-free. So if you've an educational or independent theater and you're lookin' for plays to do, look here.

Somebody's Three Things For Today

Naked Holidays. Probably the only Christmas show you want to see. Amiright? You know I'm right. You totally want to see it. I'm going.

Via.

Zip and Li'l Bit. I've been really enjoying these web comics.

Android Insurrection has a German Wikipedia page.

Abbey Singer Day

Day 11 of 12 on Dead Residents.

Maduka Steady, Virginia Logan, Mary Murphy.

My super let us use his office today. We really have to figure out what to do for him for Christmas.

Matthew Trumbull, Clark, and Mary Murphy. About to meet their collective doom.

See the mirror reflects our reality that... oh who knows.

Future cop with robot. Ha! Which is which??!

The Queen of Mars says "I am my own PA." ;-)

There is little more satisfying to me than a paintball gun loaded with baby powder.

All the Young Girls Love Alice

The BBC series Luther is shot strangely. I mean singles on the wrong side of the frame, eyes-in-the-middle-of-the-frame strangely. Either the first season was much more like that, or I got used to it in subsequent seasons, but it's rather weird.

This isn't even a terribly egregious frame as it goes. But it shows the "wrong side" well.

The show is rather well-written but it squanders female characters like crazy. And I do mean "squander" -- not "makes uninteresting". Lady Jessica is a fantastic "police captain". Is it a spoiler to say...? Why yes. It's a minor spoiler to point out that between the first and second seasons...

Weird "eyes-in-the-middle" thing.

 ... she disappears. Never to be seen again. Not a plot thing. Maybe the actor just took off? Who knows? But she was a good and interesting police captain who was a woman and really one could go on and on about how she was a female character but in command but without that "never let them see you cry" ethos. I mean, it's a gazillion interesting.
But now I'm done watching Luther and I can get back to work.

Saturnworks Pedals

Do you know what's cool? Saturnworks Pedals.

♄ψ is like the perfect logo. Saturnworks. Get it? Brilliant. (Yeah, I know, I just made it "Saturn Wave" but work with me here.)

Hand-made in Davis California, they're very aesthetically awesome.

Pleasure for the Empire

If, and this is a big if, one wanted to have a band which regular beer-drinking people wanted to come out and actually see, one could do a big and pompous set of things and just do it in such a way that it would be awesome, and the regular beer-drinking people would come.

Prague Spring in maybe 1999?

• Also Sprach Zarathustra (like a Deodato version)
• Hocus Pocus (by Focus)
• Game of Thrones Theme (hard rock version)
• Peter Gunn
• Frankenstein
• One Of These Days

It's not often that I have an actual commercial idea for something. And yeah, "commercial" in this case doesn't mean "making the hits" but rather doing something which some subset of people would dig. But for me it's a big accomplishment.

Venues

Researching venues. There's Gothamist's 8 Best Music Venues (although they're mostly too big for Diatomaceous Earth). But the comments include:

• The Bell House (might be a bit big for us)
• The Stone (although this is John Zorn's completely-curated place, they don't take submissions.)
• The Cake Shop

There's also:
The Gutter (bowling alley, has music)

Here's something we figured out last night in the sans-drummer rehearsal of D. Earth.
E/D/A/C#m
E/D/A/A

Wait. Now I've forgotten it. Luckily Ethan and Lily wrote it down.

Headphones and Philip K Dick

If you've got nigh on $1500 to lay out for a pair of headphones, the Sennheiser HD800's are apparently the ones to go for.
If you only have $350 we may have a new winner in the dynamic headphone contest and those are the Focal Spirit Professionals.

Tara Platt is in a movie that was shot in that cool standing spaceship set in Laurel Canyon. The Crystal Crypt... well now I don't know if it was shot in that set in Laurel Canyon or if they built the sets themselves. They're pretty awesome sets.

Your Three Things For Today (with bonus pics)

An interview with Chance Shirley.

Pavlov and the Drooling Dogs c.1985

Ars Nova seems like a pretty cool theater. (Still looking for a venue for the Imaginary Opera.)
Cannon Found Soundstation is Jesse Cannon's recording and mastering house. He used to work for Alan Douches. They'll master an LP there for $200. 

Quick Audio Notes

Reidel makes high-end intercoms and communications systems. Groove to them.
Peter Erskine is a sound designer and such.

Christoph Stahel is the production manager of the Montreaux Jazz Festival. 21 years ago I met him in Zurich while on tour with the Wooster Group.

Wi-Fi Hi-Fi

Very obnoxiously the router at our office keeps knocking everyone off. Now you'd think that not having Internet access in our studio would vastly increase overall productivity. And. Well, okay. Yes it does that. But we also sometimes need to actually be able to upload and download stuff. Sometimes a lot of stuff.
There's wifi access devices we could get while the Internet is being wonky. Karma makes a device which supposedly works here.

Edouard BOUBAT

Even Virgin Mobile has a pay-as-you-go Internet plan.
One problem is that we can eat data for breakfast. Between uploading movies for us to look at and making backups, we can sink our way through 6GB a month with no problem. This makes anything short of "unlimited" data extraordinarily expensive for us. To which I say "bleh".
So uh. FiOs is not available at our office (in fact, I've never been anywhere where it is available. Does it really exist? I mean my office and my apartment are both across the street from telephone company Switches. You'd think... Nah. Why bother.)
We could have a separate DSL line dropped. That will end up costing another what, sixty bucks a month? Or we could do something else. I'm thinking about getting a repeater and using it to repeat the wi-fi signal from the business we're connected to. Their Internet works great.