End of July

Felicia Hudson, Chester Poon, Sarah Schoofs. Everyone has at least one "o" in their last name. Most have "oo". Which sounds like they're really excited about something. Ooh! Or in Sarah's case, "Oof!"

Would you believe I never got around to syncing these scenes?
Lesee. I'm waiting on a robot and a spaceship from Ian. I've been mixing Carbon Copy but there are still three (new) scenes we need to shoot. Which means we need a rock quarry and an abandoned city.

What Will Be

I feel like the Blackmagic Ursa Mini will be the go-to camera for us. I prefer having the ability to shoot stills with the same camera we shoot motion picture with. But the thing is that we can certainly grab 4K stills off the Ursa if we have to but the global shutter is kinda a big deal.

Of course you need to spend the extra $1500 for the eyepiece. And there's a lot of fiddly pieces you need to get the signal up on a monitor. And power supplies. And of course a decent lens set. I really want an f2.0 (or so) lens which goes from about the motion-picture equivalent of a 35 to an 85mm lens (which as far as I know does not actually exist). I want a zoom because I fear changing lenses out in blowing sand (and I feel that much of my shooting will be out in blowing sand.) But unless the Panasonic GH5 comes with global shutter, I think that's just the way it's gonna be.

This is pretty much my life right now

Massive renders take lots of time and processing power. Even better is when the computer crashes overnight. Those spikes are periodic and this one composite is being very cranky.

Also, mixing. Lots of mixing.
We're going to shoot two or maybe three additional scenes for Carbon Copy.
Most of my crashing problems seemed to have gone away because I no longer put exFat drives on my machine. Just NTFS on the Mac which runs Windows.
All this time at the new office (about a year) and I have never set up my speaker system. Sheesh. I am getting the 5.1 system together. The amp/subwoofer will go on top of the booth. I probably still need a couple small microphone stands for the left and right speakers. I don't know how I'm going to mount the surrounds.

I'm Late

Which one is the robot?

I was supposed to have delivered this picture yesterday. But we just shot all this new footage with Kate Britton and now we know that the robots have actually tapped into her brain and taken over her mind. We've always known this. It just took until now to realize it.
I'm not 100% sure about this composite. It still needs some things worked out. GPU rendering crashes my computer in Blender. Switching to NTFS drives from exFat did not completely solve my random crashing problems.

Special pickup day

Backlight is the key to all things.

f3.5 maybe? 400 ISO? Fog. Lots of fog. Tomorrow is robot composite day in the Pandora Machine. In the meantime I have been hit hard by the tired stick. Maybe because I woke up at 5am? I don't know.
Kate Britton is amazing. I wish they'd had apple dumplings at the diner.

My To-Do List

I am a man who believes, deep down, that the reason his computer has been crashing is because for whatever reason it hates having exFat formatted drives attached to the USB buss. This is a bit of a bummer. I infer it is an issue with Macs which are running Windows. The reboots can happen after a few minutes or I can get more than a day between crashes. But this weekend I only had an NTFS drive plugged in and the computer lived from Friday through (so far) Monday.
So I'm making a copy of one of my data drives and I reformatted it as NTFS from exFat and now I'm copying the data back onto it.
We'll see how that goes.

Tomorrow is additional photography day for Carbon Copy. I want to do a shot of a couple embracing while looking into one another's eyes but, you know, one of them is a robot. Because that's how we do.

Gender in Theater Design

These numbers for the gender parity of designers in theater seem pretty accurate to me, meaning that in my experience this is about the disparity. 

Sound is, and has been for quite some time, the freakin' worst.

Real Numbers

So here is an analysis of the economics of an indy movie budgeted at a million pounds.

These numbers look real to me. And note that relatively speaking this is a freaking success story. The short answer is that it cost $1.3 million and of that it lost $700K.

Puppets and Something

I've totally forgotten what this sign says.

I'm supposed to be done with this movie in exactly one week. I'm not really confident I'm going to achieve that end. But I'm well on my way.
Honestly, we've got a day of additional photography to do. And we can't do that until a day before the whole picture is due. So yeah. We're not going to quite make it.
Otherwise I'm mixing. Mixing mixing mixing.

In the Money

Tyrannosaurus Mouse is making money hand-over-fist. Or paw-over-claw. Or something.
Okay, so I get ten bucks. But I think CD Baby only cost $35, so this is a substantial return.
(Notice that $5.80 of the $9.46 is coming from iTunes UK.  I'm gonna guess that's a single sale of the entire T-Mouse album.)

The following is from an email CD Baby sent me today:

On 06.28.2015 CD Baby sent you a Paypal payment of $9.46. It was CD Baby payment #VPV02742566.

NOTE: It takes 5 days to transfer funds from our bank to our PayPal account to pay you. PayPal will email you when it arrives.

The Paypal deposit was to pay you:
$0.02 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Beats Music
$0.06 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through MediaNet
$0.04 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Google Music Store
$0.01 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through JB Hi-Fi
$0.01 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through JB Hi-Fi
$0.64 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Amazon MP3
$0.02 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through MediaNet
$0.02 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through MediaNet
$0.01 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Deezer
$0.64 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Apple iTunes
$5.80 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through iTunes-UK
$0.01 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Spotify
$0.06 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Spotify
$0.11 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Spotify
$1.91 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Amazon MP3
$0.02 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through MediaNet
$0.06 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Google Music Store
$0.25 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Spotify
$1.27 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Apple iTunes
NOTE: A $1.50 Payment Fee was deducted from this payment.

Image Dump

There. I just needed to put that somewhere.

The Future

Every once in a while I look at a new piece of audio gear and think about how freaking far we've come. This Soundcraft UI-10 is a pretty amazing little box. A 16x4 mixer with complete digital control of every dang thing for less than $550. It only records two channels but for a regular rock band gigging situation it really gives you everything between the mic cables and the power amps for the PA.

Score!

I'm about 1/3 of the way through the mix on Carbon Copy. Well, maybe more like 1/4 the way. There are a whole lot of little details to be dealt with.

This is, however, a relatively easy scene with only two characters so the extra 4 tracks were deleted in the picture edit and never got dragged over to the audio edit in Samplitude.

Since we moved to recording 6-tracks of audio for all dialog, it's a bit more of a pain in the tuchus to deal with big dialog scenes. At the same time we're more likely to have good dialog in those scenes.
I cannot tell if I'm doing the right thing with music.
In my mind the whole thing, meaning the whole movie, is in the mind of the lead character. So what is the soundtrack of her mind? I have no idea. Well, I mean I have an idea. Is it too much? I really don't know.
This is one of those thing where, as the director, I really should have a clue. I'm going for an electronic kind of sound with pulses and grooves mostly. I really dug the James Newton Howard score to The Bourne Legacy. So I'm trying to cop some of those feels (uh, phrasing Drew?) in the Carbon Copy score.