Dancers and Puppets

 

Bev Yang and a banker puppet.

John Stange and a headless ghost puppet.

Stacy Whittle and a prisoner

Danielle Davy and a guard.

John Jones and nameless and Gaylia Wagner.

John Jones and Nameless.

Raven Wilkes and Woman.

Scouting in DC

Just some places in and around the mall. 

Another shoot happening at the war memorial.

The Panasonic GH5 can still make some nice images. This is with the sort-of stock f2.8 lens too (obviously stopped down to 8 or something. 

 

Proof

I finally got "proof" of my PhD. It's an email addressed to "Doctor Andrew Bellware" from the university ratifying my award. So that's kinda fun and cool. Eventually they'll snail mail a hard copy. I don't know what they hand me at the ceremony, I'll find out.

Experimenting with just dumping Premiere for DaVinci Resolve. By that I mean I've quit my Adobe subscription. So far Resolve seems to work. It also seems a bit faster than Premiere. I dunno. It seems to work. XML exports from Adobe seem to mostly open in it just fine. I don't really understand what a "film dissolve" really is mathematically, but Resolve doesn't have one. So far that's the only thing I really miss.

Kitbash likes the Logitech 3S mouse. They also like the Dell UltraSharp U2723QE monitor.

Victory Over the Sun: Futurist Opera

This is an awesome futurist opera. The composer was Mikhail Matyushin. Márquez Without Words is kinda brill. Kanopy has it and you might be able to watch via your library card. Alien Brunch's "Creatures" is an ambient jam with a Solar 42. Here is the Distribution Playbook. Groove to “Caesar and the Mannequin” - Man Ray. Andrew Simpson is the composer.

Ligeti Cover Band

It's time to groove to Triadisches Ballett von Oskar Schlemmer - Bauhaus. Check out the costumes. The movement. Everything about this. You know it. You love it. You are it.

So I thought it would be funny to start a Ligeti cover band. But, you know, people do actually cover Ligeti. There's a suite called Musica ricercata and it is kinda awesome. 

Here is a cover of one of the pieces, by Grégoire Blanc.

Light in August

 Voxel is a theater in Baltimore owned by the QLab folks.

I'm still doing some animation tests. 

I have presumably done everything I'm supposed to do for the ol' Doctorate from University of Salford. Now I'm just waiting for the board of post-graduate research or some such. That happens in late September so I figure I'll get transcripts and such in October. Graduation is in early December but I haven't seen any dates yet. 

Don't you threaten me with a good time. 

Puppet opera is going slower than I'd like. I think I may just have o'er worked myself and need a vacation. Which is an ironic thing to say for someone who doesn't have a job. 

Seamonster.

Setup for Scene 2

Here was the setup of the puppet set for scene two. 

The Queen of Mars and the author. Picture by Irene Skricki. 

Puppet Days

A lovely couple days puppetting. Here we are setting up the puppet stage designed and built by Jarrod DiGiorgi. 

Do you want to watch almost 4 hours of the video camera feed on set? This is the camera and playback we used on the puppet stage. It weirdly seemed to have triggered some part of the algorhythmiathingamabob and had people watching it live. 

Creepy bug!

Look at some amazing things by our artists. Groove to the graphics of Heidi Herman. Check out the inspiring animations of Eric Dyer. Improve your life with looking at Ron Dee Productions. Dig Ben Stansbery. And get your Matt McG on. 

Kick line of puppet bankers. Our martini shot.

Things spoken of include Below, Hide and Creep, Etymotic Music Pro Musicians Earplugs with Active Hearing Protection.

This was my animation setup for the backgrounds.

More coming!

Ready to Puppet

Today I'm off to shoot puppets in fabulous Bath, PA. Well, the actual shooting of puppets doesn't begin until Sunday but we're off to do pre-pro and walk the course, etc.

Gah. The Brave browser just won't let me upload images in Blogger. 

In the meantime,

Here To Record makes some interesting apps including a graphics-running program. "H2R Graphics Simple graphics for your next live production." 

Kariné Poghosyan is an Armenian pianist. 

Matt McG is a puppeteer. 

Dig Mike Kessell's Batboy Comics. He's super awesome. 

That Bach cello suite? You know the one. It's this.

Dimenna Center is really one of the only places to record orchestras left in NYC.

Notes to me

Okay nerds, listen up. Oh wait, I'm writing this to myself. Um. 

My modification of a meme.

Nerd thing number one. For theater sound nerdery. Canvas 2.0. Theater show control audio software. It does some very cool things with multitrack audio etc. And it's free. And it's on PC, Mac, and Linux. 

Downsides: it only works at 48kHz, and I can't get it to work on my computer. But it is very very cool you see. And it's just in beta. But it is very cool. It just doesn't work yet for me.

Oddly, nerd thing number two is that SFX is free now. It used to be, like, a gazillion dollars. I remember having to rent it before Qlab came along. 

OBS now has a "Hybrid MP4" output format which doesn't skunk the bed when there's a crash. I haven't tried it yet.

For quick media playback in television production there is H2R Graphics. I haven't tried it yet either. 

Collective cyclics

I accidentally bought a collective when I meant to get a cyclic. I was tired of how all joysticks in movies look like PC gaming joysticks. Which, I mean, they usually are. 

Virpil collective for a Russian-style helicopter.

So I got something else.Well. No, I mean it's a joystick for a simulator. But it's a better than average one. Yet. It's for the left hand rather than the right hand. But it does have the option of Cyrillic labels rather than Latin-character labels. 

The Forecast of Lovers

Tying Viol Frets. I thought it might be amusing to try with my electric cello.

Convenient bird is convenient. 

Soviet police training films and cartoons.

Ukrainian fishermen successfully whing a fish at a Russian drone.

MilSpec 33558 Instrument Font in True Type.

I forgot to name this post

Mirror is a plugin which faffs with the reported latency to a DAW to do reverse effects. I dunno if it's actually that useful, I think most DAWs have something like a macro which bliermergates files in reverse in a way that the process is more straightforward than it used to. 

The Life Of An Agent: Secret Soviet police training films and Propaganda Cartoons

I'd like to groove you to Auburn Sounds -- I've been playing with their autotune-like plugin Grallion. Which is free, actually. Or, you can buy an upgrade it actually. But I've been using the free version as a VST2 plugin in OBS to autotune my very out-of-tune cello. As a live performance device. 

And it totally works. Probably terrible for actually learning to play cello though. I do want fret lines on this thing. 

Cello end with guitar tuners stuck where the pegs used to go.

Anywhoo it's kinda interesting that they use the Dplug open-source framework for developing. This intrigues me. 

I sent in my changes to my thesis today. We'll see if/how many are accepted. My brain is basically a puddle of mush.

Fatoush

This is an excellent Fatoush salad recipe. I made it with pita that was too big, I should have chopped the pita up more than I did. Next time...

Flamingocicle. Not a Fatoush. Although, why not? It looks like something called a fatoush. The one-legged fatoush. 

The trick is good ingredients. Pomegranate molasses and good sumac. I'm guessing some top-of-the-line cinnamon might have worked. I made it without tomatoes (because Todd doesn't like uncooked tomatoes) and without bell peppers (because I get really bad heartburn and reflux from bell peppers.) Heck, I'd make it without parsley at this point. Fried bread. That's the key.

Cleaning Up

 Cleaning up the ol' desktop of extra images. Let's start with Soul Train. 

Two sleepy baby hippos.

Sleepy little foxes.

I love helicopter cyclics. 

Magic hour bananas.

A map of my male ancestors over the last many thousands of years.

I made this conspiracy theory in some conspiracy theory generator.

Starting a cello

 I've had a bunch of setbacks in making an electric cello. So now I have won a bid on a broken, cheap electric cello.

It's a Celio electric cello. 

I do hate the traditional tuning pegs on, well, all string instruments. 

Magic hour bananas.

But I figured I'd get one.

It's missing the D fine tuner. 

So I'll start with it, maybe do some mods. Well, obviously I'll have to mod it. I'm not sure what the deal with the bridge is. We'll see when I take delivery. $80.95 with tax and shipping. 

Various music stuff

 Double harmonic scale. Double harmonic scale.

Ableton

I dunno. Marc told me that lots of Broadway use Ableton in the pit now. It's funny because that's the musician's choice when the sound department's choice is QLab.

Hipshot string-bending system. Costs more than a Squire Tele. But could be very cool.

Chance's ranking of classic Star Trek.

Stuff to know about the Behringer Neutronabout the Behringer Neutron.

Factory reset procedure: While pressing the buttons and hold down “OSC SYNC” + “PARAPHONIC” + “KEY TRK”, Power on the Neutron.
Release buttons “OSC SYNC” + “PARAPHONIC” + “KEY TRK”, The 5x LFO LEDs should display a pulsating pattern.
Pot calibration: While all 5x LFO LEDs are pulsating than turn the

OSC1 SHAPE pot fully to LEFT
OSC2 SHAPE pot fully to RIGHT
LFO SHAPE pot fully to RIGHT
LFO RATE pot fully to RIGHT
PORTA TIME pot fully to RIGHT
When this is done press VCF “MODE” + LFO “KEY SYNC” simultaneously.
Neutron will restart.

Map of my male ancestors travels over the millennia. 

DUO QUANTIZE FEATURES

STANDARD BANK

1.Bypass - Inputted voltage is outputted

2.Major - Root, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th

3.Minor - Root, 2nd, flat 3rd, 4th, 5th, flat 6th, flat 7th

4.Major Pentatonic - Root, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th

5.Minor Pentatonic - Root, flat 3rd, 4th, 5th, flat 7th

6.Blues Scale Root, flat 3rd, 4th, flat 5th, 5th, flat 7th

7.Whole Tone - Root, 2nd, 3rd, flat 5th, flat 6th, flat 7th

8.Chromatic - All 12 notes

OCTAVE BANK (OCT mode)

1.Bypass - Inputted voltage is outputted

2.Octave - Root

3.Octave and Fifth - Root, 5th

4.Octave and Flat Fifth - Root, flat 5th

5.Major Arppegio - Root, 3rd, 5th

6.Minor Arppegio - Root, flat 3rd, 5th

7.Dominant Arppegio - Root, 3rd, 5th, flat 7th

8.Chromatic

This gaming chair by Hinomi is not cheap but it has swing-out arms for playing guitar. 

Production of films

The following text is excised from my PhD thesis based on notes from my committee. It's all about the production of our films over Covid. I thought it should live somewhere, so here it is.

Imaginous Dumpiteritude

 I'll just leave these here.

This is my modification of this meme. I think this meme is hilar.

I dunno what this is or what's up with it but it was on my desktop.

I used to religiously send this to everyone on Facebook until I got too many complaints about using old material. 

My highly-skilled drawing of a moose. 

This was me in probably 1980 or possibly 1979 in 10th Grade at Metuchen High School. 

Fun brid.

This is my drawing of a "bunny tank". I don't remember why, I had some Internet reason for drawing it.

I think this is a 30 Rock joke.

This is a power plant background image Ian Hubert made. 

I made a conspiracy theory.