Gratuity

Oh look, this is my 1501'st gratuitous post.

Shockingly it's also my 1501'st post.

Interesting how close those numbers are, no?

Red Tide. Obviously an inspiration for Fly By Night. I got Bill's last revision of the screenplay today. That means we'll likely press the "go" button on the picture in about 3 weeks. And it means we'll be in simultaneous production of two pictures. At least ONE of those pictures has to be done by the Cannes film market next year.

Oddly, I don't think there are enough naked tied-up women in Fly By Night. We might need to make some changes then.

And how can Bill be so opposed to fog machines when Blade Runner is all based on this look?

Also via Bill Cunningham: Royalty-free music. I always need royalty-free music.

I'm gonna try to get me some Madrone Mountain -- wish me luck.

Trash Film Orgy

Trash Film Orgy makes movies like Planet of the Vampire Women and Monster from Bikini Beach. In our world, of course, that qualifies them as art-house filmmakers.

Sometimes it's worthwhile to simply steal content from Bill Cunningham.

This airship design is from Alex Sherman for our upcoming "Fly By Night". I suspect we'll end up with two designs - one like this and one more traditionally "cigar" shaped. The big question for me is: how are we going to UV wrap it?

Sounds like fun, whatever we do.

912

Toon It is a Photoshop plugin for making images "cartooned" from Digital Anarchy. I'm wondering if this might work for Fly By Night.

Short film Aviatrix (via Bill.)

The third Save the Cat book is coming out -- Save the Cat Strikes Back. Sure, the first one is the last book on screenwriting you'll ever need, but the other two could be books you want. You never know.

Strangely, the best post 9-11 editorial is on Gawker.

Building a Bioshock Big Daddy (via Tim Schrum).

Problems problems... 2!

Working on CG models for Clonehunter:

Dude, all my Blinns turned into Phongs. Worse than that my bump map textures muliplied almost by a decimal point (actually, it looks to my eye like about a decimal point.) FBX export will do that to ya. So I went in and manually re-assigned the shaders which were Phongs back into Blinns, and set the bump mats to about .091.

Do I know what I'm talking about? Not really.

But we have a cat and a spaceship, both of which we got from Daz3d.com. We were looking at a Maya cat on Turbosquid which was $189 unrigged but we got the $30 Millennium Cat from Daz and it IS rigged! That's a big deal. Henry thought it was going to be a pain to put IK handles on the rig but it wasn't.

The one thing we haven't done yet is dealt with any compositing on the bluescreen. I'm working on this theory that somehow I know better than people who literally "wrote the book" like Stu Machwitz and I've been hazing the stage with our expensive little LaMaitre hazer even when we're shooting bluescreen. My idea is that the image we see when we key out will also be "hazed". That's what I intuit my experience has been from the past. So it's either that or I'm doing a lot of rotoscoping...

When we shoot Fly By Night, which will be a very bluescreeny movie, we're going to likely have to give up the hazer. Sniff! Bill likes him some inky blacks. I do worry about the image starting to look kinda "video" when we go without hazer (although of course we did all the exteriors on Solar Vengeance sans fog/haze), and you can soften the picture with "stockings" in post, you'll never get any kind of actual volumetric light (which for some reason on this picture we haven't been getting anyway.)

Today I gotta make runs to Metuchen and then back to Jersey City to make sure we have everything on hand to shoot on Saturday. Can you believe that it'll be day 7 and we haven't had 2" black gaff tape on set? That's just silly. I gotta pick some up on Friday.

Empire Zeppelins

In and amongst other things I'm doing is collecting some images for 0903 Fly By Night. I really should be posting them in our aesthetic "bible" but instead I'm posting them right here.