More Auditions

Today we had more auditions for The Shriven. Egads I hate meeting 20 to 30 new people in a day. It's really excruciating for me. So I hid away and let Maduka and Brian work the auditions with Brian reading and Maduka giving adjustments and shooting the actors. We met some excellent people who could really act though, which was tres nice.

We did need to open up our pool of actors. We have the usual people we'll use into the future (we are, after all, shooting 5 movies in 2 years) but not everyone can do every movie.

I'm digging into color correction and effects finalization on Act II (of V) on Solar Vengeance.

Ruby

This is a somewhat blurry picture of Ruby, the 5 year old long-haired dachsund. She's even cuter in real life.

She's been flopping around the theater today. We're holding auditions. A theater company is holding auditions at Theatresource too. Plus, there's a show going on. And someone else is holding rehearsals in the front. You can't say it's not busy here.

Time for a Drink

I finished the first pass at color correction and effects in Act I of Solar Vengeance. That means that we have everything theoretically done picture-wise in the first 20 minutes of the movie (with the exception of three shots we haven't actually shot yet, but that's the last of the pickups we have to do with live actors as far as we know.)

I had to manually motion track a scene today. That was fairly tedious but I think it all worked out. I believe I have a bit of a break from heavy effects work for the next couple acts, but we'll see.

This still of Sarah Doudna is actually from Act II, which I get to start on tomorrow.

Snowing in New York

This is the (now) fenced-off Washington Square Park. New York is very pretty for a few minutes (maybe even a couple hours) after it snows. Soon the whole thing turns to the brown mush at the bottom of the picture...

Mr. Puddinghead

First of all, Pushkin has rabbit feet.

Here is the sleepy kitty laying down to rest on the top of the cable box.

He has a disconcerting habit of deciding that it's time to go right now and jettisoning himself from the cable box. Physicists among you will realize that oftentimes this results in the cable box itself being flung to the floor. Inefficient kinetic little kitty.

In any case, my dad invented a cable box batten. Or a cat-launch collateral damage prophylactic. In other words, he tied the cable box to the receiver below it. So far the cat hasn't managed to knock it over.

These pictures both come from my sister Jean. Here are more.

Sexy Cat

Pushkin likes to think of himself of Mr. Mysterious. Really he's a doofy little fuzzy-butt, but who are we to tell him that?

My sister Jean took this picture.

Secaucus Diet

This is a place in Secaucus. One can see it from the train before coming to the Secaucus train station. It looks abandoned. I'm sure it's very noisy but it looks very cool. I wonder what it is or who owns it...

Daryl Boling in MC

I found another review today -- again, not a good one but they spelled most of the names right.

But then, oh man, I hit the mother lode. In this Argentine blog of pictures of naked men in movies, there are screenshots of Daryl Boling in Millennium Crisis!

Yes!

My work on your earth is almost done [insert maniacal laugh]...

Stuff White People Like

This blog has made me laugh quite a bit. I discovered it through The Invisible Woman.

"The secret you may not know, is that deep down, all white people are desperately trying to make their life seem like an ad for a Sub Zero refrigerator."

"White people love staions like NPR (which is equivalent to listening to cardboard)."

My Day Was Different From Yours

Julie Perkins getting ready for the tech run of her show "Are You Happy Now? Somebody Lost an Eye".

Zainab, Maduka, and Rik up on the roof (again). I'm sure I spelled at least one of those names wrong.

Behold the Awesomeness

... that is the Internet.

No really, behold it.

Things to See

So, you can actually see Millennium Crisis, is all it's Flash-enabled glory, and in its entirety, as a streaming download on the Interwebs.
http://66stage.com/movies.php?pl=goo&url=-5307409887822463155

Man, somebody got right on ripping this DVD and putting it up there. And for some reason, it's in two parts. I wonder how many people actually sit and watch it on the web like that. I hate watching long-form stuff on the computer. Cat videos and hampsterwithagrape.com, sure, but a feature-length movie? Bleh.


Brian was in the city today, we did some more auditions, spoke to some makeup people. Here's the spaceship. We may have something close to a locked cut of Solar Vengeance. There's still things to insert (like this spaceship) and lots of force fields to rotoscope, but we're close to having picture...

Banned from Picasa

More from the Evil Google:

So, I'm banned from Picasa. No real explanation. No examples of what actually constitutes violations of their Program Policies. Because of course, there aren't any. The scary thing is that I rely on things like Google Documents and, well, Blogger, but clearly I have to find alternatives. But I guess I'd been forewarned.

"Your Picasa Web Albums account has been permanently disabled due to repeated violations of our Program Policies. Google reserves the right to suspend a Google Account from a particular service, or the entire Google Accounts system, if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated. Google also has the right to terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice. You may review the Google Terms of Service http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html. To review the Picasa Web Albums Program Policies, please visit http://picasa.google.com/web/policy.html

If you believe your account has been disabled in error, please contact picasa-support@google.com to describe what happened when your account became disabled."

Of course, that email address just has an automated 'bot which tells you to contact them through their help page.

Snowing in New York

The snow was very crystalline as it fell, making the street lights bloom.

The iPhone tends to take good pictures.