Bloggess

Have I ever mentioned how much I love The Bloggess? She thinks I'm a robot though.

Guitar Friday IV

The THD Flexi-50 is known as a very touch-sensitive amp. It's about $2000. The 65 Soho is about $2500 in a head configuration. Buddah Dual Stage 30 amps. Valvetech amps -- the VAC is about $1200. The Two Rock Opal amp. It's five thousand bucks.
Pierson makes a Bassman clone. It's gonna run you something like $2400.
Victoria 45410 is their Bassman clone. It's nigh on $2800.

Louis Electric makes their JTM45 in both a "Bluesbreakers" configuration and in a head. I'm not sure how much the head is, I can't find prices for it anywhere.

Still? Metropoulos GPM45. As soon as Blair buys my camera. Well sure, I'm going to check it out first at the New York Amp show in June. (I'm dreading going. I'm going to have earplugs.) Maybe there's some secret magical amp what has beautiful touch sensitivity for less money that I'll want. We'll find out!

The Various Maschwitz

Pomodoro is a... well basically it's an egg timer for your computer. It's open - source and Mac only. But it's for time management -- to keep you doing the same thing for a set amount of time. You know, so you're editing or whatever and not checking e-mail or watching a video on YouTube or (for pete's sake) blogging. You work focused-ly for 25 minutes and then take a 5-minute break. Do that three times and you get a 15-minute break. I see a lot of merit in that. Via Stu.

(Stu also links to this kind of awesome Russian ground-effect bomber.)

Oh an wait, one last Stu-related thing. Film burns, which is related to film burns ffx. Well heck, we did name the character "Doctor Maschwitz" in Day 2 after Stu so I guess he deserves three entries. Stu wrote the DV Rebels Guide.

The German company Gimei Designs has some firework videos on their blog. That's in case you need some fireworks instead of burns.

I have no idea what the 1/f fluctuation is, or how it has any relation to film editing. I tried to read the linked .pdf (which is presumably also available as html) but I had no clue what they were talking about. But I guess it's a thing that ... well it has to do with the length of the cuts and... I have no idea.

Third Day of Day 2

Today was the biggest day of Pandora Machine to date. I think we had a cast of 21 or so plus a crew of 3 (which for us is a huge crew). And we got off something on the order of 150 different shots. Most of those shots were completely different setups.

So yeah, I expect we broke 100 setups. I never thought I'd do more than a 100 setups in a day, but we did.

We shot in fabulous Gowanus, Brooklyn.

There were a lot of heroes today, but I gotta give it up to David Ian Lee. He was the fight director and he coordinated all the 16 fighting zombies. So he ended up de facto being the 1st AD. We don't usually use an AD so it was quite luxurious for me. Especially because David also storyboarded a good 3/4 of the day's shots. Heck, all I had to do was be the cameraman! ;-)

Because the day began so bright and sunny we had to hide in the shadows of buildings. And because we had so many guns we had TCD on set and, I gotta say, they were delightful.

Here's Dani Quisenberry, Nat Cassidy, Tom Rowen, David Ian Lee, and Tina Tanzer, facing off 'gainst the evil horde.

Tom Rowen lies on the ground being a whimpering pantywaist after he discovers he (Eric) can't really handle a gun.

Our entire cast and crew today. I can't thank you guys enough. Everyone was fantastic, professional and willing to put up with being very dirty and very far away from holding (read: "bathrooms"). We got to go to lunch with almost everyone (some people took the option to take off after they were wrapped to do things like go to work... whatever that is. ;-)

We had a massive fight with all these people and between David's preparation and everyone's focus we managed to get it all done in 6 hours. Yeah, that's longer than I like to go before we go to lunch and I feel a bit bad about it. But at least we wrapped the day by 5:30pm (for an 8:30am call.)
The Evil Horde:
Lauren Ferebee
Tarantino Smith
Thane Floreth
Jorden Feltner
Ryan P. J. Feltner
Micah Chartrand
Kari Geddes
Gloria Rice
Ingrid Nordstrom
Gwen Lawson
Ridley Parson
Rebecca Comtois
Christopher Frederick
Hurley Graham
Isaiah Tanenbaum
Nicholas Reinhardt



Here Nat Cassidy and Tina Tanzer see the Alpha for the first time.

Today's picture wrap in Gowanus. Like I said, TCD were really great. You'll remember these guys from our first day of shooting. Yes, that's Tina wearing a police cap and it looks tres tres supercop on her.

Go ahead, click to embiggen the pictures.

Iconic Images

When we were shooting this today I thought "YES! This is the movie we're making!"

Kari Geddes is a scary (and hungry) little girl who gets a bite on Dani Quisenberry. I see a Facebook profile picture here, don't you?

And before we released them, here's our incredibly tolerant and hard-working gang of.. 16 creepazoids. Indeed, this is Tina Tanzer amongst the Horde. I kinda dig the anime aspect of this shot.

The Voices in Her Head are the Key

So I'm high on generic Ambien but I have this whole idea worked out where our lead, Tina, hears the voices all the time. Those voices, one way or another, lead her to her decisions.

When she pulls Neil along she stops for a moment. The voices. Give her a headache. But she can also hear where they're coming from. She comes to a corner and looks around to see... The Alpha.

He looks up, surprised (how could someone have been coming and he wouldn't know about them?) He runs away from her. She follows him. He tricks her into an alley with his private goon squad.

Laura hears the goons being told and then repeating 'kill her". Boy, they don't want to do it but they have to just to get that voice, those voices, out of their heads...

This is my director breakthrough before we shoot the third day of shooting. Better than coming up with this just before, oh say, the 11th day of shooting.

The Good News Is

The weather tomorrow will be great.

The bad news is: the weather tomorrow will be great.

On a show this no-budget there is simply no choice about shooting. Well, actually on a more no-budget where you're ignoring things like liability insurance and permits you could call your friends who are in the movie and see if you could just postpone to when it's not so sunny out. But we actually have to finish this movie so we knew that even if it were snowing or raining we'd be shooting these scenes.

But that sun could make things very harsh.

Luckily we have storyboards. David Ian Lee made them up. Reading the script today I realized I wrote scene 45 thusly: "They get attacked by a goon... Jean is injured. This scene takes a couple hours to shoot. David Ian Lee with fight direct it." Now I know why he did so much work on this scene -- it's in the script! ;-)
In any case, the storyboards are great. They're going to work really well for us. The thing we're not going to be able to get is the big wide shot of the whole thing I was going to rely on to give us the "geography" of the scene. Now that I think of it we should have used another location to get big geography but... this is where we're shooting because we have TCD there and we have holding not too terribly far away. Who knows? Maybe we'll get a wide shot at the end of the day?

But we won't plan on it. Instead we'll plan on shooting in the shadows of buildings in order to avoid the harsh direct light. We're going to fake directions like crazy -- just hoping making sure the "screen direction" is right.

We have the most amazing gaffer when we shoot outdoors in the daytime. But he's very strict with his hours and when he decides he wants direct light -- he gets direct light. When he decides he wants massive diffusion -- he gets that too. And he almost never consults with production first. Who does this guy think he is, God?

Oh. Right. Nevermind.

This Dog

I just love this picture. It's from here. Have I mentioned how much I love Too Much Too Soon video filters for Final Cut recently? We're using the flash frame in Day 2. Nattress also makes some cool filters.
Wednesday will be the largest cast I've ever directed. Luckily for me, David Ian Lee is doing the hard part. He's done all the fight directing and got us our fighting zombies. He's kind of a god that way. What's awesome is that I get to take all the credit for hiss work because I'm the "director" director. And David is easy to exploit. Heck, he self exploits -- he even rewrote the dialog in the movie's coda. Hooray for me. If I could only get this dog in the movie...

GH1 Test Part II

Here's a test of the GH1. The camera man gets into a spat with the producer. Eventually a sniper takes the producer out. (I recognize this is every screenwriter's fantasy.)

• First up is the standard "FHD" mode. Shutter speed of 50.
• Then, we try it with a shutter speed of 200.
• Then, we go for a test at "HD" mode, but in the same timeline as the other footage. We put some cartoon-y 2D blood splats in just to see what it looks like. Note that we aren't putting splats behind the head like we would in the finished movie.

What I'm not seeing in this test is very much "jello cam" rolling shutter artifacts. Most of the artifacts have to do with Vimeo's compression. I think this means we're just going to shoot the action scenes in the movie straight up. Same as ever.

Shutter Tests with the GH1 from Ralph Boswell on Vimeo.

Guillaume Seignac

is my homeboy.

I just love how her face is actually flushed from being upside-down. And he knows how to paint feet. Just look at the wrinkle on her ankle. Good hands too. Who doesn't love this?

*****
I spent the weekend doing pre-production for Day 2 and reading and negotiating contracts on Clonehunter. You'd think with this glamorous lifestyle I'd actually be making some money. Let me check. Nope. Nothin' yet.


An interview with George Metropolous.
Ears Boutique is a high end retailer in NYC.
Reinhart Amps.
Barchetta amps.
Stu explains Magic Bullet Mojo. Really it's a bit of a master class in color correction. It's pretty interesting stuff and worth the 17 minutes. Check it out.
The Brownstone Diner and Pancake House in Jersey City, NJ. (Hey -- how'd that get in here.)
It's actually possible to make money with a blog at all?
Cineform has a real-time engine for FCP. I've used it. It seems to work. We throw so many dang effects on our footage that the real-timey-ness of it goes out the window pretty quickly though.
I just ordered Andrew Kramer's Designer Sound FX collection. We're going to use it all over Day 2.
And heck, while I'm at it I'll go ahead and get the Optical Flares bundle.

The latest monster

Here is the latest rendering of our bad guy in Day 2 from the fantastic Ian Hubert.

It's still untextured and there's some modelling left to do but soon it'll be set up to "open" and "close" so it'll be something spectacular when we see it. In the movie it's going to be about 50 feet in diameter. There will be more than one.

Theatresource Update

Or, "Conversations Between Drew and Redacted."

*****

Hey Drew, did you see the letter that came from the Executive Director of Theatresource this week?
Yes, I did.

It would have been nice if that was sent, oh, I'd say... about a year ago.
Yeah, but at least it was sent.

So what's the deal? It seems a bit... I dunno... obtuse in many ways.
It seems to me that the new administration brought in after the coup d'etat at Theatresource is a bit surprised at how hard it is to run a theater.

And they don't want to admit that, because it would make their coup seem... kinda silly.
That's my interpretation at this time.

So what does the letter really mean?
It comes from Jen Thatcher, the new Executive Director. In it she shares her priorities:

1. More open communication with you
You are the Tribe. You ARE the Source. I want to hear how you're feeling now, what you care about, and what you think we need to start doing and stop doing (including any ideas you have on how best to communicate with you--quarterly emails? a blurb in the weekly email to the Tribe? a blog? snail mail? Facebook?). Please email me at any time at jen@theatresource.org. Or, stop by to chat in person during my Thursday night Source shift, which I'm treating as sort of informal "office hours."

This would be a 180 turn for this administration. That is, if it really happens.
Yes, it certainly would be a change from how they've been handling things up until now. Communication was the first thing to go after the coup. The writer's forum was shunted off, there was no artistic direction to the Source anymore. Which, I suspect, is why so many of us just took off for greener pastures.

OK, so I had a question about the finances. The letter says:

2. Continuing to strengthen our finances.
Overall, the news is very good. In fact, GREAT. We have renewed our lease for 5 years and gotten our financial house in order. We have a revitalized and energized Board and a tireless General Manager (the inimitable Jenny Green).

Renewing a lease is a debit on the books, not an asset. The board certainly doesn't seem "energized". It seems pretty lackadaisical.
Our finances are not "great", indeed our cash flow projections suck. But we've already established that nobody thinks in terms of cash flow projections. Basically, we got a tax refund.

And that's why we have cash right now?

Right.

If that hadn't happened, where would we be?

Up a creek.

Didn't you once try to get Jen Thatcher to tell you what the balance sheet read?
Yes, she told me she didn't want to have a paper trail that showed that information.

And why do we seem to need to push how "tireless" our General Manager is?
Yeah, that seems odd.

Could it be because she's limited by law to only working 30 hours a week?
She needed the job to get her green card, as she's not a US Citizen, and there are covenants and limitations on her visa.

But she is a professional theater manager, with a lot of experience in the area... right? We couldn't find anyone with her qualifications in New York who could already work legally in the US... Right?
How about we just go on deeper into the letter?

3. Getting more bookings, right away.
How can it be that we have better finances, when it seems like we have so many dark nights? Here's the deal. We're behind on bookings, that's obvious. It's going to take us a little while (especially in thiseconomy) to catch up. But we're working on it (especially Jenny, whohas done some serious heavy lifting getting things booked on short notice). Longer-term, we're examining our relationships with resident companies. And we're building new ways to work with the Writers' Forum.

That's a great question: how can it be that we have better finances, when it "seems" like we have so many dark nights? It would have been nice if that question were answered.
I suspect it simply can't be answered because strictly speaking it's not really factual. We got an influx of cash from overpayment of taxes and otherwise our cash flow projections are a nightmare.

Nothing else?
Oh no, there is one other thing. One of the founders had taken out a credit card and a Staples card for Theatresource in his name many years ago. Last I'd heard the debt was somewhere north of $20K. But that balance is being paid off by a member of the Board of Directors.

Is that debt that Theatresource owes?
Yes. It was honestly a secondary priority to, say, paying back taxes and rent and utilities (and insurance, ahem), but it was Theatresource debt.

So the bottom line, which had been about $100K in the red when Lanie and Jim came in, and went down to about $50K when they were pushed out, really is approaching zero now?
Yes.

So that part is actually good.
Yep.

Because a big donation came in.
Very big.

But it's not a donation which anybody at the theater sees because it's paying off an old debt -- one that doesn't actually affect our day-t0-day operation.
Exactly. And it's true that it's bringing the part of the debt down that didn't go down when Jim and Lanie were at the theater.

But the cash flow projections?
They still suck.

From your experience in business, which is worse? High debt? Or low cash flow?
Good cash flow will pull you out of debt.

(Or having a friend pay off your credit card.)
(That too.)

But it doesn't work the other way around?
No, lousy cash flow even if you're debt free, can easily lead to more debt. In fact, it will.

Hey Drew, not to interrupt here but the last time you were talking about Theatresource I was trying to get you to tell me what the previous managers had done whenever we'd lost a booking -- what we're obviously not doing now.
Yep. You did.

And you're still not telling me?
It has to do with having management which knows a lot about New York theater, knows a lot of the players (as it were) and gets on the horn from early in the morning 'till late at night to make sure that the place is booked.

It sounds like a whole lot of work.
It is. A WHOLE lot of work. Day and night. Relentless. I'd hate having to work that hard. But Daryl and Lanie did it.

And nobody's been doing this amount of work since then?
Hmm... Let's look at the next point in the letter, shall we?

4. Getting more volunteers, right away.
If you've slipped off the schedule, we want you back. If you can't commit to a regular 4-hour weekly shift, but still want to help out, let us know and we'll match you up with a special project.

So where in hell is everybody?
Well, that's an interesting question. We have the fewest number of active volunteers I can remember.

Do you think it's all related?
Well, maybe now that "communication" is a priority again, people will start coming back? Of course, we might have to stop being openly hostile to volunteers too.

Really? I was kind of enjoying the hostility.
Yes, we will have to stop being openly hostile to them. We can remain hostile to you however.

Do you think bookings are affected by "this economy"?
No. That's not the business we're in. Producers -- people with day jobs -- rent the theater and put on shows. We didn't have this kind of loss after freakin' 9-11. So that's not what happened at all. What happened here is that the management of Theatresource wouldn't book the theater until we'd signed the lease.

Uh, is that insane?
Apparently they thought it would somehow be illegal.

Illegal? What law are they talking about?
Well, not many people here actually run businesses. So maybe they thought it was like when a landlord rents out an apartment or something. I have no idea.

But that's absurd.
Well. Yeah.

When we first opened we didn't have any more lead time than we do now and had the theater booked through summertime by now.
You remember that far back? Yeah, well that would have to do with the "hard work" we discussed earlier. A lot of people who felt like they were working for something collective, not for a specific person, working really hard.

Those were some good times too.
There was a lot of dust in the air, that's for sure.

Hey -- are you concerned? About the future?
Not really. As long as we're not going crazy spending money and there are bookings, the theater will stay alive (albeit alive on a month-to-month basis). Worst - case scenario is that MTS can't make rent and another entity comes in and takes over. Preferably that next coup would be with an actual working bureaucratic apparatus.

What effect do you think you're having?
Well, the "panic panic panic!" switch seems to have been turned off for a while. Of course, it had kind of run its course. To do it now would have a "boy who cried wolf" aspect to it and probably wouldn't lead to much fundraising. And as it was primarily designed to "prove" what a bad job Jim and Lanie were doing, it would have a... different effect now.

So what if we do actually need a big capital influx all of a sudden?
You mean like the lighting board catches on fire and takes out all the dimmers with it?

Yeah.
Then we're screwed. Those things are expensive.

How stressful. Is this why CuteOverload.com is so important?
Yup.

Did you see the sexually intriguing Greg Oliver Bodine

on Law and Order this week? I heard the man himself made out with Kathy Griffin like a hundred times yo. That's what I heard. The man is too sexy for his own good. Somebody stop him!

If I could only grow a mustache

and we could find that shirt for Lou; we'd get Ethan that hat in a heartbeat.

(You gotta admit, Ginger Baker rocks that shirt and this song.)

Basecamp seems like Google Wave basically. I haven't really used these programs. Maybe Wave would be good for when we make punchlists. We'll find out in a couple months.

From.

And this fake trailer is brilliant. They nail the form. I don't think they quite understand why the form is the way it is though. Typically the title of the picture comes from the dialog, they don't push the title into the dialog. That is, unless you're Pandora Machine. 'Cause uh, yeah we've done that.

A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever -- powered by Cracked.com

And lastly a 1903 version of Alice in Wonderland.

*****
When I say "lastly" I mean... here's a postscript:
Blackstar Amplification makes the HT-5, which is a 5-watt amp (and comes in a head configuration). The heads are in the $1500 range for the Artisan A100. Winfield Amps. Sub-$1000 heads. The Suhr Badger, you're lookin' at the $1700 amp. The Cornell Plexis seem to be in about the $2000 range for a JTM45-ish amp. And, as always, the $400 Mission "Bassman" kit.