Whoa

The price of movie-making cameras just keep plummeting. This Sony EA-50 looks like it might make a very nice shoulder-mount camera. And crumble buttons! It's less than $4K with a lens!

Standard Machine

Today is Standards and Practices Day in the Pandora Machine. We need a standard way to give our logo to distributors and buyers and suchlike.
Here is a standard for the three kinds of logos for us to create:
two color = logoname_2c.eps
black only = logoname_1c.eps
for reversing out = logoname_reverse.eps
UPDATE: my sister also suggests a 4-color CMYK version of the logo in .eps which I think is very smart of her.

I've noticed that some places specify the size of an .eps image -- as in the size that it prints. But that's not the point of the .eps, right? The point of the .eps is that it'll print from really tiny to 9 feet tall. Right?
UPDATE: my sister, who has all the actual brains in the family, pointed out that a big-sized logo in Illustrator would be irritating to a designer trying to put it in their DVD box or whatever because the big logo would obliterate the image behind it when you import it.

Andy Langdon looking dreamy in the engine room of the Prometheus.

Standard Mouse

Welcome to Standards and Practices Day in the Tyrannosaurus Mouse.

Actually, today's issues involve putting Prague Spring music up on Bandcamp so that our friend Ed can have his "Best Of" album. This work is being done while other machines are rendering.

Ripping music from my own CD's is not quite as easy as I'd hoped. But now I'm using Exact Audio Copy. Nevermind the spammy ads on their website, it comes well recommended. And although it won't actually fix the little glitches I'm getting in the song "Real World", at least it'll tell me that Real World needs to be fixed (and since the glitches appear in different places each time I rip the song I can edit together an unglitched version.

I've been trying to figure out the best naming scheme for ripped songs. There is advice on the Internet about this:

Artist/Album/track* - tracktitle

if the album is multidisc (like Beatles white album), I like:

Artist/Album/Disc 1/track* - tracktitle

[and I replaygain the entire album (all discs) as an album so the album gain is the same for all the discs....e.g., a 3 disc grateful dead show which is a single concert

If album is compilation disc, I use:

Compilations/Album/track* - tracktitle

(with /disc 1, etc. after album for multidisc sets)
Via.

Best of Prague Spring

Ed McNamee wants me to make a Prague Spring "best of" album. It would go like this:

Retrograde

the best of

Prague Spring

1. Hold You Forever d
2. What Will Be  y
3. A Few Delicious Kisses  f
4. Dona Nobis Pacem  y
5. Real World  y
6. A Fountain of Tears  d
7. Give Me a Sign  y
8. October River  f
9. Another Wasted Afternoon  d
10. Kyrie Eleison  d
11. One Last Drink  f
12. World Without End  y

All Songs by

Andrew Bellware

y   A Handful of Quietness - 1992

d   A Garden of Kisses - 1993

f   October River - 1995

I think I have to make a Bandcamp.com account for Prague Spring and put that music up first. "Retrograde" is, of course, my name for the record as Ed had suggested "Perennials" which to me doesn't exactly sound like Prague Spring. But who am I to say what Prague Spring sounds like? Oh. Right. Exactly.

Things Which Are In My "Mind"

The Copyright Office stresses me the heck out. Time was they would just take your money and your materials and file them away in case somebody decided to subject you to a lawsuit, or vice-versa. Nowadays they harass you for anything that seems wrong on your submission. Fact is that the only reason we file with the Copyright Office is because the distributors insist on it (so that their Chain of Title is clear and clean.)
+++++
We have locked acts 2 through 5 6 of Prometheus Trap. We are very close to being locked on the rest of the movie. A little color correction and off we go.
++++
We want Pandora Machine jackets. The problem is that everybody in this shop wants a different style of jacket. I have no idea what to do.

+++
Stu has a great post on shooting "flat" for grading later. We shoot as flat as we can with the GH1 (the blacks are still kinda sunk). But the fact is that we do a whole bunch of things to un-flatten any image we shoot. We have lights smash right down the lens -- blowing it up with flare. We let other parts of the frame sink down into the depths. And, as I pointed out, the GH1 does it's own job of sinking blacks.
++
Here's an important note for me to remember. The "motion logos" at the top of our movies go like this: Halcyon, Still Night, Pandora Machine. I do wish I knew what the actual Hollywood term for a "motion logo" is.

A Day in the Life

A hundred drops in 90 days. I rolled to the bottom of Hill 623 only to find my Sergeant kicking the alien equivalent of a jeep over and over again. There were a half-dozen aliens lined up on their knees with their long hands clasped around their heads.
I ask the sarge what's wrong and he just keeps kicking the jeep over and over again while the aliens look at one another. Sarge just starts yelling in Spanish, which I can't understand.
One of the aliens looks at me and I look back. The alien says "Do you say 'he says' or 'he said'?"
I tell him that the sergeant is still yelling at the jeep, so probably "he says" is correct.
"He says he does not like the matriarch of..." The alien breaks off in confusion. "I'm not sure if he's talking about the vehicle, me, or you."
"All three of us, I'd guess."
The sergeant starts to smash the windows on the side of the jeep with the butt of his flechette rifle. The metal-laced safety glass splinters but doesn't really do anything that satisfying, which only makes him angrier with it.

I ignore him as his rant breaks into shouts "Madre madre madre!" or something like that (like I said, I don't know Spanish and he was wearing his helmet with comm off). So anyway I break out the rings we use to throw around the necks of the prisoners -- they have little transmitters on them which supposedly keep any of us from shooting at them for about 15 hours until we're off-planet. Which would be a real good trick except that even at this range the xmits aren't showing up on my grid and I'm right on freakin' top of them.
+++++
The pale green sun of this planet (X01556 — I had to look it up) made everything look like it was in a hospital. But you know, with a dirt floor and a sky instead of ceiling. I just started to wonder where my own squad was when two blue blips showed up on the HUD and it's Johnson and Russell.
"You see Ozawa or Martins?" I say to them.
Johnson, who used to be in my squad but ended up in Sarge's because they kept losing heavy weapons guys, looked at me like I was the insane one. "What the hell is Sarge...?" He just stops and doesn't know what to say.
"He's angry with the bug Jeep." I say, like it's obvious.
Russell walks over to the Sarge. I can tell he's going to open his big mouth and say something stupid.
"Sarge -- you want us to blow up this Jeep?"
The Sergeant stops yelling for a moment and stares at Russell, slack-jawed. Russell, like a buffoon, actually reaches around and grabs one of the big thermal grenades he likes to carry — like he's going to show it to the Sergeant and Sarge will say "Yeah, that's a great idea, let's do that!" Instead Sarge predictably turns back to the vehicle and starts to kick it again, and again, making big dents in the side of its ceramic armor.

Pleasure for the Empire

I figure the soundtrack-arm of the Pandora Machine should be a band called "Pleasure for the Empire". So far it is me and my cousin Jaime-Jin Lewis (who was drafted, she didn't volunteer.) And this is the remix of "Sucre"
This is music for our upcoming movie Prometheus Trap. File under "difficult listening hour."

Kitteh Post

Here's my brother Dave's cat "Sugar". She just went blind a few days ago. She's fairly old, doesn't seem to be hurtin'. Just can't see anymore.

The Most Terrible Thing Ever

Can we start talking about my first world problems?
My favorite bubble tea place is closing.
Now that doesn't mean that there's another store from the same chain that's equidistant from my office. Because there is.
But my favorite Ten Ren Tea shop on Lafayette Street is closing.
I expect frequent and sincere missives of condolences for this great tragedy which is happening to me.

Here is a picture of a bunny.

Recording Soundtracks

Jaime-Jin Lewis on violin.

Today was "bow the tailpiece day" in the Pandora Machine. We got some great tailpiece sounds, some great col legno sounds. It was a non-stop rock-out party with my lovely and talented cousin Jaime-Jin. She knocked this out of the park.
Groove to the sexy guitar amplifier behind her. Mmm.... Tyrannosaurus Mouse.

Education

So, I have a political blog which mostly exists because of one political observation that I have about the radical departure of US foreign policy toward Central and South America since President Clinton's election.
And when I became interested in the science of pedagogy I ended up posting stuff about it on my politics blog because for whatever reason "education" is a topic for a freakin' political firestorm here in the United States.
So I was going to put my pedagogical theory on my political blog but then I thought no, that's dumb. So it'll go here. Under this picture of a rabbit.

This rabbit is very interested in listening to your pedagogical theory.

This is a theory. I'm using made-up numbers.

You can teach 20% of the students pretty well with the system we have now, using about the same costs and personnel.
To get similar results from the next 20% of the students, you're going to need to double your resources.
The next 20% will take another doubling of resources. (4x)
And to get the next 20% of your students in the "general population" you're going to have to double again. And those students will not do quite as well as your top 20%. (8x).
If you go for 16 times the resources we have now we can substantially alter the academic performance of the bottom 20%.

And so sayith my theory for which I have no statistical evidence. Yet.

Moar Cats

Here's moar pictures of Five.

A closeup of Five with Ed.

V gets pettings from Todd

Moar pettings by Todd for Feivel.

Hanging With Childhood Friends

This week was about hanging with childhood friends Todd and Ed. No pictures of Todd really because, well, mostly because it was his camera.

Todd's picture of me. We're south of the Irish Hunger Memorial. It's like a chess temple. My only instruction to Todd: make me look thin.

Ed's cat "Five" (which could be "Cat 5" or "V" or "Feivel", which is what I called him.) He's sleeping in a bowl on the kitchen table. 

Five hangin' with his main bud Ed. He calls this "chillaxin". 

That Which Then Therefore

Tarantino Smith stars in Snow White Zombie (featuring live performance by Nat Cassidy and the Nines) as part of this year's Fringe Festival.
In Final Cut Pro when the sequence loops and it irritates you the "looping" checkbox is under the "View" tab. You're welcome, past self.
Clearly I need a Belstaff waxed jacket.

The S Icon Racing Jacket is probably my favorite but the Roadmaster is probably the way to go.
I usually don't like cake. But the ChocoBolo cakes are pretty good. I want one. Now.