Your Thingues For Today

Enduring Mysteries is... a sci-fi musical. Hmm... I got one of those too! ;-)
Black Swan Theory.

The order of front-title credits.

Jack-o-Orange

Things You Need To Know

Econo-Car in Jersey City. Well, perhaps this is the sort of thing which I need to know. Or at least remember.

We have all but the last act of Dragon Reign cut picture-wise. The bottleneck right now is that I apparently have to actually mix the whole thing.
Wayne and Rob Hurry are composing the music. Nathan Vegdahl is animating the dragons. And our own Jeremy Crowson is handling both the sound effects and the dialog edit which... oh man, that makes my life easier that's for sure.

But I'm Suffering

Do I have to be an overweight middle-aged white guy? Really?


Hoo boy. I can't even begin to tell you how depressed this Zack Galifianakis fake ad for New Balance made me. Especially as I looked down at my New Balance sneakers.
Ugh.

Analogue

Things one needs to know in order to understand A/D and D/A conversion.
It's 25 minutes long but very well worth your time.

Defy This

So I'm actually enjoying the new SyFy series Defiance. Honestly there are parts of it which are cringe-worthy (alien '80's techno acts for instance.) But there are a lot of it which is quite good. It's weird when you go from a really dreadful soap-opera-y scene to one which is actually kind of good and Battlestar worthy. The visual effects do the same thing. Some of them are perfect. And some of them go right out the window.

Groove To

My pal Ernest Abuba's show, Dojoji, has a matching grant from the NEA. Donate here. It's like doubling your money!

My Dad's Inbox

31
Thousand
Emails
In. His. Inbox.

Walla

Here's my new walla. I recorded the audience after a RCCNY concert. I think that none of the voices are distinct. There's English and Russian being spoken.

Duck

Via.

Like a Dream

Jim at Little Dawg amps talks about his "less is more" philosophy regarding tone stacks. Honestly, I have no idea what he's talking about. I do know that if I don't have a good guitar sound within about 20 seconds I'm just not going to get a good guitar sound out of a guitar/amp combination.

Can I tell you what a dream it is to not have to put 2" tapes up on a machine, reset the mixer and re-patch all the outboard gear, hoping you wrote the settings down correctly, and make a pathetic attempt to get the same mix up from two weeks ago but this time with a little more bass guitar? Because it's true. Those days sucked.
And now, discussions regarding the relative volume level of said bass guitar become rather simple. The project is brought up. I make a change. Render out a new version of the song. Everyone listens. Makes new notes. It's like a dream.

Software review

Holy cow. Do you want an extensive review of screenwriting software? The Huffington Post can help you there. In our shop we use Celtx. It's free and makes scripts that look like scripts. That's pretty much all we used to need it for but it will also generate (with some caveats) call sheets. It might even generate them accurately.

Oblaviated

As your duly appointed Kinge I have but one Mandate which with my Sword I shall protect; it is this Thinge:

• Science fiction films may not contain or allude to classic rock songs

Braak over at Threat Quality Press is hysterical in his take on Oblivion. More than that though, he's pretty accurate.

One thing I find odd about these sorts of movies is that there's always a place where they run out of money for visual effects. The space-pod thing? Always looks great. I mean, it looks fantastic. It's photo-real in every darn shot it's in.
But every time we drive across the Brooklyn Bridge on a motorcycle everything just breaks down visually.

Sets Masquerade

Joe Chapman building the apartment set for Android Masquerade.

This is the basic design.

Parts of the set are already built.

Unfinished end-wall with Kevin Kirner. 

Theater Festivals

Oh man, this is funny. Threat Quality Press on theater festivals:

"A company picks a theme, not compelled by a desire to explore it, but to wedge it into their season thematically(baseball!). Or maybe it’s February (love!), or there is funding or recognition from a larger producer to be acquired (Paris in the fucking 20’s, for Christ’s sake!). Which means that the foundation of the whole thing is an idea the company never even cared about in the first place.

Writers — who want their work produced, but likely don’t have an existing play about (the Irish Potato famine!) — throw something together for the deadline. Now, a generation of latchkey plays exist to take up space on the writers’ hard drives and which haven’t had the benefit of criticism or revision in the rare case where either, under different circumstances, may have been inspired.

Talented actors are given the tiresome task of filling out poorly-developed characters and masking plot holes and exposition. Half-interested directors are hardly motivated to make half-baked skits look like plays that are ready for production.

This is shaping up to be a great night at the theater!"