Amazon Review

Today's favorite review is this review of Prometheus Trap by "Midge".

"This director & camera crew clearly did not understand the impact of bright lights targeted at the cameras & how it affects the lighting levels & quality of the imagery."

I cannot tell you how funny that quote is to me. Or how many times the name "J.J.Abrams" was spoken on set.
Other than that Midge complains about the sound quality of the dialog and the framing being too close. To which I say "oof".
Now as far as I know she saw the UK version of the movie. I haven't seen the UK version. I hope and pray that it's in 16:9 letterbox and not blown up (pan&scan) and that the mix on that DVD came from the 5.1 English masters and not from a mix of the English and the M&E masters (which would bring the effective dialog level down another 6dB and that her review is just scurrilous.

The reason is that I feel like we go to some amount of trouble to get the dialog loud and to get the camera interesting and although this is but one reviewer who might have been cranky that day the reviewer might be right and I can only guess at what things may have happened after the masters left us or I actually screwed the masters up. It's hard to tell.

Dead Residents Schedule

This schedule is not written in stone. But it is penciled in stone.

October

• 12th Saturday - Day 1
• 13th Sunday - Day 2
• 14th Monday (Columbus Day - Day 3

• 26th Saturday - Day 4
• 27th Sunday - Day 5

November

• 1st Friday - Day 6
• 2nd Saturday - Day 7
• 3rd Sunday - Day 8

Supervillain Security Solutions

Our own Brianna June Tillo sells fortresses to evil super villains.

Pleasure for the Imperial

Page 85 of PADI's Adventures in Diving Manual, which is the PADI "Advanced" diver manual, has a pretty egregious typographical error.

The column heading on an "Imperial" chart is in meters. Now, through careful observation and calculation one might understand that the numbers in that column must indicate feet. But really, this is a space-shuttle crashing bad typographical error. And the book has been out since 2010. You'd think they'd hand out an errata sheet with it.
I like diving with Imperial units. There's exactly one substantial reason to like Imperial rather than Metric. That is: the safe ascent rate in SCUBA is one foot a second. Nice and easy. 1'/sec. With Metric it's like 3 meters/10 seconds or some such thing. I don't care. It's dumb and there's no way to just think it rather than looking at your dive computer. One foot per second is the speed I need to know. I prefer to work entirely in Imperial because of it.
Yeah, I wouldn't care if the pressure in the tank were in cubic litres or whatever. But depth is gonna be in feet baby. There. I said it. So be it.

Weird Celestial Depths

This is today's weirdest thing on the Internet. Rolling High: Attacks of Opportunity. I have no idea.


I need to learn celestial navigation, don't I?

My new Suunto Vyper doesn't even register my swims in my parents' 5' deep pool.

Elephant Mixing

I believe that Wednesday's Diatomaceous Earth rehearsal was the first one where the entire band of miscreants everyone was there. We had Greg, Lily on her Schecter playing through an Alembic preamp (directly into a Tascam hi-impedance input), Ethan on his Chapman Stick going through Countryman direct boxes (one of his and one of mine) into Lindell preamps (with just a hint of EQ added to them), Lou on drums, and me (Andrew) on guitar (recording chain is an SM58 going into a Neve 1272).


I'm going to go ahead and admit that the drums are almost entirely replaced. I think those are a DW kick, and DW Edge snare, and Yamaha toms. But the overheads are Ear Trumpet Edwina microphones going into Neve 1272's. I'm not sure how much better you could record them. I think they sound great.
And, for me, I'm finally able to set the cymbals appropriately for the rest of the kit. This is partly due to the kit replacement therapy but also because I've discovered the LA-2 emulator plugins. I can't get the Fairchild emulators to do anything I want. The LA-2 and the 1176 however... those I can get to glue me some drum kits, make basses sound fantastic, etc and so forth.
Note that I'm replacing all four drums in the kit and that I simultaneously think that Lou is the best at getting less-than-par drum kits to sound fantastic. Even so, we're just not getting that million-dollar sound out of the kit at the rehearsal studio without a little help from The Box. 
I'm mixing very dry for me. For most of these mixes there's no reverb on the snare and the rest of the kit is completely dry. Um. I mean except for the kick. I usually put a kiss of reverb on the kick. The overheads are limited with one LA2 (oh, I'm sorry Ethan, I mean compressed. There. Happy now? ;-) and the rest of the kit is in another group.
I'm not using any mixing board non-linear-type emulation on this mix. When I A/B the emulators of the EMI board, the SSL board, and the Neve board against the natural 2-mix buss in Samplitude I invariably choose the less "collapsed" nature of the Samplitude 2-mix buss. So much so that if someone told me it was in and of itself an emulation of the old EMI tube board I'd be all like "Yeah, this is the only way to mix."

Green Queen Day in the Pandora Machine

You know we have almost a complete cut of Android Masquerade? We just need some plates of the Philadelphia Desert exterior and to animate some combat drones.
We don't have enough dragon action in Dragon Realm. I was afraid of that. And we have too much of boring guy talking right into camera (me).
We must shoot Dead Residents next month (well, we gotta start in September). Which means I absolutely must figure out where we're shooting all of it.

Via Stu Maschwitz, a free callsheet.

Warhammer 40,000

For the longest time I've been operating under the following notion of science-fiction aesthetic paradigms. 

1960's Forbidden Planet through Star Trek -- that sort of colorful but steely look.

1970 2001 A Space Odyssey -- white and clean.  This even includes Silent Running and Dark Star.

1977 Star Wars -- white but dirty

1979 Alien -- very dirty (you can actually see the earlier all-white aesthetic on a couple sets like the interior of Mother and the cryo-bay.)

Nobody ever complains about motorcycle armor on characters. 

And then, you know, that's been that. We've been running the Alien aesthetic ever since. Or so I've been saying to myself. 

But it's not really true now is it? No. There's this Warhammer 40,000 visual aesthetic which we've been running for a while now. The Chronicles of Riddick probably has the finest execution of that look of any motion picture. 

Right now the above left look is what I'm thinking for our next movie.

And, you know, with science fiction there are always visual exceptions. I'd say that Logan's Run is more in the Forbidden Planet/Star Trek aesthetic world than in a post 2001 world.
And facing reality, The Road Warrior had an aesthetic impact which is just as big as any of those other pictures, including Star Wars. And Road Warrior sort of presages that Warhammer look, now doesn't it?

Do all Australian dogs look that feral?

UPDATE: Did I mention that none of the images here are actually from any sort of Warhammer book or game or anything? That's because there's no movie or TV show or anything from Warhammer. They're just books and games. So image credits are Dredd, Dredd, Road Warrior. Hey, can you tell which was made before digital color-correction? ;-)

Lost Mouse

So wait. What happened?
I lost the masters to the Tyrannasaurus Mouse Album.
You? Don't you always have like four copies of everything?
Except for, apparently, these.
When you say "masters"?
I mean the 2-track stereo mixes.
Are you sure you've lost them?
I know the sub-directory they should be in. They aren't there. Nor does a search of any online or offline backups reveal the folder or any of the files.
Can you go back and re-mix the album?
We could. But lots of little things were done after we'd mixed in order to make songs better. And that would all be lost.

(Remix cat remixes.)

Now just a minute. You used the word "would" there. And I see a blue link in the text above. You have a copy, don't you? 
There's the finished album on Bandcamp.
So you're a liar.
No. That version on Bandcamp was mastered by me. Not by someone competent.
So there's compression on it. Tastefully added by you.
When you say "tastefully" you mean "irretrievably".
I guess I mean "it's the best we're going to get."
Exactly. But here's the thing: for some reason "Ice Maiden" was mastered at a much lower level so I'm going to have to add some compression to it in order to get it to sound like the rest of the album.
But on Bandcamp, the files are in .flac format -- which means they're lossless. Right?
Yes. But they're only 16-bit.
That shouldn't make a difference with one pass of compression.
You are correct, Sir.
So what did you do when you realized the only copy in the world was on Bandcamp?
I changed the price to $0 and downloaded the files, that's for sure.

Things and Stuff

There are housings and hardware to turn your smartphone into a dive computer.

The iGills works with the iPhone 3 and 4. It's $329 (plus, your iPhone).
The DivePhone is an Android/iPhone app and hardware. It's more expensive at somewhere up to $500.
I just wish the Garmin 401 were more waterproof than 1 meter. I'm thinking maybe with a drybag? Of course what I really need is this full-face mask with regulator, LED lights, and radio.

What are we looking for?

Recently I had an email asking about what sort of screenplays we were looking for. Here was the answer I gave:

The answer to what we're looking for, in general, is movies which can "draft" off of big-budget science-fiction movies. The movies to draft off of have to be

A. movies which are coming out in 12-18 months, 

B. which distributors think are going to make a lot of money

C. which have mechanical rather than organic creatures (if they have creatures) [this is just because my studio is better at robots than monsters].

Unbridled Hostility

Customized Men's Heavyweight T-Shirt

I don't know why I thought this was as funny as I did (click through if you don't see the image above). Something to do with the unapologetic apostasy of the whole thing perhaps.Yes, that's a robot skull in the middle there. It could be worn by a human who hunts robots or, more chillingly, by a robot who hunts humans.
Actually, that makes me still think it funny.
But you know, one's audience for this sort of thing is rather limited. You really have to be a person who appreciates the irony of an ultra-macho T-shirt that brazenly admits that our present pantheon is incorrect.
40 free sci-fi fonts for your dining and dancing pleasure.
We have commissioned a suit of armor -- the Eclipse from Nightmare Armor Studios.

Rehearsal Recording

This rehearsal was Lou, Greg, Lily, and me. No Ethan, ergo, no Stick.
Now. I've been putting a lot of effort over the last year to record drums well. And you know what? I've given up. At first I was trying to do a 2-mic setup, then I moved to 3 thinking I was gonna be all avant and cool and everything. But then I got so many complaints -- and honestly, I couldn't get the toms to have that big sound without miking them individually. So we now have mics on the kick, snare, both toms, and two for overheads.

And I don't know if it's just been that I've been influenced by Dave and Lou but I'm not happy with the sound of the drum kit. Even now that there's a metal Ludwig snare it's still... meh.
So like I said, I've given up. We throw cheap mics on the kick, snare, and two toms. And they just go right into the Tascam's mic preamps. And from there they get freakin replaced in software.
The drum replacement plugins out there in the wild are... sweet. I mean they work great. They sound just like you were playing a better drum in the first place. Weirdly, too, when you insert one of those plugins on a track it cleans the track up 100%. I mean, you're not hearing any of the original kick or snare or whatever, the plugin is listening to the track and triggering a sample of appropriate dynamics and such. We used a DW Edge snare drum sample set on this recording. Lou has been telling me how great those snares are. And now we don't have to lay out a couple thousand dollars for one.


Now look, the overheads are recorded with a pair of beautiful large-diaphragm microphones going into Neve 1272 preamps. You can't get much better than that. And I'm free to make the overheads sound good rather than trying to balance the compression of the toms with the airiness of the cymbals.
But the drums themselves? Forget it. I'm done with drums. When they can be replaced this easily with drums that are always in tune, don't buzz, whose snares don't rattle constantly, that aren't affected by the humidity, and aren't creaking randomly then I'm all agog with the replacement.
Now bass. Bass we did something different with. The thing with bass is that we can hear the articulation nicely in the headphones but we lose the nice punch-in-the-chest of the low end of the instrument. Now back in the day when I was trying (foolishly, as it turns out) to record drums, I wanted the bass to be direct so that any processing to the bass didn't affect the drum sound. But now that doesn't matter. So I'm no longer on the bass DI crack pipe. It's nice to be clean.
We have this nice fretless Jazz bass which Ethan lent. And the rehearsal studio now has a beautiful tweed Fender Bassman reissue in a 4x10 (? I think) cabinet. So Lily plugs directly into that and it sounds... wonderful. I mean it sounds great. We throw a Rode NT1 on it (just draping it over the handle) and go right into a Neve 1272. It's a monster.
Halfway through rehearsal we decided to put the FatMan limiter on the bass' output of the computer which feeds the headphone mixer. This was met with much rejoicing.
I still have a pair of the Lindell preamps. And I'm still wondering what we want to do with Greg's guitar. Right now it's going from an SM58 into one of the Tascam's preamps. I've put it through the Neves and I've put it through the Lindells and so far the Tascam's have made me feel more, er, something. I have no idea.
Maybe I'll break out the Apogee Mini-me and use its preamps for guitar and for part of the Stick. Or something. I'll have to sleep on it.
Now note that this recording is just a rehearsal. This isn't for regular humans to listen to, just us. But if you want to hear what too much compression sounds like, listen to the last track -- the turbo weasel version. The bass is having a party through an LA2 emulator and most all the rest of the instruments are getting smacked real good with 1176 compression emulation. Those emulators sound sweet boy. And I like them better than the Fairchild, which actually doesn't do that much for a Drew.
One day I'm going to need a vastly more powerful laptop computer.

Things I Need

Include a Suunto Vyper dive computer.
And try to explain to me why this Whites Fusion Bullet isn't the coolest dry suit ever:

I especially like the big pockets on the thighs. I do not like having to deal with pockets on my BCD because I can't look down at that acute an angle with a regulator in my mouth and a dive mask on.
I need a T-shirt that has a robot skull on it and says:

TERRAN MOBILE INFANTRY

[Robot skull with wings(?) and a knife through its head(?)]

Kill 'Em All

Let the Machine God Sort It Out

Because, you know, that would be funny as all get out. Er. To like me and maybe three of my friends. In fact, if you don't get it, I don't think I can explain it to you.