Shadow Plane

Oh my. Making a "shadow only" plane so that your 3D object casts a shadow on the ground is a pain in the tuchus with Cycles in Blender.
But. It can be done.
Dig this fellow's tutorial. David Fesliyan explains how to do it. It's a bit, er, convoluted. But it makes a clean shadow pass. (Do yourself a favor and make sure "compositing" is left checked in the render panel or you will be as confused as I was for a substantial amount of time earlier today.)

Ignore the unplugged lens distortion.

You have to put the shadow plane on one layer and then do things with nodes. Subtract, "set alpha" and then "alpha over". Make sure that layer receives shadows. Then move your sun(s) around so the shadows match your original image. And make sure that the outputs are in the correct order in "alpha over".
There seem to be other ways to do shadow planes in Cycles but this method does not involve putting a garbage matte in over the ground plane. And it seems to work.
I say seems. I know not am.
I think at full resolution this render takes about two hours on my fastest machine. But it should make a right pretty composite so I'll let it go for the weekend and see what I've got.

Mixolydian Headphonia

The rule is you ain't supposed to mix on headphones. But from a practical perspective (and the fact I used to do broadcast) I mix on headphones all the time. For me, the horrid sound of most rooms is such that the room-free sound of headphones is vastly better.
I have a Blue Sky 5.1 Mediadesk speaker system. And it do sound very good. But it's not in a terribly acoustically nice room. And I don't want to bother other people and even though I have made it as quiet (and fan-free) as I can it isn't always that quiet here. So I mix on a pair of Sennheiser 600 headphones a great deal.
The Sennheisers are really quite good. And they're comfy for wearing many hours at a time.

Sonarworks makes a headphone calibration tool which patches into your 2-mix buss (or, alternatively you can patch it into a surround mix buss).

Does it work? Well, honestly it doesn't make me make different decisions regarding a mix. But it does make mixing more pleasant. So it essentially is a "better" button.
Honestly, I'm tempted to leave it turned on for when I export mixes. It's probably not a good idea, but you can see the blue line above to see what it does using the Sennheiser 600 preset (it does the inversion of what the blue curve indicates). But it makes the mids a tad more linear and un-tubby's the bass while extending the bass way down.
The software license (without them personally calibrating your actual set of headphones) is $69. Which is fairly decent. It might be worthwhile because listening through their plugin does reduce fatigue. And that's important.
So. Yeah. Worth it.

Notes

These are my notes on the present mix and edit of Crimson Widow of a Ruined God.

• I think it needs some rhythm guitar or single notes on an organ or electric piano underneath some of the guitar leads in order to thicken it up in a couple of places.
• And there needs to be some sort of melodic thing happening in the "A" section: that could be acoustic guitar, electric guitar, voice, or something else.
• Hmm... maybe cut out 16 bars at about minute 16 when the bass sound changes in order to get us into the next funky section earlier.
• And then maybe a Hammond solo in that funky section.
• The coda needs to be cut down to under a minute.

I honestly think it's one of the best things I've been involved in.
This whole album is me and Marc Schmied.

AMAP (Android Masquerade Additional Photography)

Re: additional photography on Carbon Copy (nee' Android Masquerade): honestly our distributor had some excellent ideas for making the movie better. And so we're shooting a scene at the beginning with some soldiers who get killed (which will up the stakes a bit more) and then another scene where some soldiers get killed defending the city against the robot incursion (which will make the stakes of the robot incursion more important) and then some soldiers getting killed during the "false flag" attack in the Philadelphia Desert.
Yes, we kill many soldiers.
Also, we still steal the "Philadelphia Desert" from Montserrat Mendez because stealing from Mozz is what we do.*

Some details from everyone's favorite comic-book movie, the reboot of Fantastic 4. I like these details. Plus, they look totally doable and wearable.

Just a couple pieces of armor and a LOT of straps. Although this is a drawing, this costume notion looks very doable. Plus, I totally dig the shoes.

Another angle on the Fantastic 4 costume.

We, of course, would add a balaclava and an awesome helmet to this costume.

Of course, none of this has been written yet. Well maybe it has but I haven't seen it yet. Steven J. Niles is working on the additions.
We need what will be an abandoned city and the Philadelphia Desert. What would be best is an old factory in a rock quarry. Do you have one of those? Can we shoot in it for a day?
Speaking of helmets, Brian Schiavo is coming up with a helmet design. I have so much faith in how awesome the soldiers' helmets will be I'm not even paying attention to it.

*Just for your own amusement think about where that desert is that Charlton Heston is in at the end of Planet of the Apes. 

Image Dump

This is the one I keep coming back to. A balaclava with all the techno stuff on it is an idea. A thought. Somehow.

Hip, shoulder, and elbow joints are interesting, I don't know how practicable they are though. The face is pretty cool.

White armor. Hard to keep clean. Not a fan of the feet but I do like the "44". The elbows are interesting.

Stuff what don't matter

I dig this guy and this series on digital audio. Specifically I dig how I don't have to care about recording in better than 16-bit or somewhere around 44.1 and 48kHz.

Assis dans un sous-sol brûlant

"Mastered for iTunes" is the biggest load of malarkey ever. Everyone should be using Bandcamp.com instead anyway.

Roger Waters should have done a cover of Neil Young's After the Goldrush.

Je espérais que vous aviez menti.

Tyrannosaurus Souris

So I have this idea that the next Tyrannosaurus Mouse album should be entirely in French. I haven't run that by the guys in the band. Maybe I won't and I'll just do it. As long as they never, ever, ever read this blog.

I'll tell you how that goes.
We rehearse on Wednesday. Lou wants us to have some songs we come in with rather than just jamming on things. I think we'll likely do both. I want to try to do big, languid, things which go into very dry, tight, funky sections. That's my goal.
Again, I'll tell you how that goes.


Il e'tait grilheure; les slictueux toves
Gyraient sur l'alloinde et vriblaient:
Tout flivoreux allaient les borogoves;
Les verchons fourgus bourniflaient.

«Prends garde au Jabberwock, mon fils!
A sa gueule qui mord, à ses griffes qui happent!
Gare l'oiseau Jubjube, et laisse
En paix le frumieux Bandersnatch!»

Le jeune homme, ayant pris sa vorpaline épée,
Cherchait longtemps l'ennemi manziquais...
Puis, arrivé près de l'Arbre Tépé,
Pour réfléchir un instant s'arrêtait.

Or, comme il ruminait de suffêches pensées,
Le Jabberwock, l'oeil flamboyant,
Ruginiflant par le bois touffeté,
Arrivait en barigoulant.

Une, deux! Une, deux! D'outre en outre!
Le glaive vorpalin virevolte, flac-vlan!
Il terrasse le monstre, et, brandissant sa tête,
Il s'en retourne galomphant.

«Tu as donc tué le Jabberwock!
Dans mes bras, mon fils rayonnois!
O jour frabieux! Callouh! Callock!»
Le vieux glouffait de joie.

Il e'tait grilheure; les slictueux toves
Gyraient sur l'alloinde et vriblaient:
Tout flivoreux allaient les borogoves;
Les verchons fourgus bourniflaient.

End of July

Felicia Hudson, Chester Poon, Sarah Schoofs. Everyone has at least one "o" in their last name. Most have "oo". Which sounds like they're really excited about something. Ooh! Or in Sarah's case, "Oof!"

Would you believe I never got around to syncing these scenes?
Lesee. I'm waiting on a robot and a spaceship from Ian. I've been mixing Carbon Copy but there are still three (new) scenes we need to shoot. Which means we need a rock quarry and an abandoned city.

What Will Be

I feel like the Blackmagic Ursa Mini will be the go-to camera for us. I prefer having the ability to shoot stills with the same camera we shoot motion picture with. But the thing is that we can certainly grab 4K stills off the Ursa if we have to but the global shutter is kinda a big deal.

Of course you need to spend the extra $1500 for the eyepiece. And there's a lot of fiddly pieces you need to get the signal up on a monitor. And power supplies. And of course a decent lens set. I really want an f2.0 (or so) lens which goes from about the motion-picture equivalent of a 35 to an 85mm lens (which as far as I know does not actually exist). I want a zoom because I fear changing lenses out in blowing sand (and I feel that much of my shooting will be out in blowing sand.) But unless the Panasonic GH5 comes with global shutter, I think that's just the way it's gonna be.

This is pretty much my life right now

Massive renders take lots of time and processing power. Even better is when the computer crashes overnight. Those spikes are periodic and this one composite is being very cranky.

Also, mixing. Lots of mixing.
We're going to shoot two or maybe three additional scenes for Carbon Copy.
Most of my crashing problems seemed to have gone away because I no longer put exFat drives on my machine. Just NTFS on the Mac which runs Windows.
All this time at the new office (about a year) and I have never set up my speaker system. Sheesh. I am getting the 5.1 system together. The amp/subwoofer will go on top of the booth. I probably still need a couple small microphone stands for the left and right speakers. I don't know how I'm going to mount the surrounds.

I'm Late

Which one is the robot?

I was supposed to have delivered this picture yesterday. But we just shot all this new footage with Kate Britton and now we know that the robots have actually tapped into her brain and taken over her mind. We've always known this. It just took until now to realize it.
I'm not 100% sure about this composite. It still needs some things worked out. GPU rendering crashes my computer in Blender. Switching to NTFS drives from exFat did not completely solve my random crashing problems.

Special pickup day

Backlight is the key to all things.

f3.5 maybe? 400 ISO? Fog. Lots of fog. Tomorrow is robot composite day in the Pandora Machine. In the meantime I have been hit hard by the tired stick. Maybe because I woke up at 5am? I don't know.
Kate Britton is amazing. I wish they'd had apple dumplings at the diner.

My To-Do List

I am a man who believes, deep down, that the reason his computer has been crashing is because for whatever reason it hates having exFat formatted drives attached to the USB buss. This is a bit of a bummer. I infer it is an issue with Macs which are running Windows. The reboots can happen after a few minutes or I can get more than a day between crashes. But this weekend I only had an NTFS drive plugged in and the computer lived from Friday through (so far) Monday.
So I'm making a copy of one of my data drives and I reformatted it as NTFS from exFat and now I'm copying the data back onto it.
We'll see how that goes.

Tomorrow is additional photography day for Carbon Copy. I want to do a shot of a couple embracing while looking into one another's eyes but, you know, one of them is a robot. Because that's how we do.