Revenue Stream

It may have already happened.

I've had a healthy skeptical "wait and see" attitude about making money doing "media" on the webernets of which Bill Cunningham is a big proponent. I keep reading and seeing stuff like "Dr. Horrible" and thinking to myself "But has he really made back his investment?" (probably not.)

Well, Bill offers this evidence from the venerable New York Times. What he's been predicting all this while may be what's going to finally come down.

“hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month.”

Now does that mean they're grossing $48,000 or more a year? If so, your organization will have to be pretty small. One guy purports to $10K to $20K a month. If you can gross $125K or more you can have a full-time office. You will be making minimum wage yourself (if you're lucky), and there will be others who make more than you who work for you but that's life running a company.

The way we work is to increase quality by working with a small number of multi-"threats". Actor/Editor/Writer/Gaffer/Director (like Maduka), or Actor/Editor/sound recordist/producer (like Blair), Editor/Writer/Producer/AD/2ndAD/Script Supervisor (like Laura), or Everything/everything else (like Mitchell).

That's the only way we can afford to make these movies. Geez, with Google AdSense-type Partner Program one might be able to make a living. We'd have to serialize the kinds of scripts we make and we'd have a huge advantage over TV in that we aren't married to exact act lengths.

Alien Uprising would make a good sequel which could work that way. I'm scared to experiment, of course, but depending on our North American sales, we might have no choice! ;-)

And as long as we make a mockbuster once in a while, we'll have enough diversity. The problem with the short form of the web is it leads one to doing comedy, which I don't want to do. So we should do something Cowboy Bebop-ish...

C'mon kids, let's do a vampire series in modern-day New York. The Federal V-Marshals are in charge of keeping the vampire population in line... Who's gonna write that? Read Saving the Cat and then we'll start making that series... We'll shoot in-between our features.

Various notes... And

Henry Steady has finished the first picture edit of Alien Uprising. We're working on notes and the dialog, sound effects, and music edit. Then the sound mix and a bunch of detailed CG work. But we have a strong first edit. Hooray!

**************

The best unproduced screenplays of 2008.

Apparently, some people still do camera reports. I can't imagine us ever referring to a camera report. That's why we don't use them. Heck, the lab won't even use them.

We don't do sound reports either (for the same reason). One day we might refer to a script supervisor's book, but we'd have to afford a script supervisor. In any case, I love this part: "Gray card and color chart should ALWAYS lead or at minimum tail the roll." Really? Just to color - match what you saw on set? Why not just make it look good instead? Don't get me started on the uselessness of recording tones on digital audio formats, yet people still do it.

Here's all you need to know about hardware audio loopers.

From Jen Thomas, the funniest site on the Internets. It's the perfect antidote to Cute Overload. I give you Fuck You Penguin.

AT&T's Text to Speech.

Changing of the Strings

I'm changing. Ernie Ball Super Slinky 9 to 42. Good enough for Jimmy Page, good enough for me. Actually, I know I lose a lot of street cred for using such lightweight strings, but I do like them better than the heavier 10s (or dear Lord, 11's). I realize there's something interesting in heavier low strings. I might be talked into the 9 to 46 hybrid wound strings. I wonder how that will torque the neck?

With the thinner guage strings I can get a Fender-like twang on the low E if I want it by plucking close to the bridge. Or not, if I pluck closer to the neck. So far.

When I was young and ignorant I actually used these HUGE flatwound strings on my half hollowbody Hagstrom. With an MXR distortion pedal I bought from a friend. And a Fender Twin Reverb (non-CBS) that I still have but almost never use. That was just a whole bunch of things interfering with how I actually wanted my guitar to sound. If I wanted to play jazz (except for the MXR) I would have been fine. But I always had trouble with it sounding like yuk. And we used to play out a lot. Two years we did nearly a hundred gigs as Pavlov and the Drooling Dogs.

I'm much better now. Marshall is my friend.

Well, similar tube amps and emulators are my friend(s).

Automated voices:

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/ttx/demo.php

Job Offer

Yep, from Craig's list:

-------------------------------------------------
Reply to: job-952176298@craigslist.org ^[?]
Date: 2008-12-09, 10:59PM PST

I Can Has Cheezburger?/FAIL Blog is seeking someone to look at cute and funny videos. ALL. DAY. LONG.

This person should be skilled at using YouTube, Flickr videos, or other social video platforms as be proficient with video editing tools. No advanced degree in videography or film school is needed. Just someone who loves to watch and edit videos -- especially funny or cute ones. This person will be screening and editing user-submitted videos.

REQUIREMENTS:
- Email us a link to a video you have edited. Only basic editing skills are needed (trim, intro, outro, text overlays).
- Send us your resume.

• Location: Lower Queen Anne
• Compensation: 6 month contract position. $8.75 an hour. Up to 40 hours per week.
• This is a contract job.
• OK to highlight this job opening for persons with disabilities
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

PostingID: 952176298

Danger

We've crossed the threshold of 25,000 visitors to this blog. I better make it a lot more interesting.

Nonetheless:

Teamviewer is a remote desktop "system". And it's free for non-commercial personal use. In other words, when you have to be the tech support for your parents...

Easy target

Drummers are so easy to make fun of. "What do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians? A drummer!" Get it? Ha HAA!

The irony is that the drummer in a band has to be better than anyone else in the band has to be. If you have a suckky drummer, the entire band sounds like poop. But if you're a sloppy guitar player you can join bands like Yes or Led Zeppelin. A sloppy drummer? Nope, not allowed.* Sloppyness in a guitar player is style, man. And it works if you have a rhythm section which is tight. In fact, the tight rhythm section makes you seem like you're so much better a guitar player.

That's the reason, I think, that drum machines became so popular. They couldn't do very interesting work, but they stayed in-time (which is one of the hardest things a musician can do.) Plus too, finding a drummer who's stable mentally as well as tempo-wise is a big trick. Believe me, I've been in a band which went through 11 drummers in 2 years. The really good drummers just go on to paying gigs because they're so valuable.** Drum machines work cheap and they don't have drug problems, or "I slept late because I stayed up all night trying to teach my cat to bark" problems.

I got on this subject when reading the manual to the Peavey Vypyr amplifiers. I uploaded the manual to Box.net because it is (for some reason) such a pain in the butt to download from Peavey.com. The first instruction in the manual is to point out the input jack. The description of the input jack is "If you don't know what this is then please put the amp back in the box and get some drumsticks."


*You can only play with Emerson Lake and Palmer.
**The first drummer I ever played with, Earl Harvin, went on to play for Seal, Pet Shop Boys, Air, and MC 900 Foot Jesus. Crimean vole! Earl not only has a Wikipedia entry, but an interview in Tamadrum.com.jp. He doesn't mention that he played in the band Nocturne with Scott Hirshon and me while in high school. ;-)

My First Date!

I did it! I went out on my first date in Grand Theft Auto IV!

Yes!

I am!



...a loser.

(At least I didn't smash up her car when we went bowling. I wonder if the gameplay would be different if I'd won at bowling...)


pic: Rebecca Henderson as Michelle in Grand Theft Auto IV.

Location

This is the storage area in my parents new place. Don't get any big ideas. Yes, we have exposure. No, we can't do nudity, big scenes, or gunfire. Just one or two people late at night, quick in and out.

I know that Mozz is going to say "OK, in that storage facility at your parents place? How about this? Helen comes out naked, and then she's attacked by a platoon of androids. She shoots them all down, hacking them in half, there's blood everywhere..."

Tuesday Already?

A cheap Stratocaster style guitar, the Xaviere.

An Agile of similar specs.

I may have already posted this picture.

Who knew that Chuck E. Cheese has more brawls than a biker bar?

You need more gossip about Madonna.

There was a homes tour which included... the house I grew up in? In my life it was always much messier than this.

99 Apple Schnapps. 99 apples. 99 proof. Does not taste good straight. Mixed with apple cider, has the requisite effect.

Grain of Salt

1. I'm frustrated with GTA IV on the PC. I do actually have two machines which can play the game, but apparently only just barely. Incidentally, the ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro is adequate (although, seemingly, marginally) to run the game. It took me 30 minutes to figure out how to open a car door. Now I can't figure out how to put down my cell phone. I bet all that is much easier on an XBox.

Also: I'm a much better driver in real life than I am in GTA IV. As a rule, in real life I do not run over people every other block and furthermore I tend to drive in the street, not the sidewalk.

2. I tend to take this kind of thing with a grain of salt. Oh so you mixed your television series in Soundtrack Pro, did you? Yeah, well what did you monitor on?

They always make it seem like the software was the important part of the process and that gee whiz, if you have the same software you can do it too! Well you can't. You're mixing for Broadcast, son. You've got much bigger issues than what software you allegedly used.

You had to have a real mix engineer working on it. It sure as hell ain't gonna be some random picture editor or a producer. It has to be someone who actually knows what they're doing and has done it before. Why? Well, you gotta deliver multiple masters -- stereo NTSC, stereo PAL, 5.1 in both formats, 5.1 full English mix, 5.1 M&E, stereo M&E in both NTSC and PAL framerates. And archiving masters -- 5.1 Music only, 5.1 Effects only, blah blah blah. But most important, you gotta be able to read and comprehend what the idiot video engineers wrote as the spec for audio. And that's going to be something wack like "no levels shall be above a peak of -12dBFS and dialog shall have an average level of -20dBFS" or some other nonsense.*

Am I really supposed to infer that your dialog editor, your foley editor, your music editor, your ADR mixer, and your mixing engineer came into your noisy edit suite with fans and cpu's everywhere, untreated acoustics, mysterious level control, and mixed on your crappity desktop speakers (in Soundtrack Pro)? C'mon.

The reason stuff tends to get mixed on higher-end systems isn't because the computer software is so important -- the software is hardly the most expensive part of the room. (The physical room and the monitoring are typically vastly more money. I think you'd be hard pressed to spend $20K on a ProTools system. You can blow a quarter of a million on the construction of a decent mixing room, foley suite, and ADR suite, without any trouble at all.) And then you've got your mixer (the person, not the "desk"), and the dialog editor, foley, etc. etc. Once you're done with all that, you may as well use whatever software annoys the mixing engineer and/or the editors the least.

3. I'm just grumpy because it took me 30 minutes to figure out that "F" was the "open car door" command in GTA IV on the PC. I hit six pedestrians, killing one, while fleeing the Albanians...


*You'll be lucky if the specs make that much sense. "Average level" indeed...

Acting

The beautiful and talented Angela Funk sent me this. It's all you really need to know about acting and the acting process. Sir Ian:

Consequences

My sister blames me for eating the applesauce. But it was really good applesauce. She washed her dog in the shower and left the shower head on the floor so that later when I reached in to turn it on, the water sprayed all over me (still in my clothes) and onto the ceiling.

There was a lot of water on the ceiling.

I say we're even, if not actually tilted in the balance to her.

I just know she's going to blame me for all the mysteriously missing cookies she doesn't know about yet.

An anonymous commenter pointed out this Amiga site where you can buy refurbished Amiga 1200's.

Taking mom to Whole Foods.

You are low on ninja kittens.

Suitable Exuberance

So I have an NVIDIA GEForce 6800 video card on my computer at my studio. Is that enough to run GTA IV? I know that the NVIDIA 7900 is the "minimum" card to run the game, but is that really more card than my 6800? What I don't get is that some video cards are like $1000 and some are $100. Is an older $1K card better or worse than a new $100 card? How on earth can I tell?

Otherwise, I have to run GTA IV on our main edit machine which runs OS X and Windows XP. Which means (I think) that if I ever play the game it can only be in the early morning.

I'm not at my studio today. So I'm over-blogging.

I tried to log on remotely to my machine in my studio where I think I'm going to put the game. Feh! I forgot the user name for that machine and then logmein.com blocked my IP address temporarily because I made too many attempts to log on. So I logged in to my other machine at the studio and then used logmein to log into the machine adjacent to it. It's pretty stupid, but it allows me to remotely download GTA IV.

We'll see how that goes.

Sometimes I end up with too many pictures in my "temp image" folder and nowhere to put them. So I'm putting them here.

It turns out that although you can dismantle something, you can't mantle it. Which is too bad. That makes me sad I will melt with ruth.

O Rly

How to stop iPhone interference with your computer's speakers. I have a terrible problem with EM interference in my studio. The solution involves aluminum foil. Coincidentally, it's the same solution to our problem with extraterrestrials.

This is your guide to the GTA IV error codes for the PC version of the game. It's in .doc format. You'll need it if it is, say, two o'clock in the morning and you're trying to get GTA IV to work on your dad's machine. Don't you have what was just a few years ago considered a state-of-the-art gaming machine in New York? Why are you trying to get this machine in Jersey to work? Oh and say hello to GTA IV Fatal Error: DD3D50 for me.

So my dad has the ATI Radeon X1250 video card. My other Gateway has an X1550. The "minimum requirement" for GTA IV is the Radeon 256MB X1950.

Is it simply that I need a card which can run DirectX 9.0c or better? Who knows? There seem to be at least two lines of video cards made by nVidia and ATI, and each line does not neccesarily get "better" when the model number is higher. Aargh.

Here you can see an incredibly helpful comparison of ATI video cards. I'm sure it is helpful to an engineer somewhere. Not to me so much. Makes me want to get an XBox and get it over with.

If you aren't feeling creeped out enough today, the Dyatlov Pass Incident.

And yeah, I suspended Parliment. What about it? Keep your trap shut or I'll shut down Funkadelic too.