New Job

My new computer, Artemis, is vastly quieter now. I put in this Noctua cooler. So far the CPU hovers around or under 40 degrees Centigrade.

I'd pay $50/month for Adobe Creative Cloud. Heck, I'd pay $50/month for all of the Waves plugins. I mean, I wish that each one were half that price. But I'm a fan of non-big capital expenditures. Yeah. $25/month. That's what the price should be. I make up the prices. So I know.

Apparently my job requirements have changed drastically. Up until Day 2, it was "Get the visual effects looking good." Now it's "make the movie sound like a million dollars."
And that is, you know, a little bit embarrassing to me because supposedly I actually know something about sound.
What I'd like to think is that we've finally stepped up our movies to the realm where the buyers are used to dealing with multi-million-dollar pictures and expect everything about our movies to be the same.

Ensemble Playing

You know, it wouldn't take that long to become technically as good a drummer as John Bonham was. The key word there is "technically".

Sure, he could do some fancy double-kick triplets, but if you practiced steadily for a few years you could indeed pull it off.
What would set you (me) apart is getting the drums to actually sound that good. And to think of the parts in the first place.
Really the same thing is true with most any instrument.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about.
Many players get so up in their own world that they don't get good at playing with others. And you know, blending and making a "sound" -- that's an amazing thing. And it takes practice. You know, practicing with others.
Which brings me to Tyrannosaurus Mouse. We ain't been practicing near as much as we should. You know. With each other.

What the What?

At a deeply fundamental level I have no idea what Ian Hubert is doing. But I'm utterly fascinated by it. It's pretty brilliant.

Space Helmets

Anthony Jones painted the helmet.

 The color is even more interesting than I thought it would be.

 The visors retain a stunning amount of visibility. So much so that I've thought that maybe we won't have to put a light inside to light the faces.

 But we will light from the inside because most of the light we'll see will be coming off of the actors anyway.

Plus, lighting from within will reduce our problems with reflections.
These are the most awesome space helmets ever.

Analog Cat

OK, so I was going to talk about virtual synthesizers and sequencers. Because they're awfully good. I'm digging this TubeOhm sequencer and synth.

But I had to stop and show you this video of analog synthesizers and a Siamese cat. (Of course I do.)



Bandcamp has a Twitter feed of "staff picks".

You Are Low On Cats

And, by extension, so is the whole of the Internet.
I'm here to help.
These are my sister's cats.

Nikki.

Pippin.

Sambuko.

Skittles.

Sambuko is a particularly affectionate cat. He wants to sleep by your head. My sister found him in her wood pile.

Bury the Lede

I'm not really one to second - guess the big studios in Hollywood. That's not true of the New York Times. I mean that both ways -- The Times will second-guess Hollywood and I'll second-guess the Times.

There's this article on John Carter of Mars and why it didn't do very well. And mostly the article is full of hoo-hah like this:

Mr. Stanton received a green light to proceed on “John Carter” in 2009 by Richard W. Cook, then Disney’s studio chairman. There were red flags from the beginning.

Mr. Stanton had never directed a live-action movie before. He wanted to cast no-name actors. And the screenplay, based on a story by Edgar Rice Burroughs that was serialized in 1912 and later published in book form as “A Princess of Mars,” was a bewildering mash-up, starting during the Civil War and moving to the Old West before leaping to a planet called Barsoom (Mars), home to tusked, four-armed creatures called Tharks.


"Never directed live action"? So what? That's what your 1st AD is for. "Casting no-name actors"? Been done on a whole bunch of huge movies. "Bewildering mash-up"? Oh come on, not any more than any of the movies already based on John Carter books which includes such lackluster performers as Star Wars and Avatar.

At the end of the article is this:

Mr. Stanton usually got his way. One area in which he exerted his influence was marketing, where he frequently rejected ideas from Ms. Carney and her team, according to people who worked on the film.

Ooh. Wait. Really?
That reminds me that William Martell pointed out this fan-made trailer that was better than what Disney was putting out for the movie.*

Oh my. Oh my indeed.
I am very cautious to second-guess my distributors. Marketing is a very specific and specialized skill. And every movie we make I learn a bit more about it. But I hope to always be working with marketing people who are better than me.
Every single trailer that we've had made for us is better than what I could have done. I can declare that as absolute fact.

So, uh, where was I? Oh, right, the Times buried the lede on that story. It shoulda been "Director thinks he knows more than studio's marketers about how to market a picture. Studio lets him get away with it."


Fake Science.

Unicorn Success Club T-shirts.

*I cannot link to where Bill said that. I'm just recalling that he put it.. in a Facebook post?

Avant Weird

This is one of the most fundamentally strange things I've ever seen. I think that at the point when you see the stagehand set the electric cable my mind was officially blown. I'm not even that sure I get the joke. Liza Minelli Tries To Turn Off A Lamp.
Rather than being a straight-up piece of sketch comedy this thing is just avant-weird. Which, of course, makes me approve of it.

Avid or Premiere

Our sales rep uses Los Angeles Duplication and Broadcasting over there in Burbank California.
George Lucas remembers Ralph McQuarrie. (Via Chance.)
+++++

Not long from now comes the time when we have to move off of Final Cut Pro. We've got somewhere between 1 and 3 movies that we'll stay with FCP. But eventually we'll have to move to a new editor.
Now maybe, just maybe, Apple will decide to continue the Final Cut non-X series.
But I ain't banking on it.
I'll tell ya -- I'm very prejudiced toward Premiere. I've cut two features on Premiere. And the learning curve between Premiere and Final Cut Pro is virtually nothing.
Last time I used Premiere the biggest issue was that the editor brought hundreds of music files into the bin and Premiere wants to render out all the waveform displays for all those files. Normally (with Final Cut) bringing in hundreds of files into a bin wouldn't matter. FCP would just ignore those files until told otherwise. But in Premiere it made the whole project very data heavy which was a major pain for us.
There are a whole bunch of people who have moved over to Avid. I don't know if that's really the right direction for us. Especially because you can rent Premiere for a few months if you need to.
We won't make a decision for at least 6 months though.

Theatresource Doesn't Even Bother

So wait, you're still ticked off about Theatresource?
Me?
Most people go through a number of stages -- you know, anger, bargaining, etc., until they finally reach "acceptance"?
Do you have any idea what those destructive idiots on the Board have done?
Well, yeah, they closed Theatresource and are operating "virtually".
They're not even bothering to do that.

How do you mean?
You know that newsletter that used to come out every week?
The one that had audition notices, job notices, upcoming shows, and rooms for rent? The one that was a key part of our community keeping people informed even when they were away from the space?
There have been maybe two of those since the Source closed.
Well at least it's still a valuable resource for the theater community.
They listed a show.
Hmm... I guess you could just do that on Facebook.
Yep. Theatresource. Now something you can just do on Facebook.

Lighting yourself

The direction we're going in here with Dolf Veenvliet and the Blender model of the Venom is to have the model lit entirely with its own lights. Which grooves me to no end.
I have found out things about paint pens. They're nice and they do totally work on plastic. BUT. It's difficult to get a nice coat of pain on something because the acrylic paint dries sort of tacky (even overnight) and the paint pen lifts up the paint as you try to do a second coat, resulting in no more paint being on the surface.
So it's all about brushes from here on out.
Which is too bad because I just love the lack of cleanup with pens and how much easier they are to use than brushes. That's just how things are.
We're going to put our models up as Creative Commons models. I'm a fan of the idea of sharing these great models with the Blender community.
With all of my years of filmmaking I'm missing four things. Here is the comprehensive list:

• A pair of black wingtip shoes. I wore them on Apostasy. I have zero idea where they are now.
• A pair of black "jungle" Army boots. Again, no clue.
• A VDB boom pole. I musta lent that to somebody. Or something. I can't find it anywhere.
• An 8mm Beretta blank-only semiautomatic. I... can't fathom where that thing is. 

I suspect that the last two things were either lent to someone or got misplaced during the move of our offices. So maybe they'll just turn up? Who knows?
I do know this. My hamantashen level is very very low right now. Like dangerously low. And it's after sundown on a Friday so there's no way for me to get any until Sunday. Sigh.

Gimme

Again, Gawker commenters are the best thing on the Internet.

No, I don't even know what this animal is. He's thinking very hard though. He just can't remember about what exactly.*

The government reads what we write in duplicate, first with their wall-penetrating satellite millimeter wave radar, and also through the chips in our brains. The NSA processes all the information and turns it over to the aliens, who are compiling market research data because they're in charge of the WTO.

It's time to complain about the Mac operating system.
Why aren't the "open file" dialogs inside programs able to do anything the Finder can do? That's a huge advantage to the Windows OS. I frequently want to be able to cut and paste and delete stuff without having to go over to Finder/Windows Explorer -- when I go to save something and I want to move stuff around, I can just do it all there. In AfterEffects it really helps to be able to delete the file you want to render to instead of just trying to overwrite it (especially when that same file is open in Final Cut).
And don't get me started about how Finder won't cut-and-paste from another drive without you remembering some arcane command. I actually bought a program called "Move Addict" for the Mac to let me do that. Sheesh.
Also, and most dangerously for your data, in OSX's Finder when you copy a folder to another folder it won't just merge the contents. Instead it wipes out the previous contents and replaces them with the new contents -- even if the file names don't match. So good luck adding data to a complex folder structure when you don't know exactly what the new data is.
Now here's something that irks me with Windows Explorer that Finder does do right -- we should be able to search inside an "open" dialog box. When I'm working in Samplitude I want to be able to search for sound effects when I go to import a sound file. I don't know the names of all the files -- I just want to type "explosion" and see all my sound effects with that in the name.

So make all these changes now. And gimme.

*He's thinking about how he'd love it if thumbnails were available in different sizes in Finder.

Yeah yeah yeah

It's a trio of white dudes from Invisible Children rockin some guns like they're gonna to in and get Charlie Kony out of the jungle.
But that's not what's important about this picture. What's important is the red color of the magazines on the AK to our left. Is that two mags strapped together? Red. Nice.

Roundabout

This is more of a Jethro Tull cat. 

Analyzing the structure of the Yes song Roundabout. I will not say this is definitive in any way shape or form. And ironically it's the shape and form I'm trying to figure out here.

One of the things about this song I find interesting is that they do a great job of making little turn-around sections to get from one place to another. Really the song is mostly what I'm calling the "A" section. And Yes are the kings of placing one section over another. They must compose working out new riffs underneath the same vocal lines in order to create those sections. And then they probably do the opposite -- make new vocal parts over the same riffs in order to create choruses.

Opening/Intro -- acoustic guitar with harmonics and reversed piano
A section with acoustic guitar and fast bass
A section verse
B section with sequencer
A section verse 2
B section
A section Chorus version -- syncopated kick and bass "In and around the lake..."
turnaround
A section with acoustic guitar and fast bass
turnaround
A section verse 3 "I will remember you"
B section turns around to
A section Chorus with arpeggiated keys "In and around the lake"
B section turn around
C section rock riff
C section "verse" with riff underneath
C section with syncopated keyboard riff
C section verse
C section "Roundabout"
Opening 2 -- acoustic guitar and Arp 2600 sequence
Going into flutes (In and around the lake...)
A section -- electric guitar -- syncopated bass and drums -- with Hammond solo
D section -- electric guitar walk up and turn around back into
A section -- adding Hammond playing a sequence of 16ths similar to Opening 2
D section -- turn around and guitar solo
A section -- Chorus version
A section -- (In and around the lake)
E section -- "Da da da" -- I don't really know
Coda -- I think this is a unique section -- acoustic guitar only