The Flash Animation (The file is 3MB, so it will take probably 30-75 seconds or more to load. Be patient, it's working.)
On Saturday I went for a hike in Chappaqua with Alix and Susan, two friends of mine from Pomona. It was a great escape from the city. And, judging by the colors, perfect timing. This was my first bona fide experience of being blown away by the fall colors. I have heard a lot about how great the leaves in New England are, but I really hadn't had the experience of seeing them firsthand until now. I was deluded into thinking that Utah's leaves compete (actually, I still think Utah's leaves compete against these. But these were pretty awesome.)
And then on Sunday morning I went to David's apartment in Fort Greene to watch the runners whiz by.
As I was watching the marathon, I got a call from my best friend from college, Daniel, aka the Danimal. He was in town from LA and wanted to hang out. We met up that evening and he took me to the top of the Empire State Building. His grandfather had designed it, so he had a pass that let us skip the lines and go straight to the top.
The reading made me want to do more experimentation with film, too. As we've been shooting this film, and as I've been reading about film directing the past few weeks, I've started to pay much more attention to how the editing of movies and TV shows is done. I'm kind of amazed to see how much of a rich visual language there is in television and movies that I was more or less unaware of until now. Of course, the flow should be seemless if done right (according to our readings).
Reading about (and thinking about) the issues involved with maintaining continuity and getting coverage has caused me to have a lot more respect than I did for directors. I realize now in a much more tangible way that there is a lot of planning that goes into getting a good shot. When we were filming we typically only used a single angle/range for every shot, although I would have liked to experiment with using multiple cameras or at least different takes with different angles to see how that can contribute to our film. It's becoming clear, though, that we are mounting a very ambitious project and multiple takes are a luxury for people not trying to get done work for 3 other classes.
The experience so far has made me really want to a) make my own feature-length film and b) star in one.
Here is a link to our pictures from the second day of shooting.
Day 2 of the Mime Shoot: I am not a mime.
Our assignment (to be done over the next two weeks) is to shoot a 2-minute piece of video. Our group agonized over a lot of different options and we finally settled on a parody/mockumentary about a person doomed to live like looking (but not acting) like a mime. He's a normal person with a normal job and so on, he just happens to look like a mime. Our piece will document the misadventures of someone who looks like a mime but does normal thing (like talk to people, get coffee at Starbucks, go shopping, play basketball).
The assignment for this week was to storyboard our piece. Rather than actually drawing anything, we just took a bunch of digital pictures of me (yes, I will be the mime--it's my screen debut) acting out parts of each scene. We're going to start shooting this Thursday or Wednesday. I'm going to have to go buy my mime gear tomorrow.
I also wrote up a parody of a Levitra-type impotence ad, but we decided it was too difficult to put together in just two weeks. I'm going to post a link to the rough script here just in case anyone comes across this and wants to do it. I still think it would make a great featurette if anyone were to make it. The script for the Levitra ad.
]]>The King Barber school, the ad said, located on 3rd avenue between 9th and 10th streets. "Ask for George. Haircuts $5."
I swaggered through the plate glass doorway, shook the hair from in front of my eyes, and surveyed the scene. Which of the estimable hair stylist herein would I deem worthy of trimming my mane? For a few moments, none stepped forward, and then a single brave soul whom I will dub "Jorge"—due to my not remembering or not having been told his name—looked me in the eye. "What you want?" He asked in a gravelly baritone.
"I'm here for the $5 haircut," I replied, leveling his gaze. With nary another word I was swept into a barber's chair and enrobed in a fetid black cape. Jorge and I negotiated the deals of the haircut (price: $5. length: shorter in the back), and he went to work with, his hair trimmer droning away.
Like many of the upper-class hair salons that charge 2, even 3 times the amount at Kings, the hair stylists there have an apparent moratorium on scissors. No matter. Jorge and his mentor "Sal" (name also apocryphal) deftly showcased the range of the common hair trimmer, using it superbly for both fine detail work and to shear great locks of hair at once.
If I were to make one niggling complaint (and it be a minor one), it would be this: Jorge, with his black comb, seemed to have a personal vendetta against my protruding ears. Time and again he sliced the comb through my hair only to whack it against my gibbous (and not slightly tender) flesh, so much so that I would be unable to contain a pavlovian grimace every time he wielded that shiny plastic weapon.
So how's the haircut? You can judge for yourself. Personally, I feel a little bit too much like a Willard-era Crispin Glover.
]]>The assignment this week was to create a 2-minute sound file. We were taught how to use a variety of different recording devices and audio processing tools (like Audacity, ProTools, Marantz Recorders, &c), but Sai and I ended up doing everything in Garageband.
We mixed Kraftwerk's The Robots with Gwen Stefani's Hollaback Girl, using some samples from other songs including a bit from Cam'Ron's Hey Ma and The New Radicals' You Get What You Give.
There were two important parts of the process: First, we needed to be able to find parts of the songs that isolated either the vocals or the drum or beats lines in order to cleanly import them as loops into Garageband. Next time I do this I'm going to try to use some of Audacity's filters to pick out the drum-n-bass line out from *under* a vocals track, instead of looking for a song that had the d-n-b line all on its own.
The second tip was to make loops of the samples instead of just cutting them. Use of the Dashboard widget bpm widget was integral to this, because we had to figure out the bpm of the sample in order to make sure everything lined up correctly.
After the loop was set with the correct beat, you can choose "Add Loop to Library" from the Edit menu (I think) and then you can import that loop from the loop library. If you do it this way, Garageband keeps track of the bpm of everything so that it all sounds good together. It's kind of magical when you see that you can just drop the loops in with each other and watch (hear) them sync up.
The tickets to Digital Life were being given away rather promiscuously (promotion codes could be found all over google), and I'm guessing with the volume of thrill-seekers (as opposed to actual buyers) present, giveaways were not as high a priority as at Comdex. Still, there were a fair number of trinkets being handed out (I got an RCA dog keychain), but the lines were ridiculous. The big to-do when we arrived on Friday afternoon was the Tivo giveaway—apparently Tivo had held a "funeral for VHS" at noon, and anyone who came by to drop off a blank VHS cassette as part of the service could get a free Tivo if they also purchased a year's worth of service at the same time. There were people smugly toting their free Tivos all over the convention floor.
I couldn't help but be smitten by this cute little robot. He's only about 14 inches tall.
At the same booth, however, there was a really creepy animatronic monkey head with weird rubbery skin (and quite a bite). I got a picture of Matt with him, and a detail shot below.
There was also a large gaming influence, and to celebrate the release of a new Star Wars-themed game, Storm Troopers were roaming the floor.
Among the games, non-standard controls seemed to be a theme. There was a fighting game where the controls were little transmitters one wears on each wrist like bracelets. I saw someone flailing wildly but having dubious success in the game. There was also a slew of mats used as input, for running and jumping. There was another, a bowling game, with an actual bowling ball used as the input device. The kid trying to bowl had to take four wind-ups before he was able to successfully get the bowl rolling down the lane (gutterball). Clearly, the consumer electronics industry has a ways to go with the cutting-edge control pads/devices.
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Taping video or audio for later viewing/listening has been going on for several decades, in some form or another. The digitization of the process makes it easier (automatic, even) to do the recording, but I don't see how the new distribution channel substantially changes anything.
]]>Starting on Saturday night, I saw the band Graham Smith at Tonic, a bar just south of Houston on the east side. It poured on Saturday night so there weren't that many people in the bar and there was also a large puddle in the middle of the room, right in front of the stage. Going to a concert in New York is not new for me. In fact, I wrote about seeing the Spinto Band for my new experience in week two.
I also saw Graham Smith again last night (Monday night), when his band played at Mo Pitkin's. Going to see a band twice in a row is, perhaps surprisingly, also not a new experience for me—I saw the Spinto Band two weeks in a row, too. My new experience was the dawning, while watching Graham Smith play last night, that I have come to appreciate music in a completely different way than I used to.
I was a late bloomer, musically. I bought my first CD, Smashing Pumpkins' double Melon-collie and the Infinite Sadness, my junior year of high school. I made up for the lost time with the intensity of my devotion, however. From that point on I was hooked, always searching for something new and obscure to listen to. At that time, music was an enveloping thing for me. I gave a lot to it, and took a lot out of it as well. I derived vitality, self-confidence and meaning from those songs that I would listen to for hours, probing the lyrics.
As much as I was into music then, though, I wasn't really a concert-goer. This is partly due to circumstance: the nearest city that could draw any band I ever wanted to see was 85 miles away. Despite this, I never really enjoyed the music as much as I did when I could hear it on my own terms. I wasn't a spontaneous enjoyer of music. This is not to say that I didn't have fun at the shows I went to. I did, and when I would get back to my bed late at night it wouldn't be just my ears that were buzzing. My whole body was alive, having sponged up the energy of the event. Looking back on those concerts, they were great.
At the time, though, they only ever really affected me when I heard songs I already knew by heart. In the distortion and confusion of your typical punk-rock show, the subtleties of the melody get lost unless you already have them running in your head. I used to be fond of saying that I had to like a band before I saw them, that I never really fell in love with any band the first time I heard them.
Lately, though, for really the first time that I have ever noticed it, I've been drawn into a songs hooks from the first chords of its bridge. Last night I saw a band for the first time, and though I didn't like all their songs, there were a couple that immediately struck me, and I didn't feel like a poser anymore bobbing my head to their beat. The reason I came back on Monday to see Graham Smith again, in fact, was because I was instantly in tune with his songs, and had to hear them again. The setlist was little changed from the previous show, and I found that after just one listen, I already recognized lyrics, hooks, bridges, etc. It was great.
My father's godmother, an amazing 91-year-old woman, lives on the upper east side and I try to make a point to visit her every time she's in town. I used to live in Boston and I would visit her every few months when I would take the Chinatown bus down to New York. Her name is Margie McBain.
Margie had a stroke about a year ago so she has lost some control of her faculties, and sometimes has trouble remembering who people are. My dad warned me that I might be surprised if I was expecting her to look like she had when I last visited her a couple years ago (he had seen her earlier in the summer, so he knew firsthand how she was doing). Margie was bedridden and the stroke had made it so that she couldn't really use much of the left side of her body.
I had to sit on the right side of her bed and lean in close to hear what she had to say, but we were able to carry on a pleasant conversation. I mostly regaled her with stories of what I, my sister, my parents, my relatives had been up to lately.
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We spent all day Thursday "filming." Basically, we put our cameras into continuous shooting mode and then biked around the city. I took 3rd person and external shots, and Sai had his camera velcro'd to his bike's handlebars for 1st-person biking footage. We set up a few special scenes, too, like the opening scene, which we filmed using a tripod in front of Sai's apartment as he brought out and assembled his bike and then rode out of the frame. There's a tiny glitch that you can see where Sai hesitates for a second as he is tightening his front wheel. This is because my camera's flash memory started to get full, which greatly slows down its ability to take pictures. I had to have him freeze and wait for my camera to catch up before we could continue shooting.
The other special scene was the crash sequence. We filmed this a number of different times to get the timing right, and there were a couple of sequences that didn't make it into the final production. The sequence with Sai going overhead is one that I'm pretty happy with.
The most difficult part about the whole process was probably the editing. We used iMovie to import sequences of images (from iPhoto) and then converted them into movie clips that we could arrange and cut as we liked. This was not such a problem (though iMovie has some idiosyncracies that we had to acclimate to), but it became really difficult to keep things moving at the right tempo when we started to attempt to use the musical cues for our scene changes. Ordering the clips and timing them right so that they work with the music changes was difficult. In the end, though, it is pretty clear that it was important that we did so. The piece is so much stronger when it plays right with the music.
As an infrequent comics reader, I have only thought superficially about the structure rather than content of comics. Perhaps that is why I was so struck in reading these twin articles at the incredible depth of the form. I have read comic books, but probably not for about a decade, and the only other comics I read have been Calvin and Hobbes, the newspaper funnies, and a few graphic novels (Maus I and II and a brilliant book I discovered this spring called Blankets, which I will return to later). I realize now, after having watched McCloud pick apart the elements that go into comics timing, that I had been aware of a lot of these devices already, if only subconsciously.
As I said, I read Blankets, by Craig Thompson, in the early spring of 2005. The book is a plaintive tale of first love found and lost, and as I read McCloud's descriptions of gutter spacing and panel placement, I remembered more and more how it was more than simply the content of the novel that affected me, it was also the layout. Thompson does an excellent job with the pacing. I remember in particular a full page image of the young lovers together in the snow at the edge of the woods (similar to but not the same as the title page), and the size of that panel created the lingering effect that it had, and without it one might miss the longing and sadness in that moment.
Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson, was my favorite comic during my early teens, and then I rediscovered the strip in early college, this time equipped with the vocabulary to get the half of the jokes I had missed the first time around. The pacing of those strips was also very well done. There are borderless panels, wide panels, Calvin and Hobbes leaping out of the bounds of their panel, and so on. I was unaware at the time of the way these different structures affected the story, but I now realize they were crucial elements.
In honor of what I read, I created my own little comic. Click to enlarge.
I am a rural kid, mostly. I was raised in Logan, UT, a small town (pop. 40K) in northern Utah about 20 miles from the nearest interstate, and about 80 miles from any airport. I am used to open space, no traffic, ample parking, the ability to drive 5 minutes and be hiking in the wilderness in solitude. When I am living in a city, the need for aloneness in nature wells up over time and, every few months, turns into a powerful force that drives me out into the country, however I can get it. I knew that, living in New York, I would be visited by this feeling sooner or later.
I actually haven't yet heard the call of nature; the energy of the city still buoys me nicely. But I considered my weekend jaunt to be a kind of stay against that feeling when it comes.
Being on Fisher's island did drive home the relativism of the idea of Peace and Quiet. Sitting on a park bench in Washington Square with my head in a book, or sitting on a hill in Central Park had begun to feel peaceful to me. Sitting on a bench at the end of the boathouse, with no humans in sight (excepting those piloting sailboats across the sound), upset my Peace and Quiet equilibrium, for it was several layers deeper; the quiet fairly rang in my ears.
