I should write one of these....
One advantage to taking a month off from writing an update like this is that there actually news. Usually. Not necessarily this time, but....
I suppose there's some stuff I could mention.
It's looking like I probably won't have Pandemic written and finished and printed and available in...nine days. Which bugs me, of course. Just one more reason to be somewhat upset by the suck in general. Not that nothing's getting done around here. Necessarily.
I'm still working on Site of the Living Dead. It's still not ready enough to open up yet; but progress is being made. Including a new, better opening video to replace the ageing and boring flashtoon thing currently on the index.html of the site. The new video, which remains a work in progress, is hiding at video.SotLD.com, for the moment.
Occasionally, I add bits to it. I'd get it done sooner, but I've pretty well exhausted all the zombiefilms I happened to have already ripped to .avi here; so now I'm pulling things off discs to add frames. Which is its own process.
The easiest and fastest way to do that, for those playing along at home, is to drop in the DVD, play it in ULead's DVD Player [I got it as part of MovieFactory3; it may exist as a standalone, too], pause the film at about the starting point of the scene you're after, and then hit ,g,g,g,g,g,g,g,g,g for the rest of your life, granting that you're pulling frames out of something playing them at 29.97 per second.
Have much room, since each frame is saved as a 720*480 bitmap, which adds up in a hurry.
Once you've got the frames you want, go over to LightWave8 and F6 the sequence into the scene. At this point, you should also have a few objects in there—specifically, a screen measuring 4:3, a screen measuring 16:9, and a screen measuring 64:27. Not that you'll actually need all three at once; it's just handy to have them since you've got all those preripped .avis and .mpegs in one of those three aspect ratios.
Pick the screen with the aspect ratio closest to the film you just grabbed all those screenshots from. Usually 16:9. In my case, my screen is also 16:9, so it's pretty easy to tell at a glance, while watching the film in the first place, what the aspect ratio was: if the blackbars are right and left, it's 4:3; if up and down, it's 64:27; if the film fills the screen perfectly, it's 16:9—which is most films these days.
Smack the sequence onto the 16:9 screen and centre it on the Y axis. The X axis should have been locked at zero long ago. Now pull the screen toward the camera until it perfectly fits the sides of the frame.
Since the video itself is 64:27 [no real reason, except that some films are 64:27, so it's simpler to match up any of the three possibilities on the sides; also, 320*240 and 320*180 are larger in filesize than 320*135 once everything's assembled and rendered and smashed to a smallish QuickTime file], the camera should be set to 640*270. That gives you a perfect 64*27 output .avi without any useless borders.
The light should be at X:0, Y:0, Z:-n, which is to say that the light should be somewhere behind the camera. The light should also be parented to the screen you're using, and targeted at the screen you're using. Just giving the screen itself an illumination of 100% kinda works; but it can do some upsetting things to anything truly black; so, I don't do that.
Set the timeline from Frame1 through FrameX, where X is the number of frames you've got.
The camera should be set up with zero antialiasing, and no soft filtre; rendering options should be set to realistic raytracing, but without shadows or reflexions or anything else there's no need to use.
Tell LightWave to render the scene and save as .avi. Hit F10 and let that happen.
Once that's all done, go over to Adobe Premiere Pro and Control-I the new .avi into the whole mess you've already got imported. Make sure the new sequence is set to run at 29.97 frames, and that it fills the centre of the 16:9 file Premiere is convinced you wanted [64:27 isn't actually an option, as far as I can tell]. Add a layer for the new sequence. Drop the new sequence into the new layer, and match it up with the soundtrack, pretty much to taste.
Pretend to play the file through with the new footage. Which doesn't really work anymore, since you're basically processing a hundred gigabytes of data through 768megs of RAM. When you figure you've got it about right, export the film as a Microsoft .avi with square pixels at 640*360, which will take about an hour to render.
If that gets done without your computer puking and restarting on you, open the new .avi in Sorenson Squeeze and smash the 500megs into about fifteen megs of QuickTime video at 320*135, remembering to tell Squeeze to crop the film to Full Widescreen [2.35:1, AKA 64:27].
Upload SotLDWorking.mov to video.SotLD.com and play through to see what you think of it now.
Pull the disc you started screencapturing two hours ago out of the drive and put it away.
Repeat the whole process if you're actually still awake.
So: I'm working on the video. I'm just not fully done with it yet.
Loosely on the subject, I saw Shaun of the Dead, which, while worth seeing, was irksome. Mostly because half of the damned film was lifted perfectly out of Teatime of the Living Dead, which is impressive enough on its own, granting that I never uploaded that for anyone to see. In fact, I can only think of about five people who ever read it.
So, now, granting that it's kinda too late to have some of that stuff in my filmscript, I'm reworking it to cut out most of the SotD stuff, and replace it with new ideas which'll probably show up in ScaryMovie4, with my luck. But: it's something to do.
Interestingly, it's starting to look like filming TotLD might actually be an option, after all these years. I've been putting it off since 1995 primarily because there was really no way to do it for less than half a million bucks. At the time.
Today, the rules are a little different.
Here's a simple way to make a film in 2005 [I'm still too busy to bother with it before about June]—apart from screencapturing existing stuff from a disc and LightWaving it into something Premiere can export to something Squeeze can smash into something LeechFTP can upload in under a week. Of course, we're using a lot of the same software.
Step One: film something. I won't bother with all the little details of this process. For the sake of argument, pretend that directing a film is a point-and-shoot matter. Although: it might be worth mentioning that Hershey's Syrup is still absolutely perfect for blood, proving colour isn't a concern. And it won't be for long.
Shoot the film on any given DVC. Canon, Sony, Panasonic, or whatever. The biggest deal regarding camcorders is that you'll save a lot of time and effort filming the thing in 16:9 in the first place; you'll get that in a minute.
Having filmed twenty hours' of footage for a total budget of two hundred bucks [an hour of MiniDV is about ten bucks; add in a few bucks for the Hershey's Syrup if you're really looking for writeoffs here], FireWire it into the computer. Warning: an hour of DVC equates to about forty gigabytes of raw footage. Be ready for that.
Pull all the footage into Premiere—though probably not all at once. Edit the film to include what you want to keep.
Export the 'final' cut of the film as Microsoft DV .avi at 720*480. For now. Also, export just the soundtrack as a .wav; that'll come in way handy, in all probability.
Import the 720*480 .avi into LightWave. You won't need the screens this time; just Control-F7 the thing in as a background image.
Feel free to import the .wav of the film and Control-F1 it into the scene, just so you can play the film through in LightWave and hear what's supposed to be going on.
As long as you've got everything in LightWave now, feel free to CG a few things. Like, say, the hundred thousand zombies you didn't bother hiring at a hundred bucks each per day. Just build them and try not to let them get close enough to the camera to show off their polygons. Rotoscope as needed to have the digital zombies duck behind existing realworld elements of the film.
Render the film. But: first set up the camera to film in HDTV at 1920*1080.
Of course, two hours of HDTV will be about five terabytes, so you might be doing this one scene at a time. What counts though is that LightWave8 actually serves as a pixeldoubler; there are simply no corners anywhere showing off where the 720*480 original pixels used to be. You just saved yourself a few million bucks.
Once the film is all worked out and five terabytes, pull it back into Premiere and reattach the soundtrack you saved as a .wav. Plot out good places to chop between scenes and end up with a bunch of little 4gig bits and burn them to about a thousand DVRs [five hundred bucks, for those keeping track of funds].
While you're burning things to DVR, go ahead and smash a copy of your final, CG-laced, colourcorrected [Premiere is a good place to turn your Hershey's Syrup into blood], foleyed, finished film into a nice little 4.7gig copy at 720*480 again; put that on a disc and go make sure it looks and sounds okay on a real HDTV with SurroundSound.
Stack the thousand discs of final, cinematic grade digital film in a safe place and find out how in the living hell you arrange to distribute a film; personally, I have no idea yet.
Optionally, burn a few more DVQuality copies to disc and show them to the people you scammed into appearing in the film in the first place. Optionally also, send one of the DVRs off to some PoD place, and have them make you a few saleable copies; then grab a UPC code for them and hand those over to amazon.com to get back the seven hundred bucks you wasted on the project.
So, now, I finish reworking the filmscript and see whether that all works as theorised next June or so. If time actually allows.
In yet other news, now that I've got working computers again, we're setting up to get back to doing Radio Free Duhmerica. I'm not sure why we accidentally take summers off from that; but it's happened three years in a row now. But, summer's about over; so it's time to play again.
In a related story, Reg [the InfidelGuy who runs AtheistNetwork.com] got Kent Hovind on his show a couple of days ago. Which I recorded. It's at gremlin.net/reg.hovind.wma for the moment—until or unless Reg sets up to sell a CDQuality copy on disc, in which case I'll unlink my RadioQuality version. Incidentally, opening that in Windoze MediaPlayer will allow it to stream at realtime, so you won't have to download all nineteen megabytes in advance.
And, don't ask what went wrong when I called in. My StarTac—which they no longer actually make—finally broke the other day. Moisture damage. It held in there, but it finally succumbed to the damned flood anyway. So, I bought a new phone, which does everything but make any sense. I can film things, record things, write things...I just can't get it to function as a damned phone very well. So calling in [the first time I've really tested out how I sound on the new phone to other people] was a slight disaster. You'll understand when you get to that part of the recording.
Meanwhile, about the broken StarTac and the suck and all, I'm finally to the point where literal lawyers are agreeing that I could and should sue these criminals into extinction. Which, granting that I've got actual criminal-level evidence against them, would be bad. So, I've also got literal lawyers suggesting that, if there's a brain among them, these idiots could and should settle out of court for pretty much whatever I feel like blackma—uh...settling for. I should know more about that tomorrowish. I'll let you know how it all turns out.
More later....
--Gremlin

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.