How Busy Am I?

Wow. Things are hectic.

Last week I was asked to come back and teach the Premiere course on Thursday and Friday. Then Thursday night the guy in charge gets back to me and asks if I'm interested in teaching a Dreamweaver I class on Monday/Tuesday.

I have a familiarity with Dreamweaver, but I hardly use it. I've programmed in html, and I also was 80% of the way to a computer science degree before I dropped out to pursue film.

All that means is that most programs are pretty easy for me to learn. I tell the guy sure, get me the book on Friday and I'll go over the lessons over the weekend so I'm ready for Monday.

Now my weekend is booked going through and doing these lessons so the students don't think this is the first time I've taught the course.

THEN Friday night the reps get back to me about Bounty. They can make all the problems in the QC go away, and they don't seem to think it's expensive. But now I need to get them the following:

CREDIT LISTS (Main + End titles) (So much fun to transcribe your front and end creds!)

TALENT AGREEMENTS (or deal memos with main cast) Photocopying! Love it!

DIRECTOR AGREEMENT or letter if none

WRITER AGREEMENT

COPYRIGHT CERT (copy of your filing of the motion picture copyright)

MUSIC CUE SHEET

MUSIC LICENSES (if any were done)

COMPOSER AGREEMENT

So there's that too. And I normally have my mom over to watch the Oscars on Sunday night, but in order to go to sleep early enough to get up Monday at 6:30am, I'm gonna have to take a Lunestra by ten pm.

The Oscars get called off. (She beats me in the pool by one, as does MY WIFE, who knows nothing about any of the movies) I still think I win because not only does Trent Reznor(of NIN, probably my favorite group of all-time) win an Oscar, but I PICKED him to win. (when he clearly wasn't the favorite, according to my mom/wife's cheat sheet)

I'm angry that Roger Deakins is fucked again. Hey, let's wait until he's dead and then give one of the greatest cinematographers on the planet the award!

Needless to say, editing on GOH is at a stop. Will try to resume on Thursday.

DID get time to watch the final episode of Spartacus: Gods of the Arena. I say again, BEST SHOW ON TV. I'm not kidding.

Watch the original, then watch the prequel series and marvel at the writing. Yeah, you know what's coming because you've seen the next series, right? Man, George Lucas should shoot himself. THIS is how you do a prequel.

Still editing

Up to scene 27, the actual first scene we shot. Yep, Day One.

It's not as horrible as I'd remembered. And we shot a decent amount of coverage. I wish I had known of the Red's capabilities before shooting. I mean, if you shot a Med Cu then you have no need of a CU. You can zoom that Med Cu without any loss of quality to at least 250%, maybe up to 400% if your focus was spot on.

So we could have saved a lot of time with redundant shots had I known. The stats on a Red can be found here, in case you were wondering:
http://www.redonecine.com/faq.html

Meanwhile, got a hair cut. And I mean, I got a hair cut. Anyone who has known me for any length of time is probably pretty used to the regular way my hair is. It never changes.

Well, I tell you now that I appear ready to go into the army. I kind of like it. Not sure what the wife thinks of it yet. I can tell she has to get used to it...I would post a picture but then I'd have to take one first...

More teaching of Premiere this coming week. (Thurs/Friday)

Also, did some blog-bookmark housecleaning. Man, a lot of people have just given up on blogging, eh? Man, I believe my blog could be one of the longest-running blogs in existence if my bookmarks are any indication.

Finally, weird how your perspectives and interests change in life. I am playing in the background(on Netflix-streaming) The Civil War--a series of episodes by Ken Burns detailing the event. It's pretty interesting.

I mean, NOW, it's pretty interesting. When they tried to make me study the Civil War in school I pretty much fell asleep every time. History was boring as shit. I didn't pay attention at ALL.

Bounty: QC Fail

So I continue my long line of QC failings with today's notification from the lab that Bounty's got some problems. However, here's the interesting thing.

Some of what the lab is calling errors(and failing errors at that) are actually errors on purpose. For instance, they note quite a few times where the "Production Props/Camera/Cameraman" is seen. It would be like citing Dog the Bounty hunter for instances where you catch a glimpse of their camera guys.

They also bust us on a lot of "heavy motion lag/choppy movement". Wonder if Cops gets those errors on their reports?

Anyway, you can see a piece of the problems above. Weirdly, not a single failing sound issue.

Not sure what vertical blanking errors are--well, in theory I do, but I don't know how to see them or fix them. So I've sent them back an email telling them not to try to fix some of the errors but to tell us how much it will cost to fix the lum issues and vertical blanking ones.

Also, on a side note you can see the GOH teaser at:
http://gohedon.blogspot.com/

I don't mind telling you that I know that this teaser could be better. I thought about improving it in a couple of places I could see, but then I thought: Why get their hopes up again?

I don't wanna make a teaser or trailer that will make the movie look phenomenal...'cause it's not gonna be phenomenal. It's gonna be another no-budget feature shot on some nice equipment. It will look good, but it's got some big issues.

So I phoned the teaser in(a little). I mean, I still think it's pretty good.

PS: The new trailers for "Red Riding Hood" are using NIN's "Hand That Feeds You" in their backgrounds. Gotta love it.

Damn Kid

On Friday he decided(as I was getting him ready for school) to puke all over the sofa. Then he got some sort of cold with a fever, and puked again off and on right until Sunday night.

So now I've got the sick. Not the pukes, but the congestion and weariness.

Have been working on the GOH teaser. It's all but done. Only thing left to do is render my new logo in 4K resolution so it matches. (I know, technically I could render it smaller since I'm just uploading to Youtube, but I'm gonna need it in 4K sooner or later...)

I jump over to the old computer and try to run 3dMax, which is what I've always used to do stuff like my logo. It crashes. Says Application Failed To Initialize.

Fuuuuck. So I uninstall the whole thing(whoops), not thinking because my brain is stuffy, that it's been saving all the .max files under the program directory(which is horrible, but it was the program's call).

There goes the newest .max version of my logo. Now I gotta boot up the old FOC2 computer and get the older version of it. I install a newer version of Max on the computer and it seems to work.

It's rendering now. I'm going to sleep. Should be done by the time I wake up.

I hope I feel better. And if all goes well, the teaser will go live tonight.

5 Favorite Non-Horror

Joe Dante tweeted this link today:
http://www.fearnet.com/blogs/tim_sullivan_shock_n_roll/b21700_of_mice_masters_inside_inner_sanctum.html

I mean, besides the fact that it's too cool that Joe Dante's tweeting stuff, it got me thinking.

What ARE my 5 favorite non-horror films? And I guess we're talking things that couldn't possibly fall into the horror realm. So films like "Aliens" and "The Birds" and "Tremors" can't count.

I'm not sure. I'll give it a try. The only one that came easy was the first. I used this web site to comb through the lists and make mine. It's a cool site(just click on the year you'd like to look at):
http://movies.toptenreviews.com/list_d2000.htm

Their lists are skewed, but 1988 has some ballsy top 40 choices.

Okay, way too hard. Here's what I got right now, but honestly, the honorable mentions could sit up there on the list at anytime and I wouldn't complain.

1. Conan The Barbarian
2. Superman II
3. Die Hard
4. Terminator 2
5. Fletch

Honorable mentions:
Karate Kid, Body Double, Rear Window, Planet of the Apes, Escape From New York, , Star Trek 2, Robocop, Lethal Weapon, Silverado, Breakfast Club, Batman(1989), Golden Voyage of Sinbad

The FOC Trailer on Youtube

has now been viewed over 34,000 times...

Man, that's crazy to think of. It seems like it took about 3.5 years to hit 20,000 and then another year it's almost doubled. It's snowballing all of a sudden.

Cool, you know?

Also, today someone from the Discovery Channel emailed us to find out about including footage from HH in one of their shows. Which is weird, because nobody else thinks they need our permission...

Funny 'Cause It's True

I did not write this...it's one of those things passed around, but it made me chuckle.

Growing up without a cell phone

If you are 40, or older, you might think this is hilarious!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning...Uphill...Barefoot... BOTH ways yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that I'm over the ripe old age of forty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a darn Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the darn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our butt! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car..We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby! Dig?

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it!

There weren't any freakin' cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOSH!!! Think of the horror...not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there's TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent...you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen...Forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your butt and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what's the world coming to?!?!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks!

And we didn't have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

And our parents told us to stay outside and play...all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside...you were doing chores!

And car seats - oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were lucky, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place! See! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 40 Crowd

It Is DONE

No, not GOH. Bounty--the deliverables. They got me the final contract with the deliverables to what I could deliver, and now they say they're aiming for that May premiere on VOD, DVD to follow probably about 18 months later.

So I put all the stuff on a Firewire 800 drive, wrapped it up, and now I have to get it out in the mail in the icy crazy weather.

Also, 'cause I'm not busy enough right now, I seemed to have stumbled into a job teaching Adobe Premiere to people. See, there's a company that charges people crazy sums of money to take their classes on all sorts of stuff(among them, Adobe products)...

Anyway, they needed a Premiere teacher this week(with maybe more jobs to follow), and they pay almost $400 a day to teach(9am-3:30pm). Hard to turn it down.

Went to a class today to see the format(in Silver Spring), then drove to Columbia to interview with the main guy. He had my resume which really just says THE followed by my name and then the words "IS A GOD". So I knew I had the job. :)

They gave me the book, so I have a day to go through the lessons real quick so I can act like I've done this before. It's all fairly basic stuff to me--I mean, come on...I been using Premiere for almost 12 years...

So I'm teaching on Wednesday and Thursday in Silver Spring. Fun fun. I feel so old now.