Posting time

I tend to post to this blog from work during the day. That leads to these short, poorly thought posts that say basically nothing. I don't plan the posts. I don't work on them long because I need to get back to work. I guess I need to post at a different time.

Cicadas

Once every 17 years, this rather large and annoying insect makes it's appearance around these parts. The cicadas are out in force, though at this point I don't feel inundated. My memory of the last emergence is mostly of the annoyance of these things flying right into me as I walked to driver's ed. Not a fun thing.

There is a story here though. I'm sure of that and I'm sure others are doing some. This is not a common behavior for an animal, to live dormant for 17 years. There is certainly a story to tell. Is it my story? I don't know yet because I haven't tried to write one yet.

Storyless

I have little doubt the reason I have no story for this film is because I have not been writing. I need to practice and that is simply not happening. Even now, I don't have a story to tell as much, but I want to post regularly so here I go. No time like the present and such.

Since I now have access to Flash CS3 at work, I am experimenting with putting video online in an easy to digest fashion. I like the way the video is embedded at videocopilot.net and will probably mirror that style for clips without sound. It is simple and elegant. As long as there is no sound, I don't see much need for player controls. I need to figure that side out too. I have some clips with sound that will need controls.

On a completely different front, I am considering purchasing a Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD player. I know you can put high def material on standard DVDs and play them back on this player. This would be a very attractive solution for playing with HD. Since my camcorder is HD, this seems a good option for me.

Pretty dead

No, the project and the idea is not dead, just the site. I tend to write a post like this on each of my sites fairly regularly. Oh well. I've completed my lightsaber test and my shooting finger test. I need to get those online. I still read and study quite a bit, but so far no solid idea for the short film. It's May now, almost halfway through the year so I need to get cracking. I want to start writing regularly so we'll see.

Practice

After watching some video tutorials about various effects, specially the ones at VideoCopilot, I really wanted to try something. I came up with the idea of making someone shooting with their finger look like they are actually shooting. I talked a co-worker into acting for me. I used the stock elements I got from VideoCopilot (their Action Movie Essentials product). I'm fairly pleased with the results. I have to resize it and compress it for the web. Once I do, I'll put it up somewhere and link to it from here.

So far I have gotten some good reactions from it. It has convinced my guinea pig to model for me again. Next up, lightsabers...

Watching movies

It had been a while since I'd watched a movie that I hadn't seen recently. Mostly this is because the movies I tend to watch lately are whatever my 3 year old is quoting at the moment. This past weekend I was able to break that trend and watch not one, but three and a half movies.

Three and a half? Yeah, well I tried taking said 3 year old to see Happily 'Never After and he decided to was time to leave before the movie was over. I don't think that is because he didn't like the movie. He watched it most of the time and was very quiet. I think he just got restless and wanted to run around a bit.

The ohter movies were all DVD rentals. They were The Hunting of the President, The Day After Tomorrow, and Art School Confidential.

The Hunting of the President is a documentary about the investigations into Bill Clinton during his terms as President. From a filmmaking perspective it was a nice documentary. They cut in some old film footage here and there to spice up the video. The footage was varions, but had some connection to what was being said at the time.

I felt compelled to watch The Day After Tomorrow because of all the acclaim I'd heard about the effects in the film. Personally, I think effects are the main reason to see the film. The story is only so-so and some parts are laughable. The whole think with the wolves was really hard to swallow, even if you allowed all the pseudo-science of the climate change. The effects were convincing on the whole. They worked well given the far-out nature of the events.

I really enjoyed Art School Confidential and feel it could garner the exact pseudo-intellectual dissection as the pieces in the film recieve from the students. It mocks itself by being what it mocks in the film. I think it works well. It's a fun film that can't be taken seriously. And it knows it.

As far as the portion of Happily 'Never After that I saw goes, it was a decent flic. It didn't have quite the same charm that I thought Hoodwinked had. It was cute enough and I wanted to know how it ended, but the characters just weren't as full as they needed to be. Maybe I would feel different after seeing the whole thing.

On my own movies, I have recorded a small bit of video for an exercise I'm doing. It's an attempt to create a simple effect. The footage has been captured to my computer, but I had to use Premiere Pro 1.5 to do it. For some reason, my camcorder did not work within Premiere Pro 2.0. I was able to control the camera there, but no video showed and I couldn't capture.

If I'm successful with this exercise, I'll post the result here. That's it for now.