Adventures Of Atom Smith

Here is a still frame from a student film I was in called A Friendly Adversary. You can see the lighting effect that resulted from hanging some blinds between the light and me. Click the picture to see all of it.

I uploaded the image as an example of using lights for a night time feel in response to This Thread at indymogul. The basic setup involved only two lights. The key light was in the next room, shining through some blinds that had been attached to a metal stand, and it had a greenish filter on it. The fill light came from a light pointing into the corner, and pointing away from me with a red gel. Because it wasn’t shining directly on me, the red illumination was extremely soft and diffuse, aiding with the nigh-time “unlit” look.

I’m not dead yet. Just a bit out of touch lately.

Fist Full Of Staples wrapped shooting this weekend. It’s directed by Nick Falls. It’s an office western. It’s somewhere in between “The Office” and “The Good The Bad And The Ugly.” I played Sam, and it was shot on 16mm film. This was my first 16mm production (as well as the director’s), so I am pleased to say that for the most part everything seemed to go quite smoothly. Except for when they set off the fire alarm and the fire department showed up in a big fire truck looking to put a fire out.

Which leads to the absolute sum total of my ultimate wisdom with regard to film making: No children, animals, old people, or fog/smoke machines. To this day, I have never actually seen a smoke machine work right on set. So, for anybody who might run across this bit of wisdom, and really wants to use a smoke machine despite it being a stupid idea:

-Do it outside. Outside is easier to vent than inside.
-If you must be inside, make sure you can easily vent the space. Really easily. Seriously, be on top of this. Smoke machines will not only set off the fire alarm, but also make it impossible to shoot the next take until you vent.
-Have fans. Fucking enormous giant fans. Many of them. Even if you are outside.
-Have a cold box setup. If that doesn’t make sense to you, you aren’t supposed to be using a smoke machine yet! Generally, people want a smoker for cool “ground hugging” fog effects. To accomplish this, you need to run the smoke through a cold box so that it stays near the ground.

Indymogul did a good cold box tutorial. Check them out at indymogul.com.

It’ll be a while before the film is developed and telecined (Put onto a video tape), so we won’t know for sure that nothing bad happened to the footage until then. But, I think it probably turned out quite well, and I’m looking forward to it.

Also, my main phone number is working again. If you tried calling me in the past week or so, you may have gotten a cryptic error message. It’s a SkypeIn VOIP line through Skype, which I paid for the next three months on. But, they dragged their feet on actually recieving my money (which showed up as having been taken from my bank account very quickly) for several days. So, the number expired for a while until I complained. Once I complained, they were able to realise that they did in fact have the money within a day. So, when Skype says “Pay Pal usually clears within an hour, and always within a day” they actually apparently mean “like a week, depending on how lazy we feel.” I dunno, maybe it was some issue between skype and paypal and actually wasn’t Skype’s fault. Still annoyed the crap out of me. The key point I’m trying to make is that my phone finally works again.

Over on the Indy Mogul forums, everybody is all a twitter about Halloween, so the community is posting all sorts of interesting seasonal tutorials. In particular, WesScog posted a quick “cookbook” style tutorial about doing a ghost effect. He used a green screen in order to accomplish it, which is usually the most convenient way to have a transparent character, but not always the best way. You typically want to use a locked down camera, can’t show the subject’s feet, and can’t have a convenient natural interaction between two different characters when you use the green screen technique. So, I dusted off some footage from Jon Stevenson’s Intercourse, PA which shows a character walking freely in the environment, feet and all, which was shot using a handheld camera.

Some composites are meant to be very subtle, and require a breakdown in order to explain to anybody, such as adding rain into a shot. This one should be a bit more obvious. You can’t just ask central casting to send you a transparent glowing guy.

So, here is my first quick test:
First Ghost Walk

Secondly, here is a full “screencapture” tutorial where I recreate the effect and try to explain what I am doing as I go along. I didn’t really plan what all I was going to say, so it is a bit rough, and I apologize for that. Also, I’m used to having Shake full screen, with an extra viewer on my second monitor. I shrunk down the window so that it’d be possible to watch the tutorial for people without huge monitors, and also to make the size a little smaller. Consequently, I fumble around a little bit, looking for things that aren’t where I am used to them, etc.

Full Ghost Tutorial

And, lastly, after I finished the tutorial, I added a few more keyframes to the rotoshape, and rendered the result. It’s very similar to the first test, but a slightly different color. Figured people would also want to see the actual result of following the tutorial.

turorial Result Ghost Walk

‘Tis yet but the eve of the great day, and already there is a shiver twitchin’ in me bones. That fitful urge to search out a deck so that I can get to the swabbin is near to consume me. If I had me druthers, I’d head out to sea with the skull and the bones on me mast. Grog in me belly, I’d heave to and light out for the Spanish Main.

If ye are nae with me, it’s to Davy Jones’ Locker with ye after a long walk on a short plank. I have me eye patch, me cutlass, and tacky and gaudy plastic earring ready for tomorrow’s plundering.

Some reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_like_a_pirate

http://www.talklikeapirateday.com/wordpress/

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/songs1.html

And, of course, according to Wikipedia:
The holiday is of particular importance to Pastafarians (those who follow the teachings of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) who consider pirates to be absolute divine beings and the original Pastafarians.

So, this is truly a high holy day for the Pastafarians. Global Warming Respect.

So hectic lately… Tonight was the Finale of America’s Next Producer. Gwen Uszuko, Denver local won tonight. I worked on the project which was under NDA at the time which was the final part of the competition. It actually turned out somewhat badly. It was Gwen’s first time directing, and there were a lot of issues, and the schedule was unfortunate, terrible, and necessary. Even so, Gwen’s mini pitch pilot, called Playboy in Sin City was enough for her to Win. She’ll be on her way to LA in about a month to go and make a shot at being a noteworthy producer. Naturally, I’m hoping desperately that she doesn’t meet anybody out there, and calls me up needing a hand with something terribly important. i just got back from the sort of after Premiere/Wrap party. I didn’t get shown much in the episode. We were all expecting more behind the scenes making of stuff, but they only had a few minutes. The few minutes they had, they did talk about the fucking turtle who shat on everything, so you did get a bit of the gist of what production was like. I expected they’d show the trials and tribbulations of assembling the stripper pole in more detail…

Backing up a notch, Netherbeast Incorporated has its local Premiere in Boulder as part of the toofy Film Festivallast weekend:

http://imdb.com/title/tt0787495/

It grew out of this short:

http://imdb.com/title/tt0439728/

It has a bunch of big name people in it, and it is a fairly local production. Shot a state over, but with some local people, such as Moderately Famous Maiz Lucero. Since Maiz and I are friends, and we had just worked on Ink together, I was invited to tag along with the Producers for the after after party. Good guys. Also, a good movie. It’s not perfect, but given the problems encountered on Playboy in Sin city, I can sympathize. If you loved Wet Hot American Summer, or Bubba Ho Tep, you’ll like Netherbeast. In the unlikely even it makes it to theaters, you should watch it. I hope it does make it to theaters, and there is a chance it might, considering Dave Foley and Darrel Hammond are in it.

Backing up even further, the previous weekend, I was an Incubus in Ink. It will be a while before this film gets released, so I won’t go into specific details about how bloody miserable the costume was. I didn’t actually sign an NDA, but I guess it’s respectful to avoid spoilers until they get covered by the promotional material. One curious quirk of the film is that when I looked it up on IMDB a few days after I was done with my four days of shooting, I realised that the movie is something of a Mouth Off Reunion. I worked with Robert Markle while I was shooting, and Jen Fiskum and Leigh Ann Gould are both listed as having parts on IMDB, so at least four of us will turn out to have been in the movie, without any particular planning. Wacky. Maiz Lucero played Brave Incubus. He also had a speaking part. I’m referring to my incubus character as “violent incubus” in my resume, though he didn’t actually have a specific name, and was a nonspeaking part. I should wind up with a bit of (somewhat obscured) face time. Also, I got to do some fighting stunts, so I hope to be killed at least once or twice in the final cut.

Perseids are tonight. I’ll be in the middle of nowhere.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/08/09/12-things-you-need-to-watch-the-perseid-meteors-sunday-night/

I’ll be in the middle of nowhere so that I can be someplace dark enough to see magnitude seven stars. I looked this shit up on a night time illumination map, so it must be true. Peak is around midnight, so I’ll head out around 11:30 and stay there for a long time.

I moved my desk and and dresser into my new place today with my Dad’s house. He also scored me a kitchen table, so I finally have a place to eat. This suits me, as I like to eat.

Last week, I was brushing up on some titling and compositing in preparation for the 48 hour film festival in case I needed to do any of it. As it happens, I didn’t. But, I was watching some clips of the Weakly News at http://www.thestream.tv/ because it has Iliza, and I’m a fan of her. Anyhow, I made an animated version of the Weakly News show open because they use a still frame, and it was somehow more logically simple to be doing titling and time killing at once if they were somehow related. I made this: http://forkforge.org/files/weakly.mov

I hadn’t really intended anything to come of it, but I emailed it to the folks at thestream.tv, and they are going to use it to open the show tonight. I find this amusing. I may donate some other title sequences to the mini network so I can use it for bragging rights while looking for work. (“My work is on seven weekly programs… (that nobody watches…)”)

I got to see the student short I was in most recently. We shot it two weekends ago. I turned out decent. It’s first year student level work, but it was dramatically less terrible than most of the other things made by the class. Hint to the competition: the stage where they do the plays is not necessarily a good place to shoot your scene. Especially if you clearly have no idea how to use the lights.

The 48 hour film project never happened.

Well, time to watch the Weakly News…

We made a Western Musical.

My Shake Fu is strong. I have done tests keying green screens. I have done tests with blue screens. Like the karate kid waxing Miyagi’s car, I have done mask premultiplication on – mask premultiplication off. I have prepared node graphs for color correcting. I have tracked and I have corner pinned and I have rotoscoped. I have done all that I can do, really. And, it may all be for naught.

The 48 hour film project starts tonight. We will draw our genre and elements at 7:00 pm. Until then, I have no idea what kind of movie I’m working on, or what kind of character I’ll be playing, or if we’ll have any effects work, or what sort of effects I’ll need to do. So, I’m idle. It’s annoying. We are going to meet tonight by teleconference rather than in person to discuss, which means we won’t have any chance to shoot anything tonight.

The guys came today to take away the extra furniture in my apartment today. I can finish moving in next week. I need to do laundry.

Finally, I have Internet at my new place. I don’t even know where to begin.

The trip… Well, here is my usual vacation snapshots gallery. It’s pretty much all Massachussets. I’ll try to get ahold of more photos at a later date.

http://forkforge.org/forkgallery/v/virg_mass/

Lots of more subjects in the rest of the post…

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So, I found out what the house being sold means. It means We are out of here by July 31st. I’m paniced. The universe has great comedic timing, but a dark sense of humor.

July 9th – you can check out http://www.comedyworks.com/ for more info about the competition, and you can call for reservations at 303.595.3637. There is a two item minimum – food or drink – when you are there. I still haven’t written all the material I’m going to be using, but look for jokes along the theme of, “it sure is funny when you find out you have to be out of your house 20 days after you get back from the trip you leave on that night…” I don’t know if I’ll have enough perspective to think it’s funny, but you can all come and laugh at me.

The Giggles and Grounds clean comedy competition – postponed. Ironically, the venue is being sold, so the organiser of the competition doesn’t have anywhere to hold it. I can sympathise with him far too well. Since the universe not only understands timing, but also the rule of threes, I expect something else will be inexplicably sold in the near future.

Banana.