Adventures Of Atom Smith

Many of you are completely unaware of AACS. That’s fine, it hasn’t been in the mainstream media much. It’s a new technology on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs which is designed to make it difficult to access a movie you buy however you want. (Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are basically high capacity DVD’s for watching High Definition movies on your whizzy new HDTV.) You see, they encrypt the content on the discs using AACS so that only people who pay a bunch of money to the licensing authority and agree to a bunch of rules can make stuff which will play these movies. This means that if you use an uncommon Operating system like Linux, you can’t just buy and play the movies. If you want to buy a movie and then copy it onto a Media Center PC that you have plugged into your TV, that is supposed to be impossible. If you want to buy a movie and burn a backup copy for the kids to watch and drool over so you don’t wind up having to buy 50 copies of the Little Mermaid HD or something, they want to stop you.

Recently, one of the primary AACS encryption keys was leaked. With this, tinkerers all over the world can write software and modify hardware that will allow people who have legally bought High Definition movies to dow hatever they want with them, including reasonable, legal fair-use activities. This encryption key is basically just a long number. You can’t legally copyright a number, incidentally. However, the folks who make AACS have vowed to pursue legal action against anybody who publishes it. In my own effort to join the civil disobedience happening all over the Internet right now, I would like to share a small short scene with you which just happens to have a very similar pronounciation to the number in question, when it is expressed in a mathermatical notation called “hexadecimal.” (Hexadecmal means it uses 0-9 and also A-F as digits, so the number can be written a little shorter than if you just used 0-9. ‘A’ means ten, ‘B’ means 11, etc.) Don’t read the character names out loud — just the dialog, and you will be on the verge of invoking the wrath of the AACS people, too.

It’s about a man called Dee who is trying to proposition several prositutes, but insists that that he has won the services of one or two in a previous (unspecified) eating competition. The german madam disagrees and insists that the rate will be seven (hundred Euros) for the three women, “If I have (a) [body guard]” – and the refers idiomatically to her body guard as if he were a bumble bee, given his ability to “sting” the stingy patron.

One of the employees at the brother claims that Dee only “ate for one” at the eating competition. He insists that he must have eaten five or six meals and then pulls out a card which he says shows he ate five. Then he claims six. The employee looks at the scorecard and realises it only says three. He continues to insist that he ate five, correcting himself and saying six. He indicates the front and back of the card white saying “ate, ate” to indicate that he ate the quantities on both sides of the card at the eating contest.

Dee – Oh, “nein?” F— “nein.” Won one o’ two!
Madam – Nein, Dee. Seven for ‘e three, ‘f I’ve bee.
Lady – Dee ate for one.
Dee – Five? Six? See, Five! Six!
Lady – Three!
Dee – Five… Six! Ate. Ate. See?
Madam – Oh.

Feel free to copy that scene or perform it or put it on T-shirts. I do ask that you let me know if you do so.

I recently responded to a craigslist post which mentioned a company looking for ideas for a cooking show. I hadn’t mentioned it on the blog because even I can’t imagine there is much of an audience looking forward to reading every pointless little detail of every email I send.

I got a reply back from “Taste This Production, Inc.” about the email that I had sent, asking for me to call and discuss the possibility of making a TV show. So, I called, and then was told that the producer would send me an information packet to review. Since they hadn’t yet asked for money, I figured it might not be a scam.

I recieved the information packet. Apparently, they were not only vaguely interested in making something, but ready to proceed with making a pilot. Of course, they hadn’t seen a photo of me, hadn’t seen a demo tape, hadn’t seen a recipe, hadn’t seen my cooking, or anything else. Reading a little further in the information packet, and I found the clincher — they were really interested in making the pilot, but I would have to pay $5000 of the costs. ::sigh:: I had actually managed to convince myself they might be completely legit. Oh well. So, no cooking show for me any time soon. May have to try and talk to an aspiring director at CFS and try to actually shoot a pilot of a cooking show. You know, for not five thousand dollars.

Freak Train was last night. Finally figured out something to do.

They were doing some of the plays for “365 Plays / 365 Days” last night. If you don’t know what that is, then you aren’t one of the cool kids. Five of the slots were pre-scheduled, but two were kept open for last minute signups. I decided to sign up for first slot. So, I was given a one page play. At first, I had rather intended to recruit folks from the crowd to assist me with the play, but I ultimately decided against doing so. You see, some of the guys for the pre-scheduled slots had brought costumes and set pieces and whatnot. So, I realised that even with several random audience members, I would be hard pressed to compete. My inspiration was to go in the exact opposite direction. Rather than trying to compete with costumes and set pieces, I would try to do my play as minimally as possible. The most minimal version of the production I could imagine was just me, in the dark. In the style of a radio play. I borrowed a flashlight so that I could read my lines in the dark, explained to the lighting guy that I needed it completely dark, and performed my play while hiding behind a staircase so that most of the audience couldn’t see the flashlight.

There were only two speaking characters, plus my decision to add a narrator to introduce the radio play and read the stage directions, and a fourth voice for the horrible screaming coming from “off stage.” So, with only four voices, I apparently didn’t have too much trouble keeping them apart. People seemed to get it, which was nice. Anyhow, It has forcibly convinced me that Atom Smith might just work if I bother to write it. Yargh.

The student film festival takes place at the Kenneth King Center Building in the “Concert Hall” at CU Denver on Thursday, May 10th. I am told that it starts at 7:00 pm.

This is the website for the location:
http://www.kennethkingcenter.org

Here is a “Map and Directions” page which has a PDF which notes a lot with free parking:
http://thunder1.cudenver.edu/CAM/kingcenter/KCMap.html

It’s at the Auraria campus, which is basically at Colfax between I-25 and Speer. Unfortunately, the film festival does not announce the final playlist in advance, so I won’t know for sure if Intercourse, PA is actually going to be shown. After my conversation with the director, I can say that it is apparently likely. Either way, I am also told that admission is free. With any luck, most of the films won’t suck too terribly, and it’ll be a fun time.

I recently found out that a production company that does cooking shows is looking for a few ideas for new series, so I sent an email, and got a response this morning. Tried calling the number that the producer gave me, but I just got his voice mail. I’ll try calling again tomorrow and see if I can convince him I should be a celebrity chef.

Freak Train tonight. Still need to figure out what I’m gonna do.

I just got home from re-recording some dialog for a scene in the Amish Sex movie, and I got to see a cut of it. This was fun because it was the first time I had gotten to see any of the footage that was shot. It’s a bit shorter than I had expected for some reason. The director could have stretched it out a bit with all that we shot, but it did look good. We should be at the student showcase film festival mabob presentation majig on May 10th. I’m looking forward to seeing how well it is recieved.

Freak Train tomorrow. Need to figure out what I’m doing.

I went to a taping of the Food Network Challenge’s Macaroni and Cheese competition yesterday. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as I had hoped, but I did get free copies of the recipes that the competitors used. Five competitors, making two dishes each, makes a grand total of ten types of Macaroni and Cheese which I will almost certainly never make. The first round was “traditional” mac and cheese, but the rules were absurdly broad (must use elbow macaroni, cheddar, and some type of milk or cream) and the judging criteria didn’t include any points for traditionalness. So, it wasn’t traditional in the traditional sense. Of course, the first cook in front of the judges had the most traditional dish, and had actually done quite a bit of research on historical variations. But, because she was first, the judges got out all their complaining about how it wasn’t what they thought of as traditional. They seemed to get the complaining out of their system with her, and didn’t particularly take issue with the vastly less traditional dishes of the other competitors.

I didn’t bother staying long enough to find out who won the ten grand, but I hope it was the one I just mentioned. The fact that she had actually done research on the subject of Mac and Cheese made the snooty judge terribly uncomfortable because he realised she could call him out if he was a bullshitter. He rambled at length about his “deep” knowledge of the subject to all the competitors who didn’t seem to have done any reading on the subject.

Anyhow, the most novel thing of the day was running into Zane from Mouth Off at the taping. By random coincidence, he and his mom just happened to sit right next to me. I heartily enjoyed making Zane terribly uncomfortable by talking about such things as my work on the Westminster Wife Show. (Read that blog antry if you aren’t familiar with the film…)

Then, the three of us moved, and we happened to sit next to Rick who used to run Oddville at the Avenue theatre. So, with Zane, Rick, and myself we had a whole section of people in shows on 17th street which are currently on a likely permanent hiatus.

Now that I have been doing more and more stuff, it amazes me how much I am running into people I already know. At the shoot for Intercourse, PA I ran into Kathryn Gould, who I had met a few weekends prior at a CASA meeting. Embarrassingly, I didn’t recognise her. I blame the amish dress. Being a minimally social sort of person, I’m just not accustomed to encountering people I know in unexpected contexts. It’s a brave, small, new world out there, I guess.

Mac and cheese show should air late summer, around the time of the Simpson’s Cake show, which is scheduled to come out right around the time of the movie.

Well, it looks like I spoke to soon. Intercourse, PA is no longer wrapped. There were some technical difficulties suring the last scene which didn’t become apparent until after we thought we were done shooting. So, we will need to go back and reshoot on Saturday. This should work fine, as I have to be in Denver Saturday afternoon for a previously scheduled audition, so I have to be in the area of the shoot anyway.

Monkey Tango is a short buddy comedy shot in West Lafayette Indiana by Pete Desiderio. I helped a bit with the script and offered a few ideas, but I wasn’t directly involved with production as I was over a thousand miles from West Lafayette Indiana when it was made. I have a DVD of it, but it is giving me fits trying to convert it into a more web friendly format. I may just post all four gigabytes of the DVD, so that you can get the out takes and eveything, including the drinking game audio commentary track.

This project is not current, not part of my demo reel, and here only for archival purposes.

This was a high school production that I worked on with Pete Desiderio and a few other guys. We were docked points because it was slightly too long. It was our first project to use any significant 3D animation for the space ships, and the alien jiggling purple blob overlords and a few other things. Also, most of the scenes are shot on a blue/green screen and composited over some other background.

I’m trying to track down the trailer for it, and possibly a few promotional stills that we made. I’ll post them if I can get ahold of them.