The wife was sick this weekend and I didn’t have anything going on. After dicking with the web site for most of Saturday I finally got back to script writing and editing. Keith wants Revenge is about 99% and I should have the final draft finished by the end of the week. I’ve found that I have more inspiration when I bounce between two scripts. This way when I run out of ideas for one, I bounce to the other. Finding that I have fresh ideas.
Yesterday it was back to editing Crosshairs. I’m sure that will make Jasso happy. I really want to shoot the guy who was the former DP before I took over. The last half of scene 5 has no audio what so ever. It’s not like I’m completely innocent from making mistakes but fuck! I at least make sure my audio and lighting is good. That’s another thing I’m running into. Bad lighting. AF can fix some of it but when the scene is almost pitch black it can’t do much for it. I really wish I was working on this project from day one. I really want to talk to Bret and Matthew about reshooting some of this stuff as painful as that maybe. Who know it may look good when I’m done editing it. Right now I’m just whining.
I spent a lot of this weekend redoing the web site. It looks the same but it has a lot of much needed functionality. While hunting around for how to integrated my WordPress blog into my ASP.NET web site, I found that the guys at SubSonic released a CMS starter site. I started making mods to till about 3AM and continued this afternoon. I was able to completely duplicate the layout and keep the navigation similar to how I had it before. There are still several things I need to do. I want to clean up the fonts. The big thing that is missing right now is the watch now functionality in the Filmography. I’m going to try and get that back up in a day or so. The big improvement is the site is now dynamic which mean I can now create a new page without having to use VS.NET to do it. Also the index page is pulling the top 5 posts from the blog.
Over the past few months I’ve been working on a small video project at work. YouTube was one of the ServerBeach’s biggest customers, and as a thanks for being such a wonderful customer we came up with a small mockumentory/roast. Have a look and enjoy.
What the hell here it is:
I finally got around to doing some tests with the new Quad Core workstation this evening. Holy Smokes, that thing screams! I did a test render in AF of a 4 minute clip with some color corrections. What would of normally rendered out in 15 to 20 minutes with my old system only took 4 minutes with the Quad Core. Not bad if I do say so myself. Next I did a test render in Vegas. This clip was roughly 2 minutes in length. It only 30 seconds to render out the clip. 30 Seconds! The bloody clip is longer by a factor of 4. This means a 15 minute short will now render in 7 to 8 minutes rather ant 1 hour. I think my editing time will be licked in the next 48Hr film ordeal. Next month I want to drop some cash on a Geforce 7800 GT. Which I’m sure will also kick the speed a bit more.
Last night I was trying to import some footage for a project I’ve been doing for work. My workstation is old, there is no polite way to put it. It’s a POS! Well during the import I couldn’t get a descent capture with out frames being dropped. I decided to close out all my apps and reboot. That as a mistake. My system continued to boot loop. Today I started shopping around for a new motherboard and proc. I was torn between getting an AMD or Intel. After doing some research I found that it was best to stick with Intel even though the AMD price point was lower. I picked ended up getting an Intel® Coreâ„¢2 Quad Processor and an Intel® DG965OT Desktop Board deal with 2 Gigs or RAM. It wasn’t cheap let me tell you, but I think it will be worth it in the end. The should speed up the rendering time in both Vegas and After Effects. With the Quad Core I should be able to continue to edit while I render out color corrections in AF. After I get all the software installed tonight I’ll be doing some test to see how the performance checks out. Also this should help out a lot during the 48Hr challenges.
I have a lot of things planned for Dark Design Pictures in 2008. First and for most I want to film my own feature. If I can get away with maybe two. Yes I know, I’ve been yipping about this for a year now. As of right now my script is about 90+ pages. I’m sure after the rewrite it will be closer to 80+. I have a lot of stuff I need to over haul. But day by day I get closer to a final product. On top of that I want to do a few short films to keep the web site content fresh and to do some more experimentation. The big thing however is I want to start make money off my film making. Yeah I know what you are thinking pipe dream. Well not so much. I’m not going to start of trying to get my feature distributed just yet. My trainer has some good ideas for some workout videos. I’m not going to go into any details. It kind of top secret stuff if you know what I mean. But it has the potential to make us some cash. With more cash means, better equipment, more money for projects and the ability to pay my cast and crew. Which means more money and better projects, hopefully.
I’m one for new years resolutions. I think they are kind of silly. No mine is not to get in shape and loss weight. I’ve already been doing that for three months now. It’s to make better time of my resources. That’s time, sleep and money. Also I want to be more active in the film community. That means showing up to the film forums and such and supporting other film makes by making appearances at their screenings. I’m shy so I’m a bit of a fucking recluse. I’m also lazy sod, so we’ll see how this works out.
Last night we finally got back to shoot Cup of Joe again. I have to say that Matthew and Melissa Dawn Smith did an incredible job last night. And my camera work wasn’t half bad either. I can’t wait to see how that scene is cut together. I think it’s going to be killer. Tonight we will continue with Mathew and Melissa’s characters. It should be interesting.