The Delusional DAAPer

If you can read this I probably embedded my flash wrong, our you’re one of those losers with flash disabled on their browsers. Go turn it on.

I Just turned in this project a few hours ago, and, not gonna lie, I’m pretty proud of myself. It was the first heavy video editing that I have ever done so I was weary of how well I would be able to accomplish the goals set forth in my storyboards.

The audio still needs some work, I want to add background music, but I am never able to find what I want to use. Any suggestions? I will also be putting together a step by step video of the techniques I used including: green screen, camera tracking, color correction, rotoscoping, and matte painting.

February 8th, 2010
, , , // Motion Design / Video // No Comments

J.J. Abrams board game a la IO9

Stumbled on this over at I09 this afternoon and this looks awesome. All the JJ refrences make me smile. Makes me want to go watch some Alias and maybe start Lost over again.

Here are the rules the IO9 created for the game:

How to play: Take two six-sided dice and throw. Divide the result by fate versus free will to get the number of squares you can move forward. When you land on “Causality Loop,” you have to keep rolling until your die roll equals the product of Faith x Science. If you land on “Symbol Overload,” take a card from the “J.J. Widgets” stack in the center of the board. And yes, if you reach the final square, all of your questions will be answered!

January 31st, 2010
// Around the Internets // No Comments

4 days, 8 questions, 15, 16, 23, 42

There are only 4 more days until my most anticipated day of 2010… That’s right, the Lost premier. I just finished my 2 month marathon of the first 5 seasons, and cannot wait until Tuesday. I hope my professors are prepared for me to be unprepared come Wednesday, A girl has got to have her priorities you know.

In preperation for the upcoming season I have prepaired my list of questions I want answered along with the rest of the interents. Here it goes:

  • Why was Charles Widmore on the Island, and why do he and Ben hate each other so much?
  • How come Richard Alpert doesn’t age?
  • Who made Jacob God?
  • What was Claire’s role in all of this? Why did she stay on the Island with Christian Shepard? On that note, is Shepard dead or alive? Is he really there?
  • Speaking of dead people, is John the dead guy in the casket, or the alive guy under the foot?
  • What the hell is the smoke monster?
  • Is there any actual relation to ancient Egypt?
  • Can we change the future…?

I could come up with so many more questions, such as all of the ones in the above song (completely awesome), but the title of the post seemed catchier with the 8 questions thing. I just wish I had the motivation to come up with the 15, 16, 23, and 42 things, but I don’t.

January 29th, 2010
, // Television // No Comments

Woo Hoo! The Milestones site is live

Today the Milestones site went live at MilestonesInc.org. I am excited to have this project finished, I have been working on it for a while and had some trouble at the end getting everything working right on their servers; migrating Wordpress wasn’t as easy as I was expecting, or I did something wrong. It’s likely I did something wrong. But all is well now. Overall I am really happy with the site, I think it turned out well and I hope it will be more informative and easy to navigate than their previous site.

Check it out and let me know what you think, There are still some pages sparse on content which we are working to get filled, but we wanted to get the new site up and running as early as we could this year. I hope you like it.

January 25th, 2010
, , , , // Deisgn - HTML // 2 Comments

Interpreting McDonalds

First crit of the quarter down. Now we just get to find out how a new professor grades, those are always fun times. Below are my Insightful, Humorous, Scientific, and Everyday interpretations of McDonald’s.

January 24th, 2010
, // Static Design // 1 Comment

Spring Awakening, you need to see this

I saw Spring Awakening last night and I am pretty sure It overtook Wicked as my favorite musical. They are very different plays, hence my being “pretty sure.” Spring Awakening follow teens as they discover life and death, sex, loss, failure. It is heavy. If you are looking for an uplifting evening this won’t be it, but the music was amazing and the story was incredibly powerful. I had chills throughout.

The story and characters were amazingly well written, and although I couldn’t keep all their names straight–it was set in Germany when they had names like Melchoir and Moritz–the story was timeless. With a change of names and costumes the musical could take place anytime, anywhere.

If you want a synopsis of the story you can google it, I was overwhelmed by the experience, so that’s what I plan on talking about.

The set design was simple. There were no props other than two switches that the adults used to beat children and a few chairs; there were no set pieces, just some environmental elements hung on the wall (mirrors, chalk board, art). The orchestra was on stage, as well as about 12-15 people from the audience. I wish I had those seats, it really gives new meaning to the best seats in the house. Because of the simplicity the set it was all about the characters and their stories. That’s one of the reasons I feel like this could be set anywhere. Because I had to visualize their surroundings, I didn’t visualize them in 1880’s Germany. I like that, I like when plays give the audience the chance to interpret the setting and scenery however they see fit. This was a very deliberate choice, I’m sure. It makes the play all the more real, these could be any kids.

The lighting design was breath taking. Because they didn’t use any set pieces, good lighting was necessary to set the mood, and had to work well with nontraditional music. All the songs were set to Rock music, which may not have worked in a classic musical setting, but it worked perfectly here.

It wasn’t like they broke out in song as they went about their lives, but more as if they used song to describe the emotions they were experiencing in a specific moment. Not everyone would be involved in each number, people who weren’t involved would simple freeze while the character described what was going through his or her head. It worked really well; had they tried to integrate very American Rock and Roll with a 1880’s Germany setting in a traditional way it probably wouldn’t have worked. The lighting was used to emphasize the change. The lighting would change drastically between the actual scene and when they would start to sing.

This play was filled with music I would gladly listen to over and over again, and the story is simple, but saturated with emotion and turmoil. [aside]Just had a thought, Let start showing this to high schoolers instead of making them take sex ed. It was much more exciting to watch and a much better explanation of the overwhelming emotions that adolescents experience, although it probably doesn’t jive with the traditional American values public schools try so hard to embrace.[/aside]

If you are in Cincinnati, go see the musical while it is here, If you aren’t, they are touring so check broadwayacrossamerica.com and see if they will be in town this season. I don’t want to say this play was life changing because that’s entirely too melodramatic for my tastes, but wow, just wow.

January 23rd, 2010
, , // Theatre // No Comments

This is why college kids are fat

I swear, I was actually doing homework when I took this pic. OK, well, I was taking a break and eating my homework, but still.

Seminar (an immensely vague class name) has some obscure projects this quarter. The first of which was to take an everyday action (McDonald’s meal) and represent it in 4 different ways: scientific, humorous, insightful, and normal. Oddly enough it is the normal one I am having the most trouble with. I’ll post when I’m finished.

January 20th, 2010
, , // Static Design // 2 Comments

Motion Design Storybording

I’m gonna have a crazy quarter, but I am determined to keep up with the blog.  I am actually excited about pretty much all of my classes, and I should have some really nice portfolio work by the end of the quarter.

The project that I have jumped into first is for Motion Design.  Another entirely open ended project. The class is all about video editing and learning video techniques that I really could have used last summer when I was working on my Desperado project but since when does DAAP give us classes in the order we need them? Who knows, at least I’m learning it now, and hopefully will be able to use it on my next co-op.

Last night tore apart my room (note picture one) and spent nearly 5 hours shooting and photoshoping these storyboards.  I am really excited about this project, and hope it comes out the way I am envisioning it. Pretty simple concept: I am up late working and fall asleep at my desk.  Then the little me that I am editing, in a photo or video, jumps out of my computer, wakes me up, gives me some Pepsi and puts me back to work. Easy enough concept, whether or not I will be able to make it work is another question entirely.

I am still optimistic though, It is early in the quarter and I have not yet been beaten to a pulp staying up till 3 every night.  I am planning on shooting all my footage this weekend and starting production next week. Now I just need to find a decent video camera.

I should be posting some more research on other projects soon, I sure have a lot of them to work on. Hopefully the Milestones site will be launched this weekend so I’ll have one less thing to worry about.  I will let you know how migrating Wordpress between hosts goes.

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January 14th, 2010
, , , // Motion Design / Video // 1 Comment

Windows 7 x64 on my MacBook Pro

It was a very exciting Christmas for one such as myself, although it was not without it’s troubles, finding a tiny tiny Phillips head and a T-6 Torx screwdriver for example. Let me explain, for Chrismas I got a new Seagate 500 gb 7200 rpm hard drive that I was excessively excited about. What I didn’t expect was my complete inability to open my laptop case. I had to wait until the day after Christmas before going to 3 stores before finding a small enough Torx screwdriver to get past the memory cover.

Once the case was open it was pretty much smooth sailing. If you are looking to swap out the hard drive in a MacBook Pro – first gen, not unibody check out these instructions from Extreme Tech, they worked perfectly for me.

After dropping in my new hard drive and putting the case back together the problems returned. The original OSX Tiger disks that came with my laptop wouldn’t boot. I should have expected this having had trouble with them earlier, but I was optimistic, maybe they would work now… They didn’t.

So, with very limited options and no one with Mac OS disks within driving distance I threw in my XP disks and low and behold, I had an operating system. I only considered the pitfalls of not having Mac OS on my Mac for about five minutes before deciding I probably would be fine without it (more about that later: I was wrong). XP loaded perfectly and once it was finished I moved promptly to installing the Windows 7 upgrade.

Being a student is a very wonderful thing. I got my copy of Windows 7 x64 from the school for a whopping seven dollars, Merry Christmas to me!

As soon as I dropped in that disc however, another problem arose:

1.
2.
Select CD-ROM boot type

I still have very little idea of what this means, but www.jowie.com has an awesome post about how to burn a new ISO that will boot on a MacBook Pro. He has screen shots, and isoBurn worked perfectly, just one check box (don’t add ‘;1′ Version Numbers to Files) that you have to change from the original disc and it worked like a charm.

After burning the ISO to a new disc and booting from that disc the install went smoothly. But then I tried to install drivers. Josh Anderson has a good post on his site that was able to answer all my questions from here on out. Also, looking through his posts he is a huge Lost fan, so major points there.

Once again, not a huge hurtle, but I never upgraded to Snow Leopard, and my Leopard disk only had 32 bit drivers on it. I tried downloading drivers from rapid share (apple doesn’t have them available for download, I wish they did) but was still missing some keyboard support.

I finally got my hands on a friend’s Snow Leopard disk but then this error got thrown:

BootCamp x64 is unsupported on this model

All it takes is a few lines in command prompt (run as an admin), but I never would have figured that out on my own.

cd /d D:
cd Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple
BootCamp64.ms

Viola, model check averted, BootCamp installed.

All in all Windows 7 runs great. I was a little weary of upgrading after seeing how Vista had ravished my mom’s and brother’s computers but I have had no trouble at all. It is just as fast if not faster than XP and now I can use all four gigs of ram.

If anyone is questioning the upgrade, I say, if you have the hard drive space, go for it. I love what Microsoft has done with the OS (mostly cause it is more like OSX) and now that I have it running I can play Borderlands and run Photoshop (Not at the same time of course, that would go very very badly) without having to restart my computer.

January 11th, 2010
, , , // Random Thoughts // No Comments

Avatar FTW

I saw Avatar yesterday like millions of other people out there, in one word: Awesome. I left the theater in awe. The story, as everyone else has said, Dances with Wolves 2.0. Sure, not particularly unique, but a good story. Where the movie shined was in its visuals. Absolutely amazing, the detail that went into the creation of the planet: the forest, the creatures, the plants, was unbelievable. And when I left it didn’t feel like a made up world, I feel like I could go there, period. It was so rich and colorful, I left the theater to drive through cold, grey, gloomy downtown Cincinnati, and was seriously depressed, I wanted to go walk through a forest, or ride a horse (I wish I could go ride dragons, but that isn’t a feasible option, although if it were, I would be all over that shit). With nearly every scene I just wished I could freeze frame it and look around, explore the detail that an amazing group of artists created.

I left the theater wishing the movie would go on for another 3 hours. It felt like no time at all. I want to know more about the Na’vi culture, and the people that are a part of it. I wish I could have seen more when Jake was trying to assimilate himself to the Na’vi, He had it way too easy in my opinion, I’m pretty sure that would have gone down differently. All in all, I know they couldn’t have made it a longer movie and expected normal people to go see it, but I would have sat through something twice as long. Fingers crossed for a ridiculous directors cut.

There is so much more I could say, but others have already said it better than I could. Annalee Newitz at I09 didn’t so much write a review, but I entirely agree with her take on the story. There are so few new concepts out there; we just keep re-imaging the same old stories, had Avatar brought a unique and insightful story to the table it could have been even better.

I’ll leave you with the two parts of the movie that just irk me:

1. Unobtainium? really? You write an entire language and you decided to call the ore that they are mining Unobtainium? I am sure there was a reason, but honestly, that’s just a little stupid.

2. You used Papyrus, or a font close enough to it to piss me off, for the subtitles, that knocks you down a few notches.

December 19th, 2009
, // movies // 1 Comment
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