Shallow ebook
Moving on in the vein of the previously mentioned writing this is a project that's been out for a couple of months now. It's a small collection of flash fiction pieces that have been haunting my hard drive. Some of them have been around for many years. It was a compulsion to actually do something with my writing that brought these pieces together. It was initially longer, at seven pieces, but I felt the other two weren't right for the tone and axed them.
Shallow is a a darker themed collection though I wouldn't go so far as to say horror. It's available at Feedbooks and Smashwords. My personal blog is at butterflybullseye.com and my writing site is davidshute.ca.
Writing Projects
Things have been a little slow around here lately. Not because there's been nothing going on but little in the way of completed video projects. Instead, most of my focus has been pushed toward writing projects. While some of these are geared toward video and film projects the majority are not. There are also some audio projects in the works.
We're quiet but we're very active.
Credit Roll
I'm currently working on the crawl for the end of The New Face of Security. It's not going as smoothly as I'd like. I've got the entire crawl laid out the way I want to but it's not scrolling smoothly. I've tried several different methods, many of them based around Flash, but it's not working how I'd like.
Now that I think of it, this is the first time that I've actually done closing credits that scroll. I've always done static plates that transition some how.
I've gotten it really close and I've needed to make some changes as I went along. Some of the things I tried in Flash.
The first attempt was simply doing everything as it's own text item and then converting that to a symbol and using a timeline tween.
The obvious problems here came down to everything moving as a single unit. Even though it was all a unit as a symbol it really wasn't a single unit. As it scrolled you could see separate items scrolling at slightly different rates.
I removed the individual text item for every item and broke it down in to groups of content. In most cases this meant condensing five or more items down in to a single item.
This helped significantly. Things moved, more or less, as a single unit. It still wasn't entirely smooth either. The easing in and out was alright but there seemed to be a bit of flicker going on. It's not clean.
I pulled out the timeline tween and did it up using ActionScript. This smoothed it out a little further while screwing up the easing. Since it's a long animation, 30 seconds in length, the easing was trying to compensate for that long time frame taking a very long time get up to speed and slow down. Still, a slight improvement.
Next I broke apart all the text. Of course, I wish I had a copy saved with the original text but that was a mistake on my part. I broke everything down to simple vector outlines. None of the text or text editing ability remained. This, again, smoothed it out slightly. I'm not sure why it deals with text and vector items differently but it did. A slight smoothing of the animation took place. Still not quite there.
I took each of these and exported to a .mov to see how they play back. They're all about as smooth as the repsective .swf play back was. Not quite smooth enough. Frustrating really.
I tried doing something up using Premiere's title feature. Awful interace to work in. Also took the vector work and saved it to an AI file, imported that, and moved the frame. This looks worse than the .mov exports from Flash.
Still looking for a good solution but I'll be moving on to soundtrack for the next little bit.
Massive Hard Drive Failure
Several weeks ago I noticed my Windows machine was running extremely off. Videos that I had zero problem editing previously were chugging along. Video that previously chugged now weren't playing at all. Granted, I had made some hardware changes and quite a few modifications so it's not unreasonable that I had conflicting software or dead ends going on that were hindering the performance of my system.
I decided it was time to reformat and reinstall. Do it right this time. Previously I was just using an entire 1 TB space a giant, open 1 TB space. To get the most out of it I should really have a second for programs and operating space, a swap space, and a storage space. If I'd done this from the get go then reinstalling Windows would be a really simple process and wouldn't require wiping the entire drive.
Not an issue. My backup drive had been performing admirably for the last year. I made sure everything was backed up and in place. This would be the first time in years that a good portion of my data was stored on a single source. Really, what could happen in two hours?
I went through the process of partitioning, formatting, and reinstalling. All said it took about three hours to get everything up and running again. Plug in my external drive and nothing. Windows doesn't find it.
Try it on my Ubuntu machine. Nothing.
Take it out of the housing and plug it in directly via SATA. Nothing.
The BIOS won't find it. Linux forensics tools won't find. This drive is toast. Along with every piece of video I've recorded or edited in the last two years.
I found some sector read file recovery tools and put them to work on the old Windows drive. The files were (mostly) still there, it was just the references to them were gone. This meant all the files retrieved were simply sequentially numbered. No more happy filenames to give me a hint of what the file was. Instead I got this.
00000001.gif
00000002.wav
00000003.avi
00000004.txt
00000005.txt
I ended up getting several million of these files I then needed to sort through manually to find all my source files. For The New Face of Security I believe I did manage to find all of these source files. At least, all the ones that mattered.
It's put a huge dent in to my time and required way more effort than I ever want to expend on something like that again. Resolved, I now return to editing once more.
Updates on The New Face of Security and edits of the stage productions for Diggin' A Hole and Everybody's Dead in the near future.
July One Acts
Now that the January One Acts are over the call has gone out for submissions for the July One Acts with KWLT. If you're got a script you're interested in directing contact them.
One Acts Photos
Some pics snapped during the dress rehearsals for Diggin' A Hole and Everybody's Dead.
Casting Call for Guelph Production
Guelph filmmakers Peter Szabo and Reese Eveneshen, both with a couple films already under their belts, have put out a casting call for their upcoming film Love Never Dies based on a short story by Stephen King.
January One Acts
The first week of the January One Acts has already passed. The process went much more quickly that I thought it would. Working on pieces over the Christmas holiday and getting started later than intended will have that effect.
Back on topic, the first week of performances is down. Complete. Finished. One more week left to go if you haven't been by yet. Of course, you could always come back and see the shows a second time too. That would be perfectly okay.
KWLT.org for more info.
There are shows left this coming Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. An 8 PM show each night with a two PM matinee on Saturday.
Aside from Everybody's Dead and Diggin' A Hole there are Trifles and The Script. I've watched both, multiple times, and like both of them. Trifles is a period drama about gender roles in rural North America around the turn of the century. The Script goes a completely different direction with surrealist modern comedy. Both fantastic shows with great casts.
Everybody’s Dead and Diggin’ A Hole
Both go to stage in a week. Still lots to go on before we hit stage, tech weekend and dress rehearsals, but we're getting really close. The show runs for two weeks; Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night with a Saturday matinée each week.
Check out kwlt.org for more info.
ADR equals Time part 4
ADR is hard, time consuming work. If you're planning on doing it you need to know that in advance. You can always hire a professional to do the work for you but the money goes quickly and I've seen pro work that is absolutely abysmal.
I don't want to be long winded with this one so I'll leave it simple. In one particular shot for The New Face of Security none of the ADR dialogue actually lined up properly. I've used all seven takes of the actor, in some case making splices between the syllables in words, made micro shifts in the time, and even stretched and shrank tiny syllable size bits of audio. After every single trick I can pull out of my hat the dialogue still doesn't fit properly.
It may not be painful but it's still obvious.