headbin

The more things change

I forgot one of my earliest post production lessons this month. After a week or so of looking for the best solution for auto-generating thumbnails from all the conform files and not finding any particularly elegant solutions I decided to just do it manually. Not only did it not take that long but I got a good morale boost looking at each and every shot. Something that the ILM crowd pointed out in the first ever VFX talk I went to - they just hired armies of people to do menial tasks.

Cannes-bound

Lost most of the week to data recovery business. The LAN server is toast. Ordered a new box to get things up and running again as soon as possible. Early feedback on the Cannes trailer video is promising. I want to spend much of the next fortnight improving the package.

I had a dream last night probably influenced by the round of test screenings I conducted at the NFT bar on Friday night.

I was in a cavernous amphitheatre high up in the stalls being introduced to George Lucas. After a round of pleasantries he asked me what I did so I invited him to look at the Sanctuary trailer I happened to have in my handbag on Sony PSP. He accepted but then things went pear-shaped. As I mashed the PSP buttons to start the video in record time I found myself ploughing through configuration settings for a different operating system. Somehow I'd managed to switch the device to freak-out mode and the video player wasn't having any of it. George looked on patiently but after five minutes of frantic and increasingly jittery button presses, he politely excused himself and moved on. Given that you have to jump through a few hoops simply to playback a non-UMD video on the PSP I woke up thinking that was an interesting omen. We'll see...

Hacked!

What an awful day yesterday was. First meeting of the day was to take receipt of a CDROM that didn't play. Then I discovered that a Romanian computer had hacked blade. Found I couldn't log in again to server. Then in the evening I got a puncture on my bike.

At least we didn't lose any data that I can see, just functionality like errr.. login, the VFX tracker, the source control system. What a royal pain in the arse. Thanks to speedy reponses from Lewis and Doug it looks like we'll have a new system built asap and temporary hosting for the tracker.

That's twice I've been hacked now in the last 12 years. Leaving my account logged on at uni doesn't count! First time it was some user in Brazil setting up an IRC server on my box. I don't know what yesterday's effort was all about but checking the logs, there had been a brute force ssh password guessing programme running over the machine for some time. I noticed because a DLT tape was ejected from the server (something none of my mob has been able to work out how to do for years!), then noticed "jonathan" user logged on. Just goes to show you what happens when you don't have your own security department and accidentally leave a door open. In this case, it was my fault, I'd hastily set up a 'common name' account for my flat-mate a week ago and left password set to same name. That plus opening the firewall to ssh did the trick.

Sanctuary video blog entries back online

I am always loathe to rely on LAN servers for Internet projects but given the state of the project's finances I thought I'd break another golden rule. Here's hoping the hard drive doesn't max out and die with too many accesses. However, since I'm not convinced there's ever more than 3 people in the virtual team actually looking at the externet I'm going to take the risk.

Bringing on a fair few people after yesterday's mailout - so good to hear from them - so need all the induction materials available.

Good day today. Feeling some movement once again. Gotta finish this thing!

Morning sci-fi!

Distinctive Records and Hybrid have agreed to let us use that track from the Morning Sci-Album which I've been using for the previz-comic and open it up for re-mixing. We may not get anything in the way of multi-track recordings as the group are deep in the midst of recording their new album but it's a good step anyhow.

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Yet another video site

MOD Films is not just about video. Repeat. This is not just about video....

From TechCrunch � Online Video Sites: Breeding Like Rabbits:

The problem with all these sites is that I don’t think the time of the amateur video has really come yet. Whereas everyone has a digital camera these days (minimally on their cell phone) to power sites like Flickr, digital video cameras are relatively rare. So while there’s amateur stuff out there, it still pales in terms of quantity and quality to the professional (copyrighted) stuff.

So the ultimate winner here isn’t going to be the guy with the best video editing features, per se - it’ll be the guy who can get around these copyright issues, and even convince copyright holders to treat their service as a marketing platform, licensing their viral marketing videos and clips for the users to play with and remix. Till that happens I wouldn’t bank on any of these companies surviving for the long haul.

Guys with beards

Reading Droidworks, a history of Lucasfilm and there's a photo on almost every page of guys with beards. OK, not so many beards around but making sci-fi is SUCH a guy's world. Proud to say that there's been different women involved in every stage of Sanctuary and I think i has helped bring out Blake's world.

blade_fastforward2

I think I've found my aesthetic for Blade. Expensive digipost production? No, just fast forward on an HD deck.

Analogue visuals idea

Inspired by analogue FX in Depeche Mode's live set which I saw last night. The raw reporting style of CCD footage which works well has achieved via a lipstick cam recording of viewfinders of cameras covering the event.

Need more smart low tech low fuss solutions for finishing this flick! Kinda sick of hearing how much work is required to create a "quick and dirty sci-fi aesthetic"....