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take a needle to the arm of the world
2003-10-27 08:37:32
It sucks when the only song you can listen to while clipping without going off track is the song you're doing for your video. And it's only 2:30 long. And your clip stages generally run about 2 hours.
Current video: Seatbelts, "Go Go Cactus Man" to Early Reins. Progress check: 38%. Expected catalog number: #84. I was trying to listen to some Primordial last night while doing clipping, but the flow was totally off. Fifteen minutes of "GGCM" on repeat later, I decided that I had to stop listening to anything at all -- either I wouldn't get the source I needed, or I'd smash my speakers to flinders. I've got about 100-115 seconds so far of the 312 I need for 100% overage, and I'm just under (by like two frames) a quarter of the way through the main source file. Good numbers, good projections.
I suddenly remembered, last night, why I was so thankful back in January to go back to editing MPEG2 direct. I haven't done any VDub-based clipping in four and a half months, and I'd forgotten what a godawful pain in the ass it is. It's even worse in this case than normally, though, because I don't have enough source to just clip around subs. Most of the source collected so far is generated by tried-and-true techniques of not taking frames with text on them, but there are quite a few cuts where I have to crop and resize. I'm only taking about 50 pixels off the vertical, so most elements won't have a noticeable change, and most characters won't appear too drastically off-model, but it's still a headache now and will be a bigger headache in editing if I have to arrange shots (on an already extremely limited source selection) to keep the aspect ratio changes from being obvious. It SHOULDN'T be too hard, but things rarely turn out as expected.
Offtopic:
There have been several long threads on the forum lately about, essentially, whether or not to make videos based on the audience's expected reaction. Sword above, people. STOP GIVING A FUCK. If I cared what other people thought about my work, I'd have quit or sold out a long time ago (some may not think this is such a bad thing, but to them: nlm mln). Make the videos you want to make. Give everyone who likes them a thumbs up. Give everyone else the finger.
It's just a hobby. If it's fun for you, screw reputation, image, and potential fan yield. Nobody ever got good or famous by asking if it was okay to do so first.
--Kai out
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bodies cooling down
2003-10-24 08:21:28
Well, it didn't turn out that bad. Video entries will be up tomorrow, as soon as I'm done with post, which is probably going to take most of today. The regular video looks and rolls pretty good; even if it's slack in some parts, it starts and finishes well, the overall editing is the tightest and fastest in SH history, and most of the lipsynch came out on. The really bad parts are somewhat obscured by the strobing, too, so it's all good.
The Chipmunk Mix, though, is fucking gold. It's the first video that I've done that has cracked *ME* up. #68 and #71 usually draw a chuckle, and #64 always gets my blood racing, but this is the first video I've done that I've enjoyed as much as OV's 'Bitches', which got me into this shite way the hell back when. Most of the lipsynch in this mix ends up even better than the original, probably due to closure. Average cut length is down around 0.5 seconds, and all the texting is still parseable. Kickass.
Of course, I'm still not going to put it up on the Donut. There are rules against sexual nudity, and there probably ought to be rules against nonstop profanity. Hopefully, someone will run an online contest with loose rules and a weak comedy category, and it'll win some hosting. If not, I'll have to send a CD and heavy disclaimer on down to Red Wolf.
Current video: Seatbelts, "Go Go Cactus Man" to Early Reins. Progress check: 25%. Expected catalog number: #84. I've done enough comedy-action for now. Going to go relax, do my 492 problem set, and gather clips for this ZCoA straight-tell this weekend.
I initially thought of doing this song to the famous Red Dwarf episode "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", but that was going to be as a favor to my bro. He hated the song, though, so I did a Boondock Saints video with Ignite instead. The song stuck around, and after being blown away by Early Reins, the obvious course was to put a video with this music into the to-do list.
Of course, I hate the obvious, so I looked around for second opinions. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything more metal with as much of a Western feel as I needed to make a video from this little source (40 minutes will be tough), and of my three C.W. McCall candidates, "Oregon Trail" had too much literalism and "Silver Cloud Breakdown" and "Telluride Breakdown" had too many horn breaks. This song had the pacing just right , and develops in a way that I'll be able to use a straight retelling as a concept, which sadly, is virtually the only thing you can do with a three minute song and 40 minutes of source video.
The next one will be a little different; Munto has a lot of pure abstract visuals as opposed to Early Reins' plot-driven cinematography, and the song I'll be using for that is much less linear. That, though, can wait; I probably won't do any work on that until after Con Ja Nai. Two weeks....hope Ian has all those eps covered.....
--Kai out
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imagine humanity's decline
2003-10-23 08:00:08
......and you'll have a pretty good idea of what the soon-to-be-completed-provided-I-survive-478 video is going to look like. I'm not sure I want to release it now. SH has done a lot of stuff that is not kid-safe, or not non-death-freak-safe, but this one may not be human-safe.
Current video: Metallica, "So What" to Excel Saga. Progress check: 95%. Expected catalog number: #83. Effects work ran six hours, but that's the price of fifteen seconds of cube-in-cubes and a tunnel, plus all the normal effects crap I always have to sift through. And in the course of this, I made the video a crime against humanity.
The purpose of this song is to shock rather than just amuse, so there's a semi-strobe in here containing 37 frames of extremely brutal hentai in razor-sharp quality. Not just the normal explicit penetrations; we're in the category of sexual torture here. Even *I*'m sickened by this stuff; I'm pretty sure there's a shot of a suicide victim in among them.
This video already had a lot of tasteless stuff in it, but this strobe (and another cut replacement with a less brutal but nonetheless degrading image) hits a new low. Time will tell if it's possible to make a video worse than these parts, or if anyone will find this crap funny. It started out as a comedy video, but now it's more of a sick practical joke played on the viewer.
Of course, I had to watch this stuff render at 3 fps; it's going to be going by the viewer at 29.97, so it might not make quite as deep of an impression. Nonetheless, SH083 has its title already finalized: Don't Watch This Video.
--Kai out
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iconoclasm sweeps cappadocia
2003-10-22 07:55:31
Put a good bit of work into the video as well as into 478 over the last few days; it'll probably be done following the exam tomorrow......if I somehow survive. This is going to be a tough test that will take all my resources to get through, and I need every point I can get to make sure I keep standing and don't have to do another semester.
Current video: Metallica, "So What" to Excel Saga. Progress check: 90%. Expected catalog number: #83. Drafting is done, and I'm expecting to do some effects work tonight after getting all my notes in order for the exam. Open book means more preparation, less memorization. There's three cube-in-cubes in here and a tunnel, plus a bunch of less-intense-looking effects, and that's on top of ridiculously sick videography and a new record for cut speed. This video is probably going to come out better than #82, which would be a first for second-rank videos (Project Haibane doesn't count; there's virtually no overlap between the source spaces used for #75 and #78).
Of course, none of this is concretely determined yet; I don't know how good the video's going to be until I get the effects in and see how the final synch looks, which will probably no be until sometime Friday. Have to mail out the AUSA entry today too....
--Kai out
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a new world will be born one day
2003-10-20 11:46:57
Unproductive weekend. Mostly because TMPEG was being a git about the 2-gig barrier, but I've worked around that for now. The Anime USA entry is done and will be mailed probably this afternoon; I need to find a post office and some clear packing tape.
And also because I went through my first Animania showing on staff Saturday, having spent the morning walking nine ill-advised miles to and from the supermarket. Not only did that take up 10 hours of my time, it also left me unwilling to do much of anything yesterday except sit in bed listening to my legs scream at me for pushing them through more than three times their normal use level (walking to and from class is about two miles each way; I did a total of 12 or so Saturday) and using them as brace points to lift an aggregate of 200+ pounds of speakers and other gear. It's not my fault I'm the only one on tech staff who can lift a speaker above his/her head solo.
No progress change; I should get the timing chart done tonight, but this week I'll also be studying for a major exam that I have to do quite well on to have a chance of getting credit in 478. The video might be done by the end of the week, but I've also got a Sword-cursed programming assignment to deal with and another AI problem set. Never ends.
Offtopic:
For some dumb reason, I bought M.D. Geist this weekend, and actually sat all the way through it. It's still less bad than Hanappe Bazooka (the gore at least was alittle interesting, and coolly realized despite the shiity production values), but so bad that I actually started thinking seriously about what in the hell it was supposed to accomplish.
Geist inherits a lot from Mad Max and the Terminator (the cleaned-up Geist's first appearance with the shades in the original OVA makes this latter one obvious), but unlike either, there is no eventual redemption. Geist is a plain and simple killing machine. Regular army, rebels, humans, robots, Geist kills them all with equanimity. Whenever one side or the other gets too close to wiping the other out and ending the war, Geist intervenes and starts the killing up again.
The problem most people have with this is that Geist, apart from the revenge motivation that leads him to kill the Guards commander at the end of the first OVA, has no reasons behind his actions. He just likes to kill and spread chaos. He's a villain, a bad guy, and the title character of the series. This doesn't make sense to normal anime viewers.
The thing is that Geist *does* have a motivation, which is made more clear in Breaston's experiments on him in the second OVA. Geist exists to fight; as a M.D.S. fighting and killing are programmed into his very genetic codes. In his wholehearted pursuit of destruction, Geist has more in common with the robots of the Death Force than with the humans that he superficially looks like. As the actions of the Nexrum commanders at the end of the second OVA demonstrate, when there is no war there is no need for M.D.S.; unlike Krauser Geist recognizes this, and assures his continual existence by taking the Loki-role and starting unnecessary conflicts.
This brings to mind the arguments around the creation of the first professional, permanent, police forces in mid-nineteenth-century England; opponents of the police held that institutionalizing law enforcement would institutionalize crime. If the police ever did succeeed in fully ordering society and purging it of its criminal elements, there would be no reason for their continued existence. In the Geist scenario, this line of logic can be constructed as the proposition that dedicated soldiers, in order to justify their continued existence, will continually start or try to start wars, regardless of the consequences for others.
It may be reaching a litte to read M.D. Geist as an argument against the institution of a professional military, but it's definitely a possible impression, and not too far off base; much of the initial hysteria that led to the Cold War was created by falsified intelligence reports submitted by ex-Nazi spies (under Western control) anxious to justify their continued existence, and amped up by the CIA, anxious to make itself a permanent agency, unlike its wartime-only predecessor, the OSS. From a Japanese perspective, informed by Japanese history (especially in the first half of the twentieth century and at the turn of the seventeenth), the idea that warriors will create wars, and not the other way around, may be more easily current.
Or, alternatively, it could be a bloody, poorly plotted, pointless, crappily animated post-apocalyptic violence series that died after two OVAs because nobody really cared. Either or.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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