… cloudy day in Portland, Oregon [timelapse] …

It was a cloudy day here in ol’ PDX, although it was nice and warm. I decided to fire up my still camera and shoot some of the nice big clouds puffing across the sky.

Here is a little time lapse movie I made with a fast interval timer script and my Canon A640. Each different shot is 40 seconds of real time.

Soundtrack created with some help from SKdrummer and SK-crooner.

~3.8mb

Double click to play:

It also rained quite a bit tonight. I took this picture with a flash after white balancing on a can of Pabst … rain drops in mid-air.

why are pop songs always 3 1/2 minutes long?

When recorded media was first introduced, it was a novelty. The Edison Cylider, being the first practical distribution method for recorded sound, never took off.

The 78 rpm record did take off, and thanks to its limitations, pop songs have been limited to about 3:30 in length. You couldn’t fit more than that onto a 78. Record executives, engineers, and producers all knew this. To sell popular music, a song had to fit on one side of a 78.

Musical forms and structures evolved quickly to fill the 3:30 time limit. The verse-chorus-verse formula that still exists today came about so that songs could come to a satisfying conclusion within the time limit of the record.

These limitations were ingrained upon songwriters and arrangers for 40 years.

As technology eliminated the 3:30 barrier for popular music with the LP record and more recently the CD, I often wonder why the time limit remains. I guess old habits are hard to break.

I leave you with a ghost from the past — the original cassette tape format that survived for eight years. I have never seen one of these or even met a person that has heard of this, so don’t expect people to care about your damn ipod 40 years from now.

… homemade USB camera shutter release …

Thanks to someone over on this website, I was able to convert a clicky pen into USB shutter release. It is designed for and works great with my CHDK modified A640.

With some electrical tape, my soldering iron, some tin foil, a few batteries and a push button switch, I was able to get this thing working in about an hour.

[Note - you have to use a metal pen that conducts on the inside]

I cut the “computer” end off of the USB cable and soldered the black wire to the negative lead of the battery. I smashed some tin foil down in the end of the pen so that the positive side would make contact with the inside of the metal body. This was conected to one side of the push button switch. The other side was connected to the red lead of the cut USB cable.

Now I can shoot controled single frame animation with my 10 mega pixel camera!

I also got my little bunkers and tanks for the “Combat” shoot which is coming up soon!

… SK-crooner 1.0 VSTi almost done …

My VST instrument SK-crooner is almost done. It is based on the 8 bit human vocaloid samples from the Casio SK-1 keyboard. Basic Moog style filtering … bit depth and sample crushing … vibrato rate and depth control with an on/off switch … portamento … ADSR controls.

Here is a mock up of the panel (TO BE CHANGED):

The “human voice” patch on the Casio SK-1 was one of my favorite sounds as a kid. It sounded funny and kind of intriguing at the same time.

SK-crooner belts out the notes in “original” mode pretty much exactly like the original keyboard did back in the 1980’s.

In “tone held” mode, a continuous portion of the waveform is looped so you can play sustained notes. No more “HOO … HOo … Hoo … hoo”. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, try it in original mode and you will get a chuckle.

If you are interested in Beta testing SK-crooner, drop me a line via the contact page. I’ll send you a .dll [sorry, windows only]

You can hear examples of SK-crooner in the following posts…

robo-dolly

python madness

cloudy PDX timelapse

… Columbia Gorge Model Railroad test pics …

I went out to the Columbia Model Railroad Club today to do some location scouting for the “Combat” music video. It was good to go back and realize the scope of the place. BIG. There is more than enough material to work with there.

[quick shots of the Columbia Model Railroad Club - click to enlarge]

I was shooting with my A640 at ISO 800 so the pictures are pretty grainy. I’ll be bringing all my lights out for this one…

I also sketched out a rough shooting schedule for the project. I hope to shoot the live action “bunker” portions in the catacomb like maze below the main floor. There is an unbelievable amount of electrical wire and great looking electrical panels with flashing lights that make for a great set.

I’m working up another CHDK camera script in mind called “Slippery Wobble” that slides from one random focal point to the next instead of jumping. Hmmmm…..

I hope to get everything shot within the next few weeks…

Carl August Johansen III

A year ago today I went to a memorial service for a good friend and relative of mine. His name was Carl Johansen.

He was a soft-spoken photographer and musician that spent most of his life in Pullman, Washington. When I was living in Moscow, Idaho he would venture over from Pullman (he didn’t have a car or license) to share his extensive photo albums with me.

I inherited some of his things … so I looked through some of his photographs and chose a few to share on the anniversary of his memorial.

[some photos by Carl Johansen - no Photoshop here]

He enjoyed taking pictures of his television. I had a “Twin Peaks” moment when I found two full rolls of film that he had shot of his TV while watching “Twin Peaks”. I think David Lynch would be proud.

Carl hoped to someday simultaneously watch “Alien” and “The Elephant Man” on two screens at the same time. I don’t know if he ever got the chance, but I promise I’ll try it at some point.

I will always admire his courage to continue on and be creative in the face of his personal struggles. It was harder for him than most people, and yet he managed to take literally thousands of pictures, write music and share it with his friends and family.

“Planet Earth: Our Response” in the Journal of Short Film

My latest short film, Planet Earth: Our Response has been selected to be in Vol. 11 of The Journal of Short Film.

It is the first regional issue of the quarterly DVD journal and was currated by local film maker Karl Lind.

There will be a screening of the all of the selected films on May 28th at 7:00pm in the Whitsell Auditorium in the Portland Art Museum.

The film is about 10 minutes long and was created over many years of collecting and categorizing archival footage. A fictional historical narative was created by intercutting my own footage with the public domain footage I aquired. The result is a sci-fi documentary set sometime in the past involving the U.S. government and the Galactic Census Bureau.

You can watch the entire film here on my site!

Click here to watch the film.