You are looking at posts that were written in the month of October in the year 2008.
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Halloween … first grade.
My mom bought me a little plastic container filled with that fake skin putty. I had a pair of blue jeans torn at the knee.
I molded the putty around the tear and made it look like I had an enlarged kneecap. I dragged my leg behind me and told people I was Igor.
That was it. I didn’t even have a hump on my back.
What is that poster on Willie's wall???
Total Voters: 15
Loading ...The above image is a still from the “No Escape!” music video. That is Willie. He is at home playing video games.
This poll is being conducted to gauge my ability to translate visual concepts as an artist. There is a 17.3% margin of error in polling results.
Click the image above to play the unfinished music video for the unfinished song “News” off of an unfinished album from several years ago!
[~45mb - LARGE and 3 minutes long, so let it stream for while before watching it.]
Well … October is that spooky time of year. I’ve decided to go digging through my closet for some skeletons.
Let’s see here … digging through closet … hmmmm … oooh … nope … too scary … heck no … ahhh maybe … noooo way … AHHH HAAA!!!
Perfect! Found one!
Here is an epic tale of an epic, undead project!
This story starts about nine years ago …
Towards the end of my band “Eureka Farm”, I lived outside of Palouse in what I commonly refer to as the “Chicken Coup”. You can see a shot of it briefly in my short film Time Lapse 1. I was shooting tons of Super 8 movies back then and I really wanted to do a detailed stop motion animation. I decided to start work on a video for the song “Quinsonnas”.
I designed and built myself a rear projection animation table and camera rig out of some wood and tripod parts. I story boarded out the film and shot most of the background plates for the rear projection around the Chicken Coup. “Eureka Farm” went to New York to play the CMJ festival and I shot the rest of the plates in the city.
I made dozens of little characters out of art board and designed my main character out of the same sturdy stuff and hinged him so that his limbs could move. I made several different heads with various expressions that I could slip in to change his mood.
The reality and the scope of the film left me experimenting for a long time. Super 8 film just wasn’t fast enough to pick up the light from the rear projected slides. On top of that, there was no real way to keep track of my work as I progressed through dozens, hundreds and thousands of frames. I would only get to see my work a few weeks after shipping it out to be developed. This was too heartbreaking so I shelved the project for many years.
In the meantime, I moved to Portland and wrote about an albums worth of material (that I never released). One of these songs fit nicely with the stop motion world I created for “Quinsonnas” and I started re-envisioning the piece in the context of the song “News”. Many of the elements remained.
I made the switch to video, which allowed me a real-time preview of what I was doing. If I messed up a move, I could instantly know and not waste hours of my life. I set out to redo the film. As I learned more about computers and film making, my friend Gideon introduced me to After Effects. I was skeptical at the time, but now it has to be my favorite piece of visual software. Thanks Gideon.
The segment above is as far as I ever got on the piece. The song was never finished. The movie was never finished. There are scenes that are not animated. There are scenes missing objects and characters!
After watching the film tonight I can officially declare it undead. I’m absolutely sure it will rise from the grave someday … in some form. It needs quite a bit of work (I’m lookin’ at you “Blam!!” that comes out of the doorway that looks like a bad internet font). It was also part of a larger story, so it isn’t complete on it’s own. I mean … there’s a whole scene dedicated to a chicken and a grasshopper that hasn’t been made yet!
I think I finished tracking the climactic end vocals for the song “Atlantis” today. By the last iteration of the vocal phrase there are twenty vocal tracks.
I mixed down a version of the end to put up here on my blog.
This mix does NOT have any:
Guitar
Keyboards
Piano
It is just vocals, drums and bass. Well … okay … I left one keyboard track in there, but it’s only playing one note so it doesn’t really count right? RIGHT!
The vocals are completely dry … to give you a clear picture of the layering.
The end of Atlantis …
… sounds kind of ominous.
Lyrics can be found here.
[The above picture was captured from my HD camcorder while streaming to the S10. Note the firewire card sticking out of the right hand side.]
As a “no budget” film maker, I’m always looking for interesting and harebrained solutions to problems that don’t exist. For instance …
How can I get a battery powered field monitor that shows me all kinds of relevant image data while I shoot video on location without lugging around my laptop?
Well … you could always get a really tiny laptop with a firewire adapter. The Lenovo S10 is a 10.2″ netbook that has an expresscard 34 slot. I picked up an expresscard to firewire 400 adapter and plugged it into my new S10.
It was detected and my Canon HV20 was recognized. I installed Adobe OnLocation CS3… but there was a hitch! OnLocation looks for a 1024×768 monitor and won’t run without one. In order to get this thing running, you need to set your display preferences to a “virtual” 1024×768. The native resolution of the S10’s LED monitor is 1024×600.
This worked and OnLocation was able to stream to my little tiny computer. Cool.
I wouldn’t recommend streaming a high def HDV signal though … the lag time is about 2 seconds! OnLocation has to decode the stream on the fly so it looks like the 1.6GHz CPU in the S10 just won’t cut it. Heck … my 2 GHz Core2 Duo won’t even cut it for live HDV streaming. Standard definition material seems to work just find with only a slight lag.
I haven’t given it the real test yet … so I’ll have to get back to this concept at a later date.
… continuing my comparison of the AxeTrak and the Grendel Dead Room guitar speaker isolation cabinets …
I pumped some white noise into both the AxeTrak and Grendel Dead Room. I captured the profile of the spectrum and have posted some comparison images here.
It should be noted that the microphone placement inside the Grendel Dead Room is entirely subjective. You can put whatever you want in there and mess around with it. I used an off-axis Sure SM57 and a MXL V69G to represent some average mics that people may have and be familiar with. The Dead Room can also come loaded with a large variety of popular speaker choices so you can really customize the sound. Mine has a Veteran 80 in it.
The built in mic of the AxeTrak provides “set and forget” convenience that may appeal to people that just want to get on with the “recording” part and not worry about microphone selection and mic placement issues. It is tiny, portable, and much quieter than the Dead Room. With the bass port in, I could record at 2 AM and not worry about it.
The above picture shows white noise inside the AxeTrak (yellow line) and an off-axis 57 (blue line). You can see the traditional coloration of the 57 as it falls off towards the high end. The AxeTrak has a pretty large bass bump, but falls off in the “rumble zone” after 80 Hz.
The above picture shows white noise inside the AxeTrak (yellow line) and the V69G (white line). Note the fairly linear response of large diaphragm the V69G. It seems to lack the peaks and valleys of both the AxeTrak and the Sure SM57. The AxeTrak seems to have been designed to emulate the response of the 57 (a traditional guitar cabinet microphone) to a certain degree.
The above picture shows white noise inside the Dead Room off-axis 57(blue line) and the V69G (white line). Just for fun. It does show that you can get some pretty different sounds out of the Dead Room if you have some flavorful mics around. Just remember to invert the phase and check for frequency cancellation.
I own two guitar amp isolation cabinets that are very different. I decided to record some tracks with each one to document their differences.
The AxeTrak
The AxeTrak is a very small little box that has a speaker input, an XLR output (NOT phantom powered), an LED, and a switch. It is very simple and well built. When it runs, it is virtually silent.
It has an internal dynamic microphone that cannot be moved or adjusted in any way. There is a bass port, but I have yet to need any more bass out of the little guy, so I have always left it closed.
The Grendel Dead Room
The Grendel Dead Room is an enormous 80 pound speaker cabinet that contains your choice of various speaker makes. Mine has a Veteran 80 (a Warehouse Speaker clone of a popular British speaker).
Inside the cabinet, there are two mic mounts and dual XLR jacks. You can plug just about anything into it and feed the signal to a pair of jacks on the outside of the cabinet. It is very well built. The lid is sturdy and the hinges are all very strong. It is heavy.
The Test
I ran my hollow body Artcore guitar into my Bitmo Modded Blackheart 5 watt tube amp and fed both cabinets at the same time. All of the tone controls and gain control were set in the middle positions. For each test (low, mid and high gain), I used a different Bitmo voicing on the Blackheart to change the tone and gain structure.
The AxeTrak had the bass port closed and the “low cut” switch off. The Grendel Dead Room was miked with an off-axis 57 and a MXL V69G (just for the fun of it). Like I said before … you can put whatever you want in there. [Note - I do have a Blue Ball microphone that was a little difficult to position while using another mic in the cabinet.]
I recorded three different guitar parts. Make no mistake … I did not spend hours dialing in my dream tones for this test. Nor do I normally riff on two power chords. I just sat down and put everything on an even playing field. Here they are … you decide what you think.
[Recorded with a BLA MOTU 828mkII & SCA N72/C84]
Low Gain:
AxeTrak
Dead Room 57
Dead Room V69G
Mid Gain:
AxeTrak
Dead Room 57
Dead Room V69G
High Gain:
AxeTrak
Dead Room 57
Dead Room V69G
All of the above samples are dry and unaltered in any way (no EQ or compression ect.). For more information of the AxeTrak or Dead Room, just type the appropriate word into the “search” box in the top right corner of my blog.
