I came back to the song “Atlantis” today and had to scour my records for all the chicken scratch lyric sheets I have collected over the last six months. I have three different notepads that I use to jot stuff down … and I knew that I had some ideas somewhere.

After finding the right pieces, I transcribed them into my ‘puter and set out to make some sense of it all. I’m going to try to get this one tracked this week. I’m not sure about the guitar tracks that I recorded last summer in Palouse. I know I’m going to re-track at least one section with my Grendel Dead Room. The rest of it could work with a little mixing and slight EQ.

Maybe …

I have been working on the timeline for the “No Escape!” music video. It has a total of 47 shots on it right now (I couldn’t fit them all into the screen cap. above). I had quite a few new scenes to drop into the timeline. It looks like I have about two thirds of the backgrounds finished. Most of the scenes have been animated, but there are some that need work.

After Effects isn’t doesn’t have the most intuitive timeline editor, so slipping and moving groups of clips can get messy. If you bump something one way or the other, you have to keep track of what else gets affected by that move. It is my application of choice for film making, so I can live with its flaws.

I hope to finish this video by the end of the year. It has been a great project to work on when I don;t feel like doing anything else. I just sit back and draw out scenes … block by block.

I used an expression in After Effects to make the frame pulse to a predefined beat. It is a subtle effect that you can see clearly if you watch the power lines.

I am slowly learning more about how After Effects works behind the scenes with expressions and such. Pretty cool stuff.

Liz and I are working on the above scene for the music video for the song “No Escape!”. It may involve a multi-stage (three image) perspective shift as the blue creature advances out of the subway exit. I’ll start with the character being the size you see above, but as she walks down the path and towards the view, she may grow in size a little.

It may be tricky to pull off. I am doing this to a whole shot earlier in the film by widening the view progressively in steps four times. This requires redrawing each scene multiple times and changing the scale of the objects in the scene accordingly.

I might need to work on the subway exit itself too …

You can see the next shot in the video here, to get an idea where this subway exit is located.

Anyway …

It’s coming along…

Steve Guttenberg, Ben Affleck, Rick Moranis, Pauly Shore, and Sandra Bullock in this years funniest …

Wait … what?????!!!

The Gutworm has been vanquished. All hail the five heroes of the land as they ingest Cheetos, Yeastie Tings and Coca-Cola and do battle with the most foul beats.

YES!

Dungeon Explorer on Wii!

(edited to reduce clarity)

I recalibrated the song “Atlantis” tonight. I’ve been doing this as I go through and record the final tracks in order to prepare for mixing. I’m trying to hit about - 18db on my Master Bus before I do any sort of pseudo “mastering”.

When I was in middle school, I was put into a special group called “Future Problem Solvers”. It was some kind of experimental educational track where we would group up and try and find solutions to global problems like acid rain and nuclear war. Our answer to every question was always the same:

“Put a dome over it.”

Acid rain melting your skin? Live in a domed city. Nuclear missiles coming your way? Live in a dome. Global warming? Dome time. Global viral pandemic? You guessed it.

No one took our recommendations back in 1987 … and look where the world is now?

You can see that in the old Imagic game “Atlantis”, people lived in underwater domed cities. I guess it never helped them though …

I was finally able to see a specialist today about my on going problem with my ears. I had my first hearing test since the fifth grade and it went okay.

They reported some hearing loss around 8kHz in my left ear which was surprising. I expected to have some loss in my right ear, considering I had a pretty bad ear infection when I was 19. They said my right ear was pretty much normal and within acceptable bounds with minor hearing loss due to years of playing live music. Nothing to worry about.

I’ve never had a problem with high frequency information on the left side, so this came as a bit of a shock. I think the headphones they put on my head were not even lined up with my ear holes. Coming from a guy who has spent half his life wearing headphones, I think I might know where they hit my ears the best. Those tests tones are awfully quiet and if the phones are not lines up correctly, then I’m pretty sure that could alter the test results.

Anyway … I’m going to do my own hearing test at home to see if my balance is off ~ 8kHz. I just want to test the relative balance between my ears. I’ll post the results later.

The good news is, although my ears have felt strange for about a month now, my hearing is pretty much normal.

YEAH!

I finished tracking the song “Breakaway” today. I originally thought that I was going to not use layered vocals takes, but I was wrong.

I have twenty vocal tracks.

They are not all going at the same time, of course. There are points in the song where I have as many as 6 or 8 vocal tracks rolling at once. I kept some of the takes that I recorded while in was in Palouse last summer.

That brings my “completely tracked” song count up to four. I haven’t revisited many of the songs since my two week recording session in June. None of the others are really done and they are in various states of disrepair.

I should probably tackle “Adventure” next. I was never able to get the right guitar sound while I was in Palouse. Maybe my Grendel Dead Room will help out in that category.

I tracked some of the final vocal takes for the song “Breakaway” from my solo record “Bits” today. I have just a few lines to go.

I hope to get this one wrapped up tomorrow…

I am starting to learn how the scripting language in After Effects works. Tonight, I went out and shot about 6 seconds of time lapse footage with my CHDK hacked Canon A640.

I dropped these frames into AE CS3 and then created a little drum loop.

Using AE’s expression controls I was able to convert the audio into a series of keyframes that I applied to the scale (size) of the images. This creates the visual pulse to the beat.

It was a very basic experiment … but it proves to me that I can do some very interesting thing by creating audio for the sole purpose of altering video.

Hmmmm…..