proposal for hyperreality

I'm still sifting through a couple of different directions with this, but I think what I'd like to do is something involving a visual representation of things which are not usually visible. Initially I was thinking something along the lines of auras, but those aren't really of particular interest to me, and I realised ghosts could be quite nice to work with. Not like white sheets floating in mid-air, but more subtle things, flashes of light or glimpses of a faint face in a mirror, perhaps even transparent versions of objects which no longer exist. I would not film this in a cemetary or anything, but someplace more every day, probabaly an older building, but one that's still used on a daily basis. I'm really intrigued by the concepts of history, memory, and prior meanings which places and things once had to people who are no longer present. At the risk of a bit of overlap with my capstone, they're ideas I'd like to work with a bit more, and video allows for explorations of the concepts in different directions than what I'm able to do in my capstone. While Beneath the Dust relays more specific stories, this project would aim to convey more of the emotional, psychological feeling of things past in some form remaining in a place, providing a more immediate emotion.

link day!

a cheerful little flash commenting on fashion, peer pressure, and the stupidity of the human race.

google is not content to take over the earth, but has also set its sights on mars.

and, because tom's too antisocial to even use a blog, I'll take on posting this link. I'm not usually much for political conspiracy theories, but uhm.. this makes some damn frightening points, that we *really* should've picked up on, but didn't. shit. seriously? yes it's long, but worth it - watch the first five minutes at least, that brushes the surface (and does far more convincing than I ever could, I stayed up mad late with tom watching it rather than sleep, which says a lot).

(on a less political but equally thought-provoking note, I highly recommend this movie. well except the god bits, they got a little too arrogant for me. but other than that.. it was pretty fantastic.)

Apple-M!

I am so drained right now.

I did not put this project off. I had everything done but burning to dvd on Monday, with the extra time I tweaked a bit and re-exported. I have been in the lab past midnight for the last three nights. I fought trying to get the dvd program to encode my videos for five hours last night, trying everything I could think of.

So now that we know about apple-M, I'm re-exporting everything yet again (though it was all uncompressed before, dvdstudio still wouldn't read them, or would read some but not others), which'll take about another three hours, before I can even get back into the dvd program.

And I am not the only one who has officially spent more time trying to publish to a dvd than was spent filming and editing everything.

And here I was all excited to not have to put everything on dv tape again... that was nothing compared to this.

...on the bright side, the white board's looking pretty sweet about now, and I put together a whole list of random little things we've all learned throughout the hell of this week. And I know far too much about that goddamned program. And I feel so much closer to everyone else who's lived in the lab this week, there's that wonderful camaraderie built of shared trauma.

But I cannot even move.

...on another bright side, I am actually almost looking forward to spending 6 hours working on each of the two drawings I have left for my capstone. Only I have to go back to the lab at 6 again and start the third video track re-exporting, then whenever that's done, go in and make the freaking dvd.

If I'm not done tonight, I swear.....

render time

So I may have found the reason for my ridiculous render times of late. (Aside from the fact that I have been known to edit frame-by-frame, and have far more layers than anyone would ever think of using...though on this project, I don't seem to be that much in excess.)

It was the freaking compression encoding, which's what was messing everyone up getting the movie files into final cut. I turned compression entirely off when I went to start re-exporting my after effects files just now (had a few things to tweak and fix that hadn't shown up in previews), and holy hell IT'S GOING SO FAST!!!! Like in less than a minute, I could see part of the blue bar! It was taking like five minutes to get that far for me before. It's like, between a fifth and a fourth finished now, and granted this track doesn't have much done to it, but IT'S ONLY BEEN ELEVEN MINUTES.

*bouncing joyously all around the lab*

So anyone else having mad ridiculous render times... try that. ^^; wow.

I may have been making new versions of the happy mac render sign for no reason...

...nah. They're still so cute. <3

touch me and I will rape you in your sleep

I made a fantastic note to leave on a computer left alone to render while waiting on a 2... no, 3... no wait, more like 6 hour render of my own. It is here. (It is huge because photoshop said this size was a letter paper size. It's a little not, but it only needs shrunk a tiny bitlet to print happily.) Feel free to use. There will also be a spare copy or two probably floating around the lab.

I meant to post this last night, but Tom finished working earlier than I'd thought. (Well not really, really I was amazed how hard and long he worked at it... it shows, his looks sweet.)

The extention to Friday is perfect, I just need to fix some nitpicky things..rather, they're fixed now, did that before class, but now I've got to reexport everything.

Hope no-one'll need this comp for the next two days... and here's hoping my harddrive doesn't mind being used for over 24 hours straight. hmm.

Also here's hoping quicktime will re-compress and export my files nicely, it hasn't been yet. sigh.

DAMN YOU TOM AND YOUR STUPID LUCK.


edit: After one night of amusement, the rape sign is officially retired, Matt just lectured that it's inappropriate for a professional class, however funny it might have been late at night. He is, of course, right, but we still think it's funny. Will be making and posting a second version soon. (Wanted to try out different messages anyway, hee.)

music

Making a song that's five minutes long is hard. Especially when a) the playback stops working completely at random every now and again, and b) you still can't figure out how to start playback other than at the beginning unless you skip through every measure to get where you want, or unless it's still paused from the last playback.

Luckily, I have probably another hour at least before my first video finishes exporting... sigh. -_-;; And I feel bad, I've probably gotten someone's hopes all up that there's a computer free, but it isn't, because my video's rendering. I'm really sorry. (Lab comps don't have my music program on them, and I'm not about to learn a new one just now. Yay Finale. <3)