Too much Film, not enough celluloid

This last week Troy and I have accomplished several large recording sessions for a sound effects catalog project I've been putting together for some time now.  We're still very early in the project, but while I've been working on that I've also managed to finish the 11 video reels to run at this martial arts event in Los Gatos on the 28th that I'll be running a projector and managing all the video and photos for.

Plenty have asked and I have consistently told all that when it comes to video editing Premier really is the easiest to adapt to in terms of a fully featured NLE.  Coming from Sony Vegas, which is a great tool even back in the earlier versions where I spent a lot of my early days editing clips together of video game captures for my friends and I doing Machinima stuff, to moving upward into a package like Premier Pro and After Effects.  After the event is over I'll post again with some depth about working on the project.

This weekend I managed to get the major ground work done designing the Arcade top and the sides.
I sent my client a rough template I had built using the vague description he'd given me.

Keep in mind I'm working the template to this design.  I lined everything up in Illustrator, and the edges can be cut to the shape of the top.

The Logo text is just a placeholder to see if he liked the idea of naming his arcade, and the name could be whatever he wants.

I got my client's feedback and am currently working on updating it to the details he specified.  He decided he wants a much fuller "collage" of characters from all kinds of games to completely cover the top, and to lose the logo idea. 

So now i'm just working on gathering and placing as many characters I can.  I may try to break up the design a bit more with some tech shapes that fill in the middle and give some more lines to work with character orientation and placement now that the logo is gone.

Resuming my old short skit storyboard too.  I'm hoping to have this done by the end of April as I'm just working on it here and there in my free time.  The intended running time for the short should be somewhere around 2-3 minutes.

Setting up a storyboard plot in Photoshop from scratch was fairly easy though getting to the organization took a bit of work:

 Each of those master folders has a folder for each cell or frame.

Each frame folder allows me to contain my elements separately so when I go cropping each frame out individually I can just delete the other frames from the PSD file, and import all the relevant elements into After Effects to build quick pre-viz animations with, and allow me to choose what I want to show in terms of aspect ratio, shot details (orange) , and camera movement (blue), or actor movement (green).

Let's see if anyone can guess what's going on just by looking at the frames below:

I'm hoping to get some friends to help put this together soon.  The paid projects come first so I'm working to get them finished so I can make time for these.  I'll try to keep regular updates coming. though I may start splitting the updates into individual project blogs.  As always, feel free to leave comments, criticism, feedback, tech support, links, hot links, polish sausage and just about anything else you can imagine... gosh, I'm hungry.

No Business in Music

So, I just ran across an article; and it has opened my eyes to the harsh reality I have already been slowly acknowledging over the years. 

It's not just this one.  There's a ton of bloggers and articles online and in print talking about the chaos of the music industry; the business of music has completely collapsed and is all but dead.  Today, fewer than 40% of the worlds most renowned studios stand the test of time; and I'm not talking literally.  I'm sure the buildings are probably still there.  However, their facilities, equipment, and treatments have probably disappeared quicker than the experts that ran them.

D.I.Y. killed professionalism.  Internet killed TV, and global commerce killed personal freedom.  If you belong to any of these groups, please stand up.

I'm disheartened at the lack of fight; not by the music industry; not by the film industry...  No, they've been the ones fighting hard to cling to their old business models and trying to continue the way of sucking every last penny they can as the business model - along with them, slowly dies.  I'm talking about you, the uneducated; naive individual.

I just learned a new word today and that word is Googlization. I dare you to post a comment with at least one way you can't get to youtube; and I bet if you find one, that device or method is old and obsolete anyway.

The music industry needs to die already.  I'm serious.  There's no such thing as a patron of the arts anymore.  Hell, there probably hasn't been since the Renaissance.  Let's recognize facts: Businesses don't just give money away. They expect money in return.

It's no surprise then that the music industry has gone belly up.  Music is like ideas.  An idea should be free to share.  Music is either priceless... or worthless. The revolution of sound recording is nothing more than a really, really long fad that's finally reached maturity.  Think about that one long and hard, from your smartphone... while you're on the toilet.  Don't forget that courtesy flush.

I sound pretty cynical I'm sure by now.  I have good reason.  People don't care about ideas anymore, they care about dollars. They care about the bottom line.  There's a war going on, a silent... stupid one.  And by stupid, I mean education.  DIY revolution was instigated by the amazing trickle down effect of technology over time to the point where now not only is software capable of producing sounds for you, but the hardware it takes to run everything is super affordable.  If you need a history lesson, a cost analysis map, or even a comparison: read my previous blog post - Figuratively Speaking.

I share a similar sentiment to Rob Tavaglione, in his article "Music Production Biz in '12" (see first link).

" Major label budgets are now indie-sized; indie budgets are now “go make it yourself and we'll distribute;” and unsigned artists are making their own records with friends on laptops (or tablets, or phones, etc.)."

That empowering freedom has fallen into the hands of the uneducated, unaware, and uncaring.  "Let's all go make our ideas" with little to no respect for the process of how to do so properly.  It's no wonder indie musicians are skeptical about "studios" especially when anyone with a few scraps of recording gear, a room in their house, and an internet connection can advertise themselves as an "affordable studio".


A message to everyone: stick with your own recording gear. You're not going to get signed and the labels are probably going to be all the worse for you anyway.  Stop caring about your music already, no one else does and that's because they're one step ahead of you, probably trying to sabotage your audience and stealing your fans.  You really need to get off your high horse, and get your head out of the clouds about how "the people still do care and love good music".  The club scene has killed traditional venues, no one wants to go just listen to someone play live.  The music business is dying so expect to give away your music for free, at least be happy when people listen to it and actually like it.  Cd's and Vinyl? So last century, they're like Disco; they just don't know it yet.


And lastly, but most importantly... don't give up.