Things Best Said

Okay, back into this. no interesting dreams lately but while my temp stuff is rendering I’ll give you the backstory and bring you up to date.

i work for a company that does video for concerts. we have worked with some pretty big names (none mentioned here) and have had good success. mostly, we’re still and up-and-comer. Over the past 3 years that I’ve been around we’ve been lacking in one area, post-production. Editing, motion graphix, 3d, etc. I always thought it would be valuable for us to get into that, some for my own job-sake, but mostly because we’d be the only company out there that does both video support for tours and pre-produced video to be played on the screens.

enter me.

we have a band, alias PIPE, who is our most visible client. Naturally, we want to impress that client with all that we can do and until now we haven’t had much of a chance. Now that we have post gear it’s up to my department, mostly just me, to come up with things to put on those screens for that band. As of this moment I’m working up storyboards –the most advanced storyboards thus far for productions like this — by taking the band’s existing artwork from their new album and making it move on screen.

That’s where the dreams come in. I’m full of ideas that haven’t had anywhere to go for quite a while until I saw the artwork and began to envision it as moving elements. My spare time, and working time, consists of dreaming up these visuals AND figuring out a way to make them happen.

I’m big into effects; miniatures, 3d, mattes, green screen…you name it. if there’s a book or website about it, I’ve read it or am currently doing so. I’m astounded by the possibilities of what we’re capable of if only given that chance.

So, in a short amount of time, we will hopefully be getting to work on some pretty astounding visuals that nobody has seen used this way. Our rag-tag team is pulling out every stop and dreaming big hoping that we’ll get the opportunity to do these scenes.

That explains the dreams and what I’m doing. Make sense? not yet, probably, but soon it will.

Today I painted a wall in our shop chroma-key green for use in some effects and am currently rendering out a few shots in 3DS MAX.

If PIPE isn’t astounded by what’s in front of them I’m going to try for a job at ILM.

More than anything I really like the idea of putting a team together that can concentrate on a vision and make it into reality. We’ve got some really talented people here that can make those images come to life.

’nuff for today…more work to do.
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Again with the dreams. I’m either on the verge of being really sick or getting better, my body still hasn’t decided. So, that leaves lots of room for sleeping. It’s strange that when you’re sick you have very lucid dreams and, I think, boardering on the fantastic. New and complete dreamscapes form around you making it hard to tell the difference between your waking hours and the dreams. As a person who relies on fabricated visions this has been a truly interesting few days. more later…

Weird dreams again last night. Instead of my usual fame and fortune, through video production, dreams I had very detailed visions of this new production. Knowing how much work is going to be put into the visuals we’re going to try and create I have begun to tear them apart in my dream.

For instance. We build a hard cyc, paint it chromakey green, put tracking markers on it, shoot this, shoot that, bring in the motion control cameras, assess the storyboards, shoot more elements, extract the mattes, check with the 3d artists between takes to check eyelines and direction, look at low-rez comps of the elements, place our matted actors, test and test again. That’s the kind of thing I dreamed.

This production is going to kick ass. I’m not sure at all how we’re going to do some elements, though I have a pretty good clues as to what others have done, but I’ve never executed them. Am I worried? Not really, just anxious to begin.

I spent some time yesterday typing up what each storyboard will be in detail. I’ve finished 2 of the ten pieces. I know I’ve got a long way to go, but man is this cool. I wonder if this is how the big boys are doing it? surely they spend copious amounts of time drawing each layer, making notes, placing elements to enhance the scene before it’s ever seen one piece of celluloid or tape.

I wonder how much $$, what kind, what format you can get a high-speed video camera for? They’ve got to be rentable, right? What morph programs are out there? Are they expensive? What’s the learning curve? Is there a simpler way to do it? Think big, J, then boil it down to the simplest way.

more later…

fitful sleep last night. I dreamt the soaring dreams again. where i was floating over landscapes that turned to storyboards then the color drained from them and they turned black and white, to stick figures and finally to just the heavy relief drawing paper that I like to draw on. no pictures but I kept moving over the scape. I’d like to think that this is my mind reasoning that I’ve got a lot of work to do…that this is an ever-expansive project. It does seem that it’ll consume my waking and sleeping thoughts.

FFC said, “once I tell people that I’m going to make the movie it becomes a life of it’s own and everything begins to fall into place”. for better or worse I thought…

My first task is to take the strongest elements and make them work in storyboard form –disesembling the elements into their parts and creating those frames. Put them into a cohesive form is all I have to do, right? make them visible to anyone who looks at them and it will take on a life of it’s own. I can’t expect that once I say “it’s going to happen” that things will fall into line but with hard work and tireless enthusiasm it will begin. Oh, J, just begin.

just getting started…more later tonight/tomorrow…