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After I got home from Boston and finished Tuesday's homework, it was time to finish up my recreation of the last three minutes of The Usual Suspects. I had edited a good deal of the video while on the train; during that part, I had an epiphany of ridiculousness, as I realised I was editing video, composing music, and mixing audio on a 1800s era transportation device, using an inch-thick slab of aluminum and silicon... quite ridiculous!
I had a lot of trouble composing the background music for this on the train; once I got home, I borrowed Robb's mini-keyboard, and things got a lot better.
The raw music, for your listening "pleasure":
Background Music!
The Final Chord!
What you've all been waiting for, the video!, or Quicktime+H.264 format
The short-and-silly blooper reel!, or Quicktime+H.264 format
Nate's face (in not-quite-police-sketch-mode), which comes printing out of the printer as the reveal takes place:
The final cast list is also up. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to convince as many people as I would have liked to help me, so there were some shots which were infeasible, and I ended up playing quite a few people (Kobayashi and Keaton, most importantly, but also all of the rest of the usual suspects, except Verbal, of course).
I now have to figure out what I'm going to do next! We have one more project; the only requirement is that it be between three and 12 minutes long... that's awfully open-ended for me! We'll see! I'd really love if I could avoid having people in my next project (not that I don't love you guys, but it's a hassle working around a bunch of people's class schedules); I'd be even more happy if I could avoid the ER (that's equipment, not emergency), by doing something involving only what I can do with my still camera. We'll see, again!
I just got back from GNOME Summit Boston; I'll write about that experience at a later date... I edited together the first 2/3 or so of the video on the train on the way down to Boston (I had to work on proglang homework on the way back, which I somehow finished within the bounds of a single day), and tonight I started throwing the audio montage on. I'm really not sure what I'm going to do about the music, though, because there's simply no way I can duplicate the whole thing in time. At least, not if I want it to sound good...
Also, Nate sprained his ankle, so recording the last bits of video tomorrow is going to be really awkward. In addition to the fact that I don't have any extra actors to be the few remaining people. Really bad.
Remind me not to do anything for my final project (the next project) that requires cooperation; I'm really bad at shepherding people/asking people for help/etc... and it's not good!
We'll see. It'll get done, somehow.
This was hard.
I can't believe how hard it is to break a mug. We had to break it into two pieces with a hammer, then hold it together while dropping it (with liquid in it!). It worked out not-too-bad; we then slowed it down to 25%, which is a little sketchy because of the already-really-low framerate, but Motion seems to have done a reasonably good job making it not look horrible.
How'd you know I really like green?
I hate video/audio/wi-fi on linux
I guess I'm going to write a little bit every few days about the process of this whole recreate-the-last-3:30 of The Usual Suspects thing.
Connor is going to be Kujan (the investigator/police person). We'll have to find/fake suspenders, somehow. For him, and for Rabin (the other cop). Need to find someone good for Verbal (this is vital), and someone reasonable for Rabin. Kobayashi, too, and Keaton, and another extra cop. That's all, really, most of the other people are from behind or such so they can be anybody.
I sat down and stepped through the video and wrote down every shot. Fun! I started, but haven't quite finished (it's done now), stepping through and writing down all of the audio (well, primarily the dialogue, I'll worry about music later).
I also found a copy of the script online. Unfortunately it's a little different from what actually ended up happening... and misses the audio montage during the last 3:00 or so.
GNOME 2.28 is out! Now with 100% more Seed!
Also, last Wednesday, my first Intermediate Video project was due. I've shoved it to Vimeo for your viewing pleasure. Or not. Amy's awesome in it, but the lighting needs serious help (and I only managed to acquire one of the crappy cameras that has really poor low-light response). There are also some stories surrounding the making of this video and having to call PubSafe because I locked my keys in a room that nobody else I know has access too. Whoops!
Anyway, the next video will be mostly filmed outside; what's not being filmed outside will be filmed with lights (I'm planning on getting 6 large video lights, this time). So it should look a lot better... Unfortunately, it's also going to consume a lot of time — I'm replicating, to the best of my ability — the final 3:30 or so of The Usual Suspects. Ha! Disaster waiting to happen...
Two very quick things before I go to bed; class tomorrow! Amy was here this weekend... we had a great deal of fun recording some video for class, playing with the ants (more on that in a minute), losing my keys, and seeing Deerhunter and Boredoms at EMPAC!
She & Him
After seeing (500) Days of Summer with Mom and Amy, I found a music video of Zooey Deschanel (if you follow that link, disregard her IMDB profile picture...) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the two stars of the movie, the former being the über-adorable actress from the recent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, Elf, and Tin Man, among other awesome things, the latter being one of the leads in 3rd Rock from the Sun, and her costar in (500) Days of Summer), dancing to a song which was clearly recorded by Zooey. I'd known she could sing since Elf, but was quite happy to find out she's actually recorded a whole album, as the band She & Him, along with 'him', producer M. Ward.
She & Him, Volume One is a really awesome album. I guess I was a little surprised that I could enjoy music that sounds so... old. It really sounds like it's from the 40s or 50s or so, mostly in the way that it's slow and very vocal-centric, but even recording-quality wise (which is a little unfortunate, but other than that, really awesome). In any case, Zooey's voice makes this a really cheery album (even if some of the songs are sadder in nature), and definitely one that everyone should at least give a chance, because it's so pretty!
EDIT: apparently there's ANOTHER music video for this song; I'll watch it tomorrow when Matt's not asleep and I can have music!
EDITx2: and one for my favorite of their songs, too... actually apparently that's someone's drawings along with the song, but whatever... still awesome!
Ants
The ants for Matt's ant farm arrived this weekend; as such, we spent a good part of the weekend doing entertaining things with ants. Most entertainingly, we put a live webcam on the ants, at least for a little while. This resulted in some insanity when we decided to spice up the ant's living environment, and even more insanity when we started to get viewers from around the internet. We ended up staying up an extra two hours to talk to people on the internet watching our ants, and taking requests for music to play to them! Good fun...
Last Friday, I left Colchester for Troy once again; this time, instead of heading for an RPI-run dorm, I'm living in my first apartment, along with Matt, Mike, Nate, and Robb (surprise!). There are some random pictures of us around the apartment at Flickr, of course.
Classes started this Monday; my schedule doesn't look too bad (no class before 10, and even that's only two days a week):
I've been to one session of each class by this point, and they all seem pretty reasonable. Our Machine Learning professor seems to be one of the most coherent computer science professors I've ever met, but we'll see what I'm saying in a few more weeks! Intermediate Video is taught by a relatively recent (2004) graduate of RPI, which should be interesting (besides the always-interesting CS-major-in-an-EMAC-class dynamic).
The walk to campus isn't nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be. Ten minutes or so, which isn't that much worse than the 7-10 it took the last two years. Also, Carol's (and Kim/Zarin/Christine/Jillian and Gino/Marcus/Nick/Andrew's) place (I feel like that's one-too-many-girls or one-too-few-boys, but I can't imagine who I'm including that doesn't belong/forgetting that does belong... it's confusing because there's always so many extra people there!) is on the way to campus from here (which also provides a great place to hang out in the gaps between classes).
Anyway, there's lots of other little things to talk about, but I'll write about them later. I'm just glad that we're all back to Troy, Kaitlyn's happily back in school, and Amy is (somewhat less happily) back at school too! (Amy's coming to Troy this weekend with her new Mini 9 to OS-X-ify!!)
I had a painful experience trying to make the video of gnomines-clutter for my last post... it seems to be very hard to capture OpenGL apps under X with any reasonable framerate. Anyway... after finally getting one of the dozens of programs that I tried to work (I can't remember which one now...), I decided I'd try to fix the problem from a different angle.
I'm really only interested in exporting the output of Clutter views, mostly. So, I figured I'd hack up Clutter to output PNGs for each frame. I added a check for the CLUTTER_EXPORT_FRAMES environment variable (or the --clutter-export-frames argument); if it's set, I discard the system time and instead draw every frame (incrementing the master clock by 1/CLUTTER_DEFAULT_FPS, so that the "frame rate" of the output is adjustable). When clutter_stage_paint is called, I read the pixels of the stage and export them to incrementally-numbered PNGs in the current directory.
This should work in theory. In practice, for some reason, some animations randomly speed up or slow down. You can see it in the video (most specifically with the sliding bounces when you finish a level).
Video of Lights Off with this here.
Patch is here. It's not particularly attractive... but maybe once it works I'll make it make more sense...
I'll have to harass someone working on Clutter and see if we can make it work/what I'm doing that's so crazy, because I'd really love for it to work!
There's at least one other thing that needs to be taken into account: idle time. Since frames are only exported when the stage is painted, when you're just sitting there doing nothing, nothing is exported, so the video runs like you're very, very quick with the mouse :-) But I'll work on that later...
Anyway, this might all be crazy or pointless. If so, I apologize! In any case, it can't possibly be as crazy as Carol's first blog post in many months... which is quite entertaining and awesome all at the same time, and details from a layman's point of view what she worked on all summer (while making fun of most of our crew at the same time). It's nice to see her getting along with GCC, finally! :-)
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