Tuesday, September 30, 2008

13 Bit Runs on Sugar

Maybe we already posted that once, but it's worth repeating. 13 Bit runs on sugar.

We have not posted in almost a month. No excuse, but we have been busy. "Game Theory" is out, out of the nomenclature closet, as well - we can officially say that Quesadilla, aka "Not Blavatsky," aka "The System," aka "The Rules of Make-Believe" is now done and has started to enter festival land, where the rules of make-believe really apply. We have high hopes and crossed fingers.

I can hear Meredith over at the other steam-turbine operated workstation, putting her back into the control levers as she paws into the "Lesser Evil" chocolate kettle corn, which leads me to the title of today's post. We have tried for a few days to cut back on cupcakes and other essential fuels of creativity. It is all in vain, though. We need sugar to sustain the flow, Columbia River-like in its majesty, of creativity coming from the mighty industrial-strength dynamos of the Bit Generators. Nothing else gets those massive engines running like a high dose of refined or unrefined sucrose.

We have begun working on - and are both thrilled by - Project Venezuela, aka "Notadoca," aka Empanada, aka Baguette. Finished outlining it, found a cool little web app and are writing the script now.

We are going to have to shut down shop for 4 to 5 weeks soon. I am going out west and Meredith is going east in order to save the western world from financial ruin. We may try video conferencing, but we probably won't be able to write that way. Arguing over dialogue just doesn't have the same impact and resonance via video conference. Either way, we'll brainstorm over phone, Big Mer from Hong Kong and I from Hanksville, Utah, and we will plot out a series of 15 movies that we'll each watch over the month.

I'd like to say we'll blog, and I may blog, but I'll bet that she doesn't. She'll get mad when she reads this, but I don't care - I'm at the keyboard now.

In the short long term? We need to replace one of these old steam turbines, which is getting long in the tooth, and are waiting for them to announce a new model.

Elko says "woof."

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Scrubbing is no good

Paul is trying to dictate to me what to blog. But no man can dictate my blog words. That does not make sense, but then again I a suffering from a mild case of chipatosis.

Today we discovered two things:
1) we went looking for extra sounds (laughing, chair scraping, foley type effects) in our captured clips. When you scrub the clips, often times you miss these important sounds. Therefore you must triple L.

2) Freeze frames are obvious. This came courtesy of our sound guy Greg. At certain points in the picture (really only two), we froze the frame because we did not have enough stable footage. But you know what, you can tell that the picture is not moving. Solution: loop one clip. It works like a charm.

Ok back to sound collection.

Monday, September 1, 2008

"I'm in the rat park..."

And with that phrase, I always know that another Bitting session is about to begin.