"I would be a much nicer person if I had not gone to summer camp."

I won't tell you which one of us said that - although I will admit that I never went to camp - but this is the kind of amazing nugget that comes up when you are deep in the zone.

We are doing a shot list for the next scene, the next shoot. It doesn't matter what shoot, it's *our* next shoot and it will be fabulous. We are working on shots, discussing, debating angles, what order we will shoot in, what happens during each take, what dialogue goes where and how much we get in each take. This is difficult, but actually very satisfying. It's, dare I be that trite, our roadmap.

Anyway, we are doing it now and just took a break to talk about things. One of us started to talk about time going faster the older one gets, and the other one was agreeing, leading to a story about "color wars" at camp. "Race wars?" "No, color wars."

Anyway, one thing leads to another and a story illustrates the point. And somewhere during the course of that story is the offhand comment about how "I would be a much nicer person had I not gone to summer camp." It's like life, you know? These little stories are all we have to share with each other on our pathtic, magnificent, brief fling upon the rapidly disintegrating planet. Shall I tell you about the Amazon?

"I don't think you should ever go to nowhere."

That's one of the pearls generated during this, today's session of "Remapping DVD Button Navigation 101, 13BIT Style."

Meredith and I are wonking away on the incredibly strange interface for Encore. After I had burned a bunch of test DVDs, we discovered that there was a too-healthy dose of randomness when our buttons were activated from a remote control.

We have plowed into the program and are doing what we have to do. I kind of like the idiotic little GUI interface, but Meredith is grumbling. She's a command-based woman, after all, and I prefer idiotic little GUI's, which is what makes us a good team. See "Why it Takes 13BITs" for more on that subject.

"There are a lot of ways to fuck this up," she is saying, as we use the little pick-whip widget to remap the buttons. Does anybody out there in blogland appreciate the gravity of this? Only those other few, poor pathetic souls who have found themselves in the sorry position of having to author their own DVDs. *THEY* will appreciate our pain.

Actually, for all my kvetching, we really like to make DVDs.

Our new top-secret project has the code name of HH. NOT for Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, I might add.

Why It Takes 13 Bits - Take Two

I was going to have a nice, long entry here, but Meredith is trying to hijack the timeline in Final Cut and I need to keep a close watch on her.

We have been ploughing along with "Lumia." We finished the title music much the same way we did the video - one of us doing some grunt work, then the other tweaking it.

She's raving like a delirious person about our secret new flicker-reduction method - bringing down the whites instead of using a flicker filter. These details are not really that important - at least not until we forget them and need to remember them for the next movie - what's important is that we are figuring it out now and getting it done.

Halfway through the film with color correction. The sound comes next. Then the end credits and the publicity materials. We could probably edit it forever, but we need to say "enough is enough" and lock it in. The we move on.

Found out today that at least one person is reading our blog. Hi AJ!

Why It Takes 13 Bits

And not just 2, 3, 6 or even 8...

We did the titles yesterday. We had been mulling it and prototyping it for a while and had both gone in a completely opposite direction from the one we ended up with. I had been visualizing one thing for a long time and we had been working on that, Meredith in Motion and I in After Effects.

She had had her reservations, but was gamely working on it. I think I actually had a good thing going with After Effects, but eventually I yielded to her doing something on Motion while I went to work on the title music.

At some point, I looked over and, instead of using the Lumia light art, itself, as background, she had somehow incorporated one of Wilfred's seminal flowcharts about what Lumia is. Beautiful and strange work done in his own hand. I instantly liked the idea and told her so. We then set out to run with that.

We switched seats and I gathered more of his drawings and graphic detritus - none of which we used in the final titles, but all of which confirmed to us that we were on the right path.

We switched seats again and I put down the music to backseat drive for a while. I suggested that we just animate the document in our top-secret motion graphics program, which I cannot name now. She liked the idea. We did that together, both of us tweaking this and that, Meredith at the controls. We finally exported it and then brought it into Motion.

The rest of the process was our usual back-and-forth of "I like this color," "what do you think of this?" "let's do this," "change that," "make that move faster," "make that stay longer" for a long time. Between the two of us, we came up with something that we both really liked.

Then, there the inevitable small glitches. Meredith fixed some, I had to pull up an ancient Photoshop trick to fix another.

We finally had some cool titles, ones that we hadn't intended to do at all, but which we like much better than the original idea.

The moral of this tale? Stay flexible. Stay openminded. A little creative arguing can be a good thing, just so long as it's civil.

And don't forget to add some huevos rancheros and breakfast burrito from Miracle Grill to fuel the whole process.

Onward.