Another day, another bit

Best line of code overheard muttered at the compound today:

"If blah blah blah..."

Yes, Meredith is up to her old tricks again, this time working on the asset upload for our super secret, beyond cool iPad app that concerns "Video Out," our first award-winning feature.

We are closing down shop again very soon, after having closed it down a few days ago for my aborted trip out west, and this time we will most likely stay shut down for a few weeks, barring emergency phone calls from collectors or hollywood agents.

What is the food situation lately in Bitland? Not really dire, but in need of a change. We have been doing Integral Yoga smoothies, the old standby, but we still miss Miracle Grill, Rue Bourbon and a few other local joints that are now gone.

A promising-looking place is supposed to open soon on Charles and Hudson - "Dolci by Donna," or something like that. In the meantime, though, our current standbys are Barbuto, Keste, Taim and Bonbonnierre. Now, I am advocating a return to Westville, after having OD'ed on their pesto mashed potatoes the other night, but Meredith is resisting. I will wear her down, though, at some point in the long slog ahead of us once we start logging all the footage we are now collecting.

And what are we collecting? Did we talk about the collectors documentary yet? If not, we will soon.

Suffice to say that we are collecting collectors, and there are some fascinating ones out there.

Now I'm hungry.

"The Quiet Room" has finally started going out to festivals and we have high hopes for it.

Onward!

"Better Than Criterion"

The original title for this post was to have been "What Is A Plot?", which is what Meredith was musing on as she read a quote from Socrates in our preparation for the next project, our equivalent of a trek up Mount Everest. As we gird for that monumental expedition, we are wrapping up the loose ends of our lives here on the planet of documentaries, meaning we are still finishing "Lumia" and getting ready to get it out to festivals.

Though we are still possibly going to make some changes, we are working on a DVD. In fact, that's been the last few days. We were really high on Adobe Encore, but after today's many crashes and general pixel-mapping wonkiness and kludgy interace issues, we may be ready to return to our first love - DVD Studio Pro. Only the future will tell the end of this tale. Meredith is now muttering "Oh man, this is ridiculous" as we endure another restart.

Anway, she was just testing a menu page and saying "This is better than Criterion" when I decided it was time for another progress report. I think it will soon be time for the Little Pie Company or Miracle Grill. Then I must pray for the Yankees.

Onward

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.