Still, I'm healthy. I've got someone who loves me and whom I love and trust in return. I've made some good friends this year and travelled more than in years past. 

I guess it's a matter of perspective. I tend to be more melancholic at the end of the year (Dec is not my favorite month). But, spring is not far off and I am feeling better. 

Couple goals for the upcoming year:

1. Get out and see more movies in the Theater this year
2. Listen to more music. 
3. Finish an animated film (that I direct)
4. Clear out the clutter in our apartment
5. Learn Luxology's Modo 3D program
6. Write every week. 

I'm looking forward to this new year. I want to enjoy myself and spend time with my friends. Only 15-20 years left and I want to make the best of it. 

www.ubu.com

Founded in 1996 by poet and dj, Kenneth Goldsmith, ubu.com was originally a site devoted to concrete poetry, but expanded to include music, documents and film. It's a completely free site whose goal is to make experimental and avant-garde works easier to access. The experimental in any art form is often marginalized with little commercial distribution. Ubu.com is a treasure trove of artworks many of which are in the public domain. 

www.mediahistoryproject.org

I came across this fabulous website recently by way of the remarkable davidbordwell.net cinema site. David is a film scholar who has written many excellent books on cinema and cinema history. He always has interesting comments, guest bloggers and up-to-date links for anything cinema related. And mediahistoryproject.org is no exception.

Basically, the Media History Project describes their site as:

We are a non-profit initiative dedicated to digitizing collections of classic media periodicals that belong in the public domain for full public access. The project is supported by owners of materials who loan them for scanning, and donors who contribute funds to cover the cost of scanning. We have currently scanned over 200,000 pages, and that number is growing.

Our Collections feature Extensive Runs of several important trade papers and fan magazines. Click on the arrows below to learn more about these periodicals and select volumes to download and read. You’ll find more material and options at our Collections page.

The site is a treasure-trove for those interested in early Hollywood film/radio history. And all of it is public domain. You can download in pdf or use their excellent reader to read online. I love the many covers of magazines they have archived as well. 

This is a young site and deserves your support. Try their blog and sign up for their newsletter. It's a fascinating glimpse into history. 

(download)

Click here to download:

website-of-the-week-www-biglistofdeadpeople-com-bHDszqznDAlgmjqDmgjA.zip (797 KB)

In addition to drawing, writing poetry and creating wonderful animations, Mike also creates his own music. His music for The Fall is really neat (created with toy instruments, I believe). He's created comics using the www.issuu.com publishing site (very cool) and even has a section on his site devoted to puns. I also found his compilation film "Man Dies Goes to Hell" quite amusing and original. 

I just love Mike's spirit which comes through beautifully in his website and design. Funny, DIY, retro, imaginative, silly, sad; all of these words come to mind when I visit his site, which I plan to do often. He's got a collection of his animations out called "Baby is Mamas Favorite Toy" which is being sold at another great site called www.crankyyellow.com

I hope I get a chance to work with Mike some day on an animation project. He's the kind of artist I admire. Now, take a look at Mike's version of Albert Camus' The Fall

Came across this remarkable abstract artwork using 2D images projected onto 3D sculpture and also flat paper. The result is a continually moving collage of colors and abstract shapes. Catch it in HD at Vimeo. The creator, Robert Seidel, has a cool website where you can get more info and download the film as well if you want to study it further. 

Robert is also the creator of several remarkable abstract films including _grau which has won awards at festivals all over the world. 

Madame Tutli-Putli is a stop motion film created in 2007 by Montreal artists Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, known collectively as Clyde Henry Productions and produced by the National Film Board of Canada. I came across it while browsing through the NFB's extra-ordinary online archive of films. It took five years to make and broke new ground in using compositing as part of stop-motion production (the characters eyes were composited on to puppet bodies).

Madame Tutli-Putli has won many film awards around the world including an Oscar nomination in 2008. This is the kind of film I admire and love. It inspires me because it shows how, with hard work and passion, you can create an entire universe using your imagination.

The film is also available at the NFB in HD at this link: http://www.nfb.ca/film/madame_tutli_putli_en 

or simply select the drop-down link on the video player below, switch it to HD and go full screen. 

Steve Sczcepkowski, the audio director of the just-released Deus Ex: Human Revolution, talks about creating sound for games. His comments are thoughtful and funny. I wish I could work for him. I'm playing the game right now and it's excellent. Check more on Deus Ex: Human Revolution at metacritic.

Second Hand from Isaac King on Vimeo.

I love the combination of new and old style animation in the little gem of an animated film. Isaac King has created a nearly perfect film where the form/style is imaginative and yet acknowledges past cartoon series like Mr. Magoo and the Rocky & Bulwinkle Show. It's what author Amid Amidi calls "Cartoon Modern", although Isaac King's take is uniquely his own. The form of the film also perfecly expresses the plot and theme. Sound effects, music, animation, design and editing are simply masterful. Second Hand is made with imagination and care. It's the best kind of work created by someone who not only is a master of their medium, but obviously loves creating.

I felt at one point as if I could see myself in the lead character as he throws everything away after one use and clomps along pushing his way ahead. I suspect there are others who might feel the same way. The message of stop and enjoy your life is an important one for us in these hyper-modern times. I won't be watching snail TV anytime soon, but I will take a deep breath and look at the trees. Thanks to Mr. King and his animated film. 

Check Isaac Kings website for his bio and other works. His Vimeo site is quite good as well. 

I was recently invited to speak to Chantal's "Machinima Mondays" group in Second Life about audio in Machinima. The session lasted for about an hour and I enjoyed it very much. The group, which numbered about 15 people, had good questions and were patient with the inevitable tech issues that come up in Second Life. I chose for my topic, "Working with Voice Recordings", mostly because I was presently working with voice recordings that had been sent to me for a machinima production. 

I wanted to provide a sort of re-cap here on my blog of what I presented to the group. I created a short video demonstrating some of the problems and solutions that come up when working with voice recordings. Let's start with that and I'll add to it afterwards

You can view the video in HD at youtube here

Working with Voice Recordings

• Remember that audio is part of directing as well. Don't wait to work with audio until the end of the production process. Start with audio from the beginning. 

• Learn simple, key concepts of Audio: wav format, digital audio formats, frequency, reverb and noise removal should be the first things you learn. Plenty of info out there on these topics. Try YouTube and the Wikipedia for more info

• Three basic steps to process voice recordings: clean it up, level the volumes and process the tone

• Be sure to level the volumes of the voices. This doesn't mean that every voice has to be at the same volume level all the time, but it does mean that actors will send you recordings that are done at different volume settings and you need to get those levels to sound relatively the same. 

• Clean background noise BEFORE you raise the volume. Encourage your actors to avoid background noise during recordings, but if there noise present the trick to removing it is to sample the noise only then remove just the noise. This is pretty easy to do in Audition and Audacity. Here's a tutorial on noise reduction for Audacity. The problem comes when the noise is at the same frequency as the speaking voice. In this case, when you remove the noise you'll remove some of the speaking voice as well, which you do not want to do. It's much trickier in this situation and would take a much longer post to explain what to do. For now, read up on "Noise Reduction Audacity" via Google and you'll figure it out. 

• Processing the tone of the voice recordings: each actor will most likely record their parts using different microphones with different recording qualities. Your job as the director is to make sure these recordings sound like they were all recorded using the same microphone. The reason for this is that you do not want to distract the viewer of your film by inconsistent or different sounding voice recordings. You want to get the viewer to think that the voices are coming from the visual world you've created in your film. The best way to solve this problem is to use a "parametric equalizer" (tone shaper, basically) and to adjusts the bass, mid-levels and treble of your recordings to get them sounding similar. The technical process is simple in Audacity (check this tutorial), but it takes some time to develop an "ear" to hear different tones. Try to follow the basic rule: voices should be clear and distinct, not too bass sounding and not too tinny. Listen to some of your favorite Anime films or series and you'll hear great sounding voices as examples. 

Finally, it's important that you voice recordings sound good in your film. They share the task of telling the story along with the visual images. If you have poor, or sloppy voice recordings, the story you are telling will be hard to follow as they will distract the viewer. Even if you do just the basics of a lttile noise clean up and volume levelling, you can make your voice recordings sound much, much better. 

I plan on expanding this video to include a voice over and better video. Stay tuned as I hope to have it done soon. 

My thanks to Chantal for inviting me to speak to the Machinima Mondays group. 

My partner, Lisa, has been involved with the Mystery Writers of America for the last several years. We've been to several of their events including lectures, book signings and mixers. They recently set MWA members and their friends with a Raymond Chandler tour of downtown Los Angeles and the Hollywood area. The tour is conducted by Esotouric Tours, run by the husband and wife team of Richard Schave and Kim Cooper along with other guest narrators like James Ellroy, the mystery author. Esotouric runs not only the Raymond Chandler tour, but covers other subjects like Charles Bukowski, Black Dahlia and Route 66. It's my first tour with them, but it won't be my last. Lisa and I had a great time. 

The Raymond Chandler tour costs just under $60 and for that you get almost 4 hours of top-quality tour bus commentary and many, many stops at important locations connected with Raymond Chandler and his works. We started at the venerable Clifton's Cafateria in downtown Los Angeles with a tasty meal in a wild decor. The tour starts on the 3rd floor of Clifton's (where a lot of pictures and displays of the restaurant are located) with an cheerful orientation by tour guide Richard Schave, who appears to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Los Angeles/Chandler history. Once in the bus (very comfortable and cool) we headed over to sites related to Chandler like the Barclay Hotel (wonderful single-room-occupancy turn of the century hotel), The Giannini Building (where Chandler worked in the oil industry), the Oviatt Building (the lobby is wonderful LA art deco) and ending up out in Hollywood with Musso and Franks restuarant and the original location of the Stanley Rose Bookshop, where Chandler and many other literati met and drank in the backroom. 

In between stops, we'd watch clips from various Chandler movies and Richard, along with his wife Kim and Joan Renner, would read aloud from Chandlers works and letters. We'd also be regaled with stories about Chandler's life in Hollywood, especially his relationship with director Billy Wilder while Chandler was writing the screenplay for Double Indemnity. The stories were sometimes hilarious, but with a dark aspect to them, too. 

I was particularly excited to see the original location of the Stanley Rose bookshop, which I've often wondered about but didn't know. Stanley Rose was a kind of fake bookseller in that he set up a bookshop as a front for providing bootleg liqour to individual and to the studio (Paramount to be specific). Somehow, the store caught on and many literary figures met there and hung out in the back room to chat and write. I knew the location was near Musso's, but Richard pointed out the exact place based on his research using pictures and documents. Now, the place is a t-shirt shop, but it wasn't hard to imagine the bookshop and rows of bookshelves. You'd come out of Musso and Franks and head over to Stanley's. 

Eventually, after driving through some wonderful LA neighborhoods that look almost unchanged from the twenties/thirties, we made it back to Clifton's and said goodbye. Both Lisa and I thoroughly enjoyed the Raymond Chandler tour. It was informative, entertaining and a lot of fun. I highly recommend this tour or any of the other tours that Esotouric runs. This short blog post only touches on a few of the fascinating aspects of this tour. If you are in Los Angeles at some point, give the tours a try.