Life Goes On

...much as it has this past age. It's kind of a pedantic update, but something to go on. Sassy Pants had her Christmas program with her preschool last night. She did a good job with her part and was incurably cute in it. I videoed it, of course, and not only did I snap a few shots of it, but I gave the still camera to Rock Girl (since the Solcialite insisted on sitting on my lap...and kicking the tripod a couple times) so she took some pics as well. The lighting in that room was not so good, though, and I fear for the quality of the pictures. Originally, I thought it was something Rock Girl was doing (i.e. not holding still long enough), but I found mine looked about the same way.

For my job, it has settled into what amounts to a mundane routine. Occasionally, something interesting comes up, and I always make a contribution to the betterment of the organization, so through the economic troubles the country is experiencing, I'm remaining gainfully employed. Of course, they cut our overtime, but we just adjusted the budget and moved forward. We're still doing financially better than we have been, and last month, I finally did what I should have done a long time ago, and made a long range budget plan that shows both what we have, what carries over from check to check, and what we need to have even a year from now. It's been incredibly useful at tracking our expenses and keeping us in line.

I do have a rought cut of movie still, but I wasn't able to go shooting for my transitional shots last weekend. I'm hoping that with my sister home, I can get the laptop shot I need, and then drive about getting the outside shots that I need to provide some additional scenery and fill some awkward gaps.

The most amusing discovery with the movie deal, though, is that while I had intended to submit the film to the Barebones Film Festival, due to my strapped cash situation, I can't afford the entry fee. More amusing than that is that the entry fee is more than I spent on my entire film. If I spend the entry fee, it'll more than double my expenditure on it. Thought that was funny.

But that's the gist of the past few weeks. I did put all my toys back out on my desk at work. I'd put them all away before Halloween to ensure the kids who were walking through the office didn't think I was giving toys away...I'd lose them all. But they're back out and displayed again, and everyone is back commenting on them again. I'm still not out of Halloween candy yet either.

There's me for now. Maybe I'll throw something out soon again.

A Rough Cut

Well, I completed a rough cut right on schedule when it comes to getting the raw footage to an acceptable level. It still needs some sound balanced and I've got some gaps when it comes to transitions, especially when it comes to time transitions between certain scenes. My plan was to get some road shots and some scenery of Broken Arrow to fill some gaps to indicate some time has passed. 

I also need another shot that I won't discuss at the moment since it would totally qualify as guerilla filmmaking since I'll need to get a shot of a certain situation that people would not be entirely comfortable with if they knew they were being shot for a feature film. In the final product, even if they saw themselves, they wouldn't have a clue. It's also a shot in the dark as to whether I'd even be able to get such a situation, but I'm hoping I get lucky...and if you knew what I was talking about, you would find "lucky" to be quite the morbid thought.

Once I get those shots down, I'll have a complete cut ready to go for both the sound balancing and the music writing. I still have a commitment from Farmer, who is my composer, so that's still a go, and The Engineer is practically chomping at the bit when it comes to engineering the sound.

I did have to move from Moviemaker to Pinnacle since Moviemaker couldn't handle some of the more complex sound things that I was doing. Pinnacle worked like a dream since it works frame by frame as opposed to fractions of seconds like Moviemaker does. Some elements were more difficult to use, especially in the sound category. Pinnacle can't just mute a sound clip, like Moviemaker does. You have to actually adjust the volume before and after the clip in question. But on a brighter spot, clips and their sounds all move together when you do anything, so if I had syncked the sound in Pinnacle, I could have cut anything anywhere and everything would have moved together. I don't know if that made sense, but it was very cool. It made the cuts in the complete movie file a lot easier.

The picture part is almost done, but unless I get those shots by the weekend of the 13th, I won't have a full rought cut ready by the 16th deadline for that festival I was going to try and get into. I really need to read some more info about that to see if I can even afford it. But we'll see how things go.

The Curse of Other People

I would say that the hardest part of keeping any blog is what to put in it. That's the problem everybody seems to have, right? "A blog sounds like fun, but I never know what to say." Or even better, "My life is too boring. Who would read about it?" 

Well, I don't know who would read about my life, but I know people do. But the hard part about blogging anything isn't that one would lead a boring life. Come on. No one is that uninteresting. You might feel that way, but the biggest problem in blogging your interesting and uninteresting items is that you usually have other people around to tell about it, and once you've told your interesting story to one person, you don't tend to want to tell it again unless it's really, really good.

So while you might tell everyone about the overturned car on the expressway, you might only mention that fascinating discussion on building a virtual machine that you heard only with the guy sitting next to you. The promotion is spread all over town while the fact that you managed to clear 24Gb of space last night or lost 16 pounds gets lost in the day once it comes out once.

Such is that curse of other people. I know the Queen spends literally hours on the phone talking to people and telling them absolutely everything that goes on. I chat with her and Optimus Prime and The Engineer, and it remains the same curse of not having anything left to blog once I've told it. It becomes a matter of remembering all those events and placing them here and telling others about them. 

Can I promise to do that? No, but I can promise to try. I really don't have any vices that I need accountability for, or that I need to put out there. My life continues on like a little train, dutifully chugging along, but not making any major waves. I do have a lot of interesting things that I'll probably start putting out there since I do want my share of boasting. Also, with Christmas coming up, there are a ton of interesting and quite geeky things out there as well.

Oh well. So I've discussed the mystery of blogging again and why people (mainly me) have trouble with it. I say again that I'll give this a go, and stop whining about not doing it. There've been a few things I'll probably backdate to begin with....