Logan’s Run Online

Hey, this is a blog, right? So I’ve no problem writing up thoughts just to get them out of my head. If only I had a pensieve…

(Forewarning: this’ll probably be sporadic and jump around a lot. Screw transitory phrases; it’s 9:50pm on a Friday and I’ve nothing better to do! Don’t care about updates to my life? You don’t have to read this!)

I changed majors again. Again (again), again. I think that’s four times now? Computer Science to M&M to Event Management to RTV. I think I’ve finally found what I wanna stick with because, even throughout all those majors, I still always had my camera on hand, filming events, writing stories to shoot, editing, and trying out After Effects compositions. Now I get to do all of that fun stuff for my classes! And I took on a third minor in Theatre, mainly so I can tech backstage at some of the performances UCF runs. That’s a big thing I miss from high school.

I completed an internship last week for Cybis Communications, a local video productions company here in Orlando. We went out to Disney for a week, stayed at their hotel, did all of the load-in and setup, graphics, videography, editing, audio, etc; pretty much all of the stuff I wanted to back when I was an EM major. I had a great time and wouldn’t mind working with them again, especially for the experience and contacts. I should probably start hanging around CAB’s VPC more often with my new major…

I went to my first “house party” two weeks ago! I was a bit nervous at first, but after meeting a few of the people (and seeing some familiar faces there) I was a lot more relaxed. I didn’t drink, though, since I was driving myself, but I did learn a bunch of drinking games. They were very fun and I played some with my friends the week after. I think I want to go to some more house parties but I just don’t know where to find them or who to ask…

I had what’s technically my first kiss, although it didn’t turn out how I’d hoped and no, I’m not saying anymore on the subject. On a somewhat-related note, Harry Potter 6 (the movie) has this rather terrifying Exorcist-esque scene at Hogsmeade. I was a bit scared.

The 4th of July is this weekend! You’d think for what is the 4th of July weekend it’d just be parties non-stop, although the beginning of this weekend so far was essentially me finishing out the first season of White Collar. Tomorrow is going out to a club with some of my friends and Sunday (July 4th itself) we’ll have a BBQ and fireworks. Monday we’re all off from school and work, so I have no clue yet what to do.

My car’s up here in Orlando! Lance is off being a counselor at camp for the summer (and he’ll be starting his freshman year at UF in August) so I was finally able to bring it northward. It’s excellent being able to drive myself around instead of having to rely on others for rides. On the other hand, driving gives me the ability to go to the grocery store, which means no mealplan, which means I have to start feeding myself 24/7. Not that I mind, it’s just a small annoyance at times.

(Probably because of my switch of major) I’ve had a “creativity rush” in terms of writing stuff recently. More storylines for the main film I’m working on, some new ideas entirely, a new song (lyrics + tune, fuck yeah!), and even recording/mixing/posting some multitrack a cappella stuff on YouTube. I had a really brief idea for a story that I decided to turn into a film, song, or both when I realized that generally, I can’t write stories, and I do envy my friends that can do creative writing in that manner. (When I create, I’m always thinking in film/TV terms, camera angles, editing techniques, etc. to the story, not as much characterization, which bothers me.)

I’m training for a half-marathon! The furthest I’ve run so far is 9.6 miles and with my current plan I’ll definitely hit it by the end of summer and before fall semester starts. Running is really fantastic!

In another two weeks I’ll hold three concurrent jobs with the Honors College along with my Studio Director position at Knightcast. At least I’m making some money for myself! BHCSI is going to fun considering I’ve done it once before from the camper’s perspective. The Symposium Coordinator job will mainly be prep work for the retreat in late August since much of it doesn’t really apply until fall semester. Being a Peer Ambassador for Honors Orientation was on the whole an exciting experience (I gained much respect for the O-Teamers that are able to do those long days week in and week out, time after time, every session) and I get to do one make-up session toward the end of July. We also revamped everything over at Knightcast, recently getting a brand-new webserver, DJ computer, genre streaming system, audio console cable, and archiver. Somehow I don’t think anyone reading this is too interested in that last sentence.

I’m gonna try to update this blog more often, especially given this month is my birthday and my last month of being a teenager. You’d think I’d feel young at 20 but I already feel old at 19. What’s up with that?

To my roommates and friends outside in my living room as I’m writing this: quiet down! I need to get some sleep for my 7am run tomorrow…

So after MONTHS of delays and procrastination on it, I’ve finally finished the editing on and shipped out my latest film, a short horror idea centered around a local DJ, “Radio”. Check it out up on YouTube (in 720p HD, no less!) over at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN0szeAZaJ4. Or, feel free to view it below!

If you’re interested in some of the technical principles I came across while shooting this, read on. The biggest problem I ended up having with this film was loss of my audio takes from the shoots: I shot the film in my camera’s 24p mode which wraps the 24 progressive frames in a 60i stream, thus necessitating a reverse telecine process to extract them out. When doing this in After Effects and rendering out the subsequent frames, I lost all my initial audio takes because AE’s default render options doesn’t include audio–I’ve since learned to ALWAYS check that audio rendering is enabled. I ended up recording all the audio in separate takes and dubbing them in afterwards–lip-syncing is almost impossible on film. The second thing I really learned about in making this film was the importance of storyboarding. Although I shot a lot of b-roll and had all of the shots I wanted, I realized both while shooting and editing that my mis-en-scene looked a bit capricious, as if I didn’t really have a grand idea at the time as to exactly how I wanted to scene to look. I realize now that, by storyboarding out the exact process and shots beforehand, it’ll probably make shooting go a lot faster and ensure in editing I know exactly what goes when.

I saw this recently with an eclectic mix of other films, and I just had to get some thoughts down on it.

In this movie, an unknown source releases a chemical that causes entire populations of people to kill themselves and become suicidal. As a matter of fact, the only people in the movie who do not become an heroes are the main characters, as if this wasn’t a drawn-out horror movie cliché. As the movie does not fully explain the cause, watching it is a huge waste of time for anybody. At the end, though, the “unknown source” actually turns out to be a bunch of freaking trees. Angry, vengeful trees. Never before in a movie have there been so many stock shots of wind blowing ominously through foliage, and never before have so many enviro-Nazis simultaneously wet themselves the world over.

Alright, so Campus Movie Fest was a couple of weeks back and my friends and I got together and made a pretty sweet film. At least, in my opinion it was pretty good. Of course, it didn’t win any awards or anything (not that I’m aware of; there could be some very obscure independent student film award in Indonesia that gives me 400,000 rubles and I won or something), but, then again, I didn’t make it for that purpose. More just to have fun and mess around. Honestly, a week with a free camera and Mac laptop. Who’d say no?!

Anyhoo, here’s the culmination of our week of creating a script, casting, shooting, editing, producing, directing, etc. Enjoy!

Make comments on the video’s page itself, not this blog post! Unless, of course, your comments are about this post and not the video…maybe I’d need some sort of “meta-post”…hmmm….