Some of the guys at work have used white-board markers to scribe a rough sundial on their window. As the sun rises, it casts a shadow onto the window sill. They are using a seam line in the middle of the sill as their marker. It's pretty cool!
Yesterday I discovered that I have an electric personality... or something. Every time I would get out of my chair or, in some cases, get into my chair within about a foot of a prototype board I'm programming, it would reset.
The first two times we thought it was a fluke. After nine sequential tries we decided it was definitely me. Other people don't do it, either. I even reset this board in someone else's cube...
Yesterday I was wearing silk, so I was probably building up a HECK of a charge. Today I'm wearing linen... and it did it again.
Pretty neat, eh?
Saturday is our first day at Dragonwood and we will be filming a few scenes with Victoria, our pretty dead girl. I may or may not have a makeup person capable of doing her, so I may (or may not) get to do the makeup myself.
I'm thinking I need to practice on Friday.
When I volunteered for the makeup management position in the Deadbacks project, I was working under the assumption that it would be mostly an organizational task, using a number of skilled volunteers that we had on hand plus some more we would find.... after all, I'm not an experienced makeup person. I figured I could push papers and work schedules, and one or more senior makeup people could take the techincal lead.
Well, I couldn't find anyone to take the lead for this, but I kept hoping. I'm just now beginning to internalize my role as makeup manager, which is a lot like my role as physical FX manager... e.g., I own it, including creative aspects.
It should turn out okay. Maybe even better than okay!
As we approach the final weeks before shooting, the panic level is rising, as well as the chaos. But it looks like things will come together, assuming we actually get a cinematographer. And we finish the sets. And I both find and train sufficient quantities of makeup people. And find time to sculpt and cast the props. Let alone make molds from our actors.
Ummmm.... the next two weeks sees me doing a lot of work with makeup people and actors, squeezed into many of my "free" moments.
Yeah.
On the happy bright note, I'm getting my combat-steel saber tonight at TaiChi, and I find I'm inordinately excited about the prospect. This enthusiasm has also probably been fueled by my recent reading of the first 20 "Lone Wolf and Cub" manga (just now being reprinted by Dark Horse comics, so I have to now buy these).
Last night I had a chance to work on my heart sculpture a bit, and I found that my choice of clay for this project was perfect. This Chavant NSP Medium is great stuff! Rubbery enough to not crumble in handling, hard enough to hold up to handling and take details, enough tack so I can add clay as needed, heat-softenable with a heat gun to enhance MANY working aspects, and so on. Great stuff!
I took the evening off from TaiChi to go to a rehearsal of Deadbacks.
That was kinda cool. Our actors are really pretty good, some of 'em are excellent.
I may even have just enough makeup people to not have a complete disasater on that front, too. Tonight I'll tump all of my makeup volunteer names into a bucket and e-mail 'em... Saturday is Makeup Day, and I want to test both my makeup peoples and the actors getting into makeup.
It should be interesting.
Right now at work I'm stuck... I'm working on a piece of code that is stuck on two fronts. Any second now I expect a phone call from my tech guy at the company that makes my compiler and development environment. With any luck we'll figure out how to make his system do what I need..
... which is to compile my code for ROM (flash, actually) and on boot, copy bits of it to RAM and then run THAT to re-program the flash... tricky stuff that supposedly works easily with their linker and loader.
Hah.
Oooh, my brain is all sleepy and blurry this morning.
I don't even remember what I did Thursday and Friday, though I'm sure I went dancing Friday and visited odd Friday (www.oddfriday.com).
This weekend was a blur of activity, the beginning of the madness that is this movie production. Though I can only imagine what Aaron is going through -- not enough budget, barely enough actors, no cinematographer yet, not enough makeup crew, and so forth. On second thought, I know exactly what he is going through; this sounds a lot like Haunted Trails 2004... only the movie is more complex and has slightly higher stakes (I think).
I was able to do a variety of interesting things over the weekend, other than planning the work out in great detail (mmm, dependency graphs) and shopping for tools and supplies.
For the first time, I cast clay into molds for re-sculpting. That was cool. The clay I found (NSP Plasteline Medium) is awesome! From an awesome company (www.chavant.com). They sent me a comprehensive sampler pack of clays for only $10 S&H... very nice. Then I bought 50lbs of clay. A good deal for them, I'm sure.
I did discover, to my regret, that Armadillo Clay is a distributor of Chavant, even though they are not listed on the website. Visiting Armadillo to get hydrostone (a hard plaster) I saw they carried the NSP -- a no-sulfur variety that I expected to be kinda obscure. I told Armadillo they weren't listed, so maybe they will get on Chavant's case.
Lessee... I tested several blood bases, all of which had interesting characteristics, though I really don't like the strawberry syrup blood. Ick, fake strawberry, and the seeds clogged my syringe.
I built up a valve manifold and "nail board" to manage up to six bullet hits in sequence.
Hmmm... my original bullet hit mechanism used a 260 balloon (www.tmeyers.com) to seal the tube and provide a blowout. I found that for large loads, the blood accumulated in the expanded balloon and, on rupture, just fell to the ground. So I used cling wrap around the load tube hole instead; it blew out just fine under the pressure I'm using and it didn't stretch to create a blood-blister.
I did have to seal the wrap with petroleum jelly, though, so it wouldn't leak. No big deal. I also found that if I reduced the air pressure to 20psi or so, I get more of a "squirt" than a blast, so that's useful information. Unfortunately, the pneumatic valves I use require at least 30psi to operate. But if I need a squirt, I can always use the manual valve again.
We need a way to get bullet hits on boards and trees, and the best way to do that is to shoot "dust" at the target. One way to do THAT is to get a paintball gun and some black-shell / white-paint balls for it. Then, using a syringe, suck the paint out and then replace it with... something else.
Instead, however, I hooked the compressor up to a 28" tube and loaded it with a large gelatine capsule from the health store, which was in turn loaded with blood, graphite, petroleum jelly, and a variety of other materials I wanted to test.
A shot of air and out if flies! Either rupturing or, more often, opening on contact. Poof of dust! Splash of blood! So that worked okay.
I'm sure there was more, but I don't remember anymore.
No, I don't mean our ridiculous US budget deficit
(Oooh, Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility; Oooh, they don't tax us; Ooooh, BULLSHIT. If they are so responsible, why are we spending so much more money than we make? Sure they aren't taxing us... they are taxing our future. But that's a different rant.)
I've got zillions of dollars of STUFF hitting my doorstep between the 14th and the 18th. Gelatin, glycering, silicon molding materials, more makeup, sausage casings (don't ask), and I don't even remember what all else. Not to mention the errands I'll be running to get plaster, cotton puffs, sunscreen, pneumatic fittings (on order), and an endless list of other trivial bits.
I just hope to hell that I got what I needed and not too much that I don't need.
Mmm, movies. What a way to spend money.
Thursday afternoon I broke down my computer and finished putting all of my various worldly goods into the designated conference room.
Thursday and Friday, we amused ourselves at the annual NI Tech conference, wherein we all give presentations to each other about what we are working on, where we are going, new ideas, old traings, whatever.
Over the weekend, magically, all of our cubes were broken down and re-assembled differently.
Today I am back online in a bigger, better cube! Whee!
Saturday I took my management final and probably didn't bomb it entirely. There's actually a good chance I got a B, which is entirely sufficient for my needs.
I really didn't enjoy the class and I'm glad it's over.
Next weekend I do the CS-111 final, but except for all of the writing a computer science final entails, it will be a breeze. So that's all essentially done with.
I have CS-121 on my plate now, and I don't even know what that is. I'll buy books for it soon or something.
The BIG priority right now is the Deadbacks movie. We start shooting April 30 and I need (desperately) a makeup crew to apply the appropriate pigments and paints to the faces of the actors. It should be interesting.
Not to mention all of the FX work -- sculpting, casting, testing, assembling, you know -- I have to do. Seeing as how I'll be onsite at the shoot on the weekends, my actual FX building time is VERY limited.
Should be interesting.
The first filming day is three and a half weeks away... that's three weekends.
There is a LOT TO DO between now and then! Of course, the shooting continues through June, so TECHNICALLY I have time DURING the shoot to make stuff... but I want to be on the site when they are shooting, which takes a bunch of time away.
Gah!
This weekend I have my management final, which I need to study for but haven't been, so I doubt I'll do very well... and I will be hanging with our storyboard artist working on scenes I care about... and I hope to talk with Aaron some too, about various FX and makeup decisions...
I'm a bit worried. I guess I'll be cutting my extra-curricular activities to the bone for a while.
Last Halloween I did work on making body parts that could stand up to handling -- that would feel real. While my first tries were decent, I also learned things along the way that will make my next set of realistic parts even better.
For example, there is a newer form of dragon skin that is MUCH softer than what I used, which will give future parts a more flesh-like feeling.
And I understand that you can burn or melt away silicon flashings (if you avoid the toxic fumes, at least). Gotta try that. I hate flashing seams.
But for the movie I need to go one better. I need body parts that can be eaten.
Maybe not *swallowed*, but at least chewed.
Needless to say, I'll be using gelatin for these. I'm thinking a tough gelatin skin followed by foamed gelatin that will, at the last minute, be impregnated with blood. Another option is to include blood-tubes in the part and fill those with blood... I'm still experimenting. For blood tubes I would use some form of sausage casing, so I need to find a local supplier of those.
Ahhhh... we're gonna have fun on this.
I've also found some *awesome* and reasonably priced clays for model making... much better in every way than the sculpey I used last year. The sculpy will retain its role as barrier walls and stuff, but I don't think I want to sculpt with it anymore.
I reached critical levels of frustration last night working on the last bits of my CS11 work.
Because of Microsoft's idiocy and incompetence, I lost the better part of two hours of my life last night in frustration and annoyance.
I want my !@#$% two hours back. No, I want ALL of the time I spent waste in frustration because of Microsoft's bullshit software back. That should account for an extra year. And for that kind of pain, I want $100 an hour. Lessee, at 2,080 hours a year, that's $208,000 they owe me. Bastards.
I should probably have found the problem in only an hour, but I really wasn't expecting the level of idiocy the problem was a symptom of. I mean really.
Their BUILT IN !@#$% showed the file just fine. The code was just fine. If I stripped everything out things worked. I discovered, after some suffering, that a single comment in the file broke things.
It took a while to get to that point, though, because the error messages had nothing to do with ANYTHING.
Which is what was so !@#$% annoying and mysterious about it. The error messages would change around a bit, but never seemed relevant to anything.
The code that was !@#$%ing with me was downloaded as part of the class, so I got suspicious about garbage invisible characters in it. So I loaded it up under a DECENT editor (Scite... find it, get it, love it) and discovered that the offending file was terminated in CR (carriage return).
Native termination for windows is the bullshit CR/LF (carriage return and linefeed pairs).
The compiler or, more likely, the pre-processor couldn't cope. Even though everthing showed the file as being just fine (the editor, the post-processed expanded listings, EVERYTHING), it was actually puking deep inside the system where nobody could see it. And it wasn't giving rational errors.
So I wasted two hours of my life chasing down a termination incompatability.
It isn't like it's HARD to make a parser cope with CR and/or CR/LF terminators. It's easy. Their IDE did it. I've done it before. Diseased monkeys could probably write code that would do it.
So I want my two hours back.
Bastards.
Well, there was a problem in my new code... a weirdness in the hardware that, for some reason, I didn't think applied to my case. I was wrong. Now it's all re-written and, since it compiles and no bugs have been found, it's perfect!
I suppose I need to test it now.
Sunday morning is the first audition for Deadbacks. I think I'll go and watch. Should be interesting.
Most of the rehearsals and stuff are on weekday nights, which makes it hard for me to be there.
This weekend I also need to get my plans for the FX in place. I'll make notes and then merge them with the storyboard when I have a chance to talk to Denis.