Jed Smith - Week 10
For the last 7 days, I have been working pretty constantly on the Trouble With Unicorns. On Thursday of last week, we shot the Meadow pixilation sequence, and on Monday, we shot more stills of our actor who plays Morgan, whose name is Venu Mattraw, walkking through forest. We also shot the pixilation scene that ends the movie, and then drove that night up to Tacoma just in time to shoot some pixilation in the docks industrial area during Magic Hour (more like Magic 25 miutes). Having started on this endavor at about 10am, and getting back at about 11am, I then proceeded to work all night doing fine-cut edits on the assembly edit of the movie that we had previously finished, and also to work more on the Dan rotoscope special effects scene, match-moving the horn to the movement of his head, and also working on the matchmovving composite of the infomercial scenes in Morgan's bedroom. Then after a long day of Critiques, I went to Peter Randlette's house for the final critique of the previous week's Hybrid Music performance. This constituted a full challenge to my abilities of waging the sleep battle. Then I came home and crashed for about 14 hours. That Wednesday afternoon, I worked with my brother on attempting to understand the functioning of a 555 timer IC and attempting to decipher the arcane functionality of that infamous device, the transistor. This learning was for a definite purpose however, as I was attempting to build an Intervalometer to accomplish Time-Lapse photography with my Canon 350d.
On Thursday I wrote my Evaluation for Hybrid Music, and had my evaluation conference. Directly after that I rushed home and started transforming the prototype of the intervalometer device into a physical functioning device: from breadboard to paper-circuit. During this process, Morgan, who had come to my house that morning to borrow the Unicorns drive (which is the main portable harddrive used by us to store media and project files for the unicorns project, and is manufactured by Lacie), in order to start in on some editing while I was busy with New Media duties, contacted me by instant message. I quickly learned that he had plugged the Unicorns drive in, and smoke had come out of it and the smell of burning had permeated the room. Fearing the worst, we put off troubleshooting this catastrophe until...
I managed to finish my Intervalometer to a point of functionality before the New Media class started at 6:00pm, when I had to present it as my final project. Delicious timing. After feeling exceedingly bad about how little time I was having to work on my job of Program Aide, I came home from class and Morgan and Brad and I got together in my room and took the 3.5" IDE Hitachi T7K500 320GiB out of the extremely unfriendly user servicable cage. Sure enough, a large spot on the circuit board of the cage in the power-supply area was blackened, and it smelled like burnt electronics. Still optimistic about the state of the harddrive, we pulled it out and plugged it into another known working USB-IDE cage. We turned it on, and it started to smoke and burn also, without spinning up.
So there is currently about 2 days of my work on the SFX Dan scene locked up on that drive, and a good 10 hours of editing lost, as well as various unique audio files and sound design projects and written documents related to the project. Of course there are backups, but they are from Sunday night.
There is still hope however. The drive is dead only because of the logic board. An order from Newegg.com is currently shipped by 2-day express with the exact same harddrive, and our plan is to switch the logic boards, because we know that the motors inside of the fallen drive are not damaged, and likely the heads are not damaged either. We will continue to polish edit individual scenes, and we will synch them when the fallen drive is resurrected from its ashes and capacitor goo.
Today (Friday 06-08), we got a nice studio mic and went into COM 346 and re-recorded all of the scratch track narration with Morgan, and then a little later, Recorded ADR with Sumner and Venu, to recover dialog on some of the scenes with the more awful sound work. This went well and I am hopeful for the fate of (at least) the intelligebility of the sound. Brad and Morgan revised the narration alot last night also, and the changes are an improvement. The Narration is no longer going to be limited to the dream sequences.
So that's where this project is. Over the next remaining days we are going to get as much done as possible, and make it as polished as possible, and will find out how good it ends up being.
PS: Here's my Blurb for Lethe:
In Greek mythology, Lethe is a river of Hades that souls were made to drink from before being reincarnated, causing complete forgetfulness and oblivion. Lethe is section 01 of a larger project representing through audiovisual experience the perceptual and cognitive evolution of an Artificial Intelligence from genesis to self-awareness.
