The following is a brief and spontaneous foray into the realm of cloudscape photography.
1 CommentDue to the inevitable migration of my sleep schedule during times without large quantities of obligation, I happened to be awake at about 7am one morning. I felt like going for a walk, for it had just stopped raining. The rain was the first in a couple of months. The sun was just rising behind some clouds, and the light looked quite pleasant. Armed with my Chinese macro extension tube, I took pictures of leaves and water droplets, and other inane subject matter. Brilliant.
I had the good fortune to have the best 4th of July evar. I always wondered what was missing from my 4th of July celebration experience, and it turned out the answer was . . . very large explosives. By a stroke of luck I was able to help set up the 2008 fireworks finale portion of the Freedom Fair show in Tacoma, mentioned here.
The hardest part of the job was the setup, which took two days. We were working on a barge just near Glacier Northwest Concrete in Tacoma. Pyrotechnics work is not as glamorous as it might seem, it consisting mostly of shoveling sand, stringing squib wire, and loading mortars in tubes in the right order. I had altogether too much fun doing even this, however.
And, some photographic evidence of the fireworks show itself. Officially, I got to wear a fireman’s suite and be on “fire duty,” which was supposed to consist of running around with a fire extinguisher and putting out flames that might threaten fuses that might launch the wrong shells at the wrong time, however, because 3 other people were already doing that, I ran around with cameras instead.
Also, if you are into pictures of me, and captions, check out Dave Cramton’s pictures.
Doing work with fellow film geeks, of course we ended up making a video glorifying the 10″ fireworks shell, creating a somewhat silly loading tube ceremony. This ended up being an intro to the other footage of the fireworks show, and the aftermath, that I shot.
2008 Tacoma Fireworks from badur on Vimeo.
Recently I have gone to glorious new heights in my search for novel methods of procrastination. See the visual results above. And also, below, if interested in a photographic history of the former Smith-White family establishment, horribly subject to Jed’s spastic color-”correction” methodic obsession with Lightroom and extremely high contrast images with sickly shadow green and highlight orange tonality.
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| From Pictures from Ages Past |
Last week was Thanksgiving Break week. I was going to not take a break and spend the entire time in my room working. Then I decided that was a bad idea, and went up to see my Mom for a few days. She lives near Friday Harbor on San Juan island. I did not get nothing done while I was there, however. I brought audiovisual documentation equipment consisting of my Canon HV20 HDV camcorder, my Canon 350d digital still camera, my brother’s laptop and Tascam US-122 audio interface, a Rode NT4 stereo microphone that Peter Randlette was kind enough to lend me, and 2 MCA SP1 microphones that my brother also has, for stereophonic recordings of varied stereo width, or to have mono documentation options.
I captured a large amount of moving water textures at dusk on the ferry trip over that will be useful for the 2nd dream. I recorded audio of water lapping at the ocean shore that is a very good approximation of my memory of the 1st dream. I captured photographs of many moist rocks while at said shore that will also be useful to create the environment of the 2nd dream. I also got to direct my mother as a voice actor, while she delivered her lines from the 3rd dream. Most interesting! I also captured some brilliant wind-in-trees ambiance that will be quite useful for sound-design in the 1st dream. Here is a pointless landscape picture.
When I got back, I had a bit of a difficult time getting motivated. I took Thanksgiving off. I started then working through even more tutorials on Nuke and Maya, delving deeper into the ridiculous complexity of these programs. I discovered by happenstance, a new tool which is magically assistive for tasks involving rotoscoping. It is called Motor, and is part of a suite of tools by Imagineer Systems. What is interesting about Motor is that it uses the companies proprietary planar tracking technology to track the motion of objects in footage, and extrapolate the motion of a 2d plane in 3d space from it. This amazingly accurate track can then be applied to the motion of a rotospline. This effectively means that 80% of the roto work is done for you, and all you have to do is provide the fine-tuning keyframes. This is difficult to explain completely. Once I start roto work on all of the pornography for the elements in the 3rd dream, I promise to post a screencast and show what I am using, and how I’m using it to do what I’m doing.
Then I decided that it would be a good idea to stop burying my head in software for awhile, and start work on my project, bringing about a new paradigm of learning software as a necessity to achieve an end-goal of creating something specific! Always a better way to learn, right?
Fortunately, the first scene is not too hard, and I had a plan of how to do it. This plan involved the creation of a wide-angle still image stitched from many tone-mapped HDR exposures. I resorted to this complex plan of image creation because the picture I had remembered from my dream couldn’t really be captured with … my camera, using conventional techniques. I used the PTgui software to do the image stitching, and Photomatix to do the HDR processing and tone-mapping. This is a similar technique to the processes of gigapixel photography, and the specific innovations of these techniques in regard to visual effects, pioneered by Eric Hanson and compatriots, at XRez. I then took the footage into After Effects and did some 3d camera mapping piled on the filters until it looked right. (After Effects is more suited to this type of effects processing than Nuke, although I did play around with Nuke’s 3D system with this footage a bit).
Soundtrack:
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It all started one tired morning with the rumbling dark ambient noises of Necrophorus, in all of its babbling bubbling creeching buttoning demonic glory. Of course at this point I was not in the position to fully appreciate this glory, and stumbled out of bed to turn down the volume of my speakers, eyesight bleary, balance unstable. I was rather tired, having only slept for 4.5 hours, having gone to sleep at 12am out of depression and wishing to put off the task at hand for as long as possible. The task at hand was this: write job applications. Yes, I am not the only one incredibly good at avoiding things until the very last possible minute when you just have to face them.
My Grandmother Sally was coming to pick me up on her way north at 11am, and I had to finish the applications by then. Of course one of the things I hate doing more than many other things is bragging about myself and attempting to make some critical person in an office battling an ocular hernia and an intestinal ulcer, leaving to go defecate streams of blood into the garbage can every 15 minutes because the toilet is broken and he really doesn’t have a choice like me and think that I’m the ‘man’ for the job. Of course this is what I had to do, and although there was some small satisfaction to be gained from imagining the just plight of this imaginary executive, I still had to write things. Curse you things! I said to myself as the letters went out of focus on the screen and I blinked but the goo was still there. A plague of goo, and no words.
6 hours later, I had napped for 2 hours and finished one application (the one for electronic media. I rushed to upper campus to attempt to turn it in and get back in time for the Grandmother arrival and the packing of things for the trip. Of course I don’t have the slightest clue about what sort of self-agrandizing or insane psychological drivel-tangents i wrote about in my application, but one thing is certain: they will think I am not mentally stable enough to work any job, let alone their job. I also talked to the computer center slave, and they said i could turn the application for that in on monday and still get an interview, which is what most of the hiring was based on anyway. Curse you interview!
So I drove with my grandmother, who is actually quite pleasantly neat up north of seattle and eventually to Anacordis, where there is a ferry boat, which we got our car onto and rode in for an hour accross the ocean of puget sound, and between various island isles, eventually arriving at a place called Friday Harbor on the san juan island place. i’m sure this is all quite fascinating. i should probably get to the exciting things.
cut to a few hours later, after some dinner of potatoes and delicious blackberry pie. Malcolm is fiddling with a moldy 8mm projector, trying to get a very moldy old roll of film to load. I am holding a flashlight and trying to help. moments later we are watching a glorious 70s porno on a towel hanging on the door to the bathroom in the trailer where they live, fully featured with minimum poduction value, minimal stimulation of female genitals, and a very well endowed man standing with arms akimbo being laboriously sucked off, while fractal mold patterns pulsate and attempt multiple times to take over the frame completely, but never quite do. after the finish of that glorious film, (my mother’s mother having gone to bed already), we start up the next one, which appears to be in rather bad shape, despite having a cover that hadn’t disintigrated entirely, on which you could make out the letters “swedish erotica”, because each of those words is in fact its own letter. we load this film, with less trouble than the first and start it playing. of course the mold has taken over the image so much in this one that there are only abstracted shapes of the images that used to be there. Sometimes you can make out a face or arm or penis, hair white skin black wall grey. Like Brad’s direct animation, except filthily organic and fractal chaotic, as only mold goo can be. about halfway through the second film goo stuff starts piling up on the edge of the screen, and you can tall that there is all sorts of filth sloughing off and catching on the gate. sure enough, when it’s over, we open up the gate, and there is a ton of black goo inside that reminds me of tar in texture consistency and smell. it was worth it though. needless to say, i brought both the films and the projector home.
The next day we embark upon a journey to the beach to water the dog called Clause who was my dog and best friend and constant exploring companion ever so long ago in the alaska days (who sally was bringing north). On the way there we stop to see Mona, who, by birth, is a camel.
We feed Mona some apples, which is of course the only reason that an advanced creatures such as herself would tolerate us lowly human-beasts, because if she were to even desire to acquire apples by her own devices she could merely wish it and that thing would occur. Do not be fooled by her rough, un-ultra-camel appearance, for she is indeed mighty.
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