Category: Video

Live at RHS Band Aid

This past Friday I pulled out Blonski’s purple bass and his fat Peavey amp and rocked and rolled at Rockville High School’s Band Aid concert. I’ve played with a few other teachers in my middle school at our talent shows for the past five or so years, but when Jen’s son suggested we take our show on the road to the high school, we though, “Why not?”

Thanks to Jen Roggi on vocals, Judy Thompson on drums, and Ryan Kupferschmid on acoustic guitar. We had a blast and hopefully we’ll do it again next year.

Rock on,
-Mike

Google Hangout leads to drum video recording

I like playing Steve’s drums and the way that they sound and I like hanging out with Steve.  I told him we should do those things.  The text messages went as follows:

gtalk01

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get to his place before 8:30, and so I requested caffeine.

gtalk02

Steve obliged and also had chicken nuggets.  Later, we reflected on what could be done better the next time.

gtalk03

Still, it’s worth watching at least part of.

-Mike

 

From the Vault: CRAXYBRAIN

A month or two back, Steve and I attempted a one hour challenge.  That in itself wouldn’t be much of a surprise, except that this time we nearly kept it to 60 minutes.  That’s probably the reason this track never got finished…

There’s a few other interesting tidbits about CRAXYBRAIN, though.  Most of which you can find out by watching the documentary of us writing and recording it.  Eagle-eyed viewers will notice a tired basset hound throughout!

The documentary concept is one we’d definitely like to revisit in the future, and, if nothing else, we got a sweet video intro tune out of it!

-Mike

Hiatus and Scene 1 Editing

How long has it been?

Must have been ages since our last post… seeing as how Nat has gone full sci-fi Lawnmower Man on us:

CyberNat

He’s actually pretty pumped about it; all those splines and lines means he’s articulate! As in he’s got a big mouf:

OK, its not that big, but maybe a little too big for his head. Fortunately adjusting the size should be no problem! And after spending a day learning motion tracking software, The overlaying process of the mouf on the face ain’t so bad. Animating moufs still is… anyone know how to automate animated mouf generation based on audio input? Cause that would be pretty cool, allowing me to play more Awesomenauts with Mike and lament on the sad selection of other great online co-op games.

The outdoor King scene has been on pause since we last got together, but we should be finished in another day of filming. The venue is likely changing for it, as I’ll be packing all of the equipment up and moving it from Vienna House to Mikey’s, which really needs a cool studio name. Like “Maggie’s Magorium”, or perhaps something even cooler!

Until then, I’ll be churning out the splines and keyframes!

-Steve

ps- moufs!

King makes you feel bad for him

One might say that the aim of any artistic work is to provoke emotion.  What better to provoke someone to feel a way about something than to make a dog sad?  We have made the dog sad.  Behold!

Eventually, this scene will be stitched together with an interior shot, a static image of stars, and a meteor shower through the witchcraft that is modern home video editing.  Please reference the post below for a mockup of the shot.

Until next time,
-Mike

 

SpaceBase: Explosionity!!!

Was this the horrible, unspeakable accident that sparked the genesis of the Melty Man?  Does it fully explain the back story of how Mr. Man attained his moniker?  Might it create a wealth of story-lines ripe for exploration throughout the first season of SpaceBase: Infinity?

Either those things, or we dropped the adjustable arm lamp entirely too deep into the set and blew out the image.  Great opportunity for ridiculous text effects, though.

Steve is pretending to be a giant.

Today, we fully assembled the next set, experimented with lighting (including some nice LEDs leaking through the window), and made King’s new sitting position.

Sit, King!

In addition, we realized that if we leave clay out, the clay gets dry.  Hmm… that sounds familiar for some reason.  Looks like we’ll be remaking the character’s bodies again.  Hooray!

When everything is composited, the shot should look something like this (only, a little better):

King's locked out.

Finally, a question to ponder… better rap “supergroup”: 213 or Westside Connection?

-Mike

Moon-henge: Future Eye

After a long hiatus, the SpaceBase:Infinity crew is back and hard at work… finally. The jerks.

And next on the list for scenes is one of the more unique sets we will be working with on this project. After much deliberation, we decided to go with a cross section of the SpaceBase interior, with the exterior showing at the same time (you can see a little of the base’s inner workings at the top of the above image). While a little technical and tricky, this should prove to be an interesting shot, which will make up for our lack of exposition and dialogue in the scene!

Mike rips a pipe in two with one of those saws, just like the mouseover says

After crafting the majority of the Base’s set for this scene, we took a break to make some musics, and it was good. The crew of SB:I toiled away as we played our hearts out. Then we took another picture:

...what the mouseover says

 

Until next time, when you will see more!

-Steve

We should've taken more notes

Let us begin this blog post with a block quote of an earlier blog post.  Imagine a world where it is early March, the weather is still threatening snow, and Steve and I are tirelessly clicking the enter button on his wireless number pad.  A bold decision is made:

“We’re also planning to do some creative reusing of a few of the angles we’ve shot so far.  In a few weeks, we should know whether or not we have ingeniously saved hours of work or confused the shot sequence so severely that only hours of additional work can sort out the wreckage.  Exciting!”
-Mike

Fast forward to present day.  We made a mess for ourselves.

What have we learned?  Make notes.  If you plan on reusing footage, make it apparent where the cuts should be.  Write down frame numbers, descriptions, draw a picture.  Do something to remind yourself later instead of, you know, not doing anything and assuming it’ll all work out fine.

Here are some things I’m hearing Steve say as he edits the scene and I write this post:

  • “This doesn’t make any sense.”
  • “We filmed the dog out of sequence; that threw me off for a little bit.”
  • “Yeah, it’s too… maybe a little further.”
  • “What’s this shot?”
  • “Winona reaction face.  But there’s a lot of talking there!”
  • “I’m assuming that comes after what we just did. [sigh]”
  • “I really don’t know what we did here.  I’m gonna move on.”

Next time things will probably be perfect.  I’m pretty sure.

-Mike