(no subject)

This is amazing. Why has no one commented or voted yet?

I really like this. How it scooches off on its own at the end, as if crawling away from the remnants of itself. Rebuilding. Nice.

Question

Would it be against "the rules" to post a sort of Making of documentary/commentary regarding the video for the task T-Minus? I'd kind of like to describe what went into creating the video portion without breaking the silent-film mood of this submission, but I'm not sure if that'd be Kosher -- what with using one idea for two tasks...

(no subject)

oh

my


goodness.



that was GOLD.

(no subject)

Absolutely brilliant.

(no subject)

Go ahead and submit it for T-Minus. I see nothing wrong with using one idea for multiple tasks.

(no subject)

Hells yeah, do it. I wanna see the making of.

I agree with Lincoln

I don't see anything wrong with reusing an idea. Though there are subtleties in people's appreciation thereof. Multitasks or overly-direct repeats have frankly found disfavor. Sometimes this seems to go overboard because repetition/iteration of ideas can result in a Lincoln-like excellence.

But there is a general community distaste for (or ignoring of!) multitasked activities. I've often observed it as a silent cultural agreement on the subject. People who feel strongly about it should say something--I don't think they need to defend themselves, I'm just curious.

Forethought is valuable.

The aesthetic appeal alone on this praxis is worth the vote. The excellent and amusing bit of animation is certainly worth a vote.

It is nice to encounter this sort of thing now a days.

(no subject)

Vote for one of the most Aesthematic completions I've noticed this era.

Also, for old gentlemen from Providence.

(no subject)

I'm with Ben.

Brilliant.

Also, I'd love to see how it was made, T-Minus all the way!

(no subject)

You mad fool!

(no subject)

Shplanked!

(no subject)

Holy crap. This is the awesomest praxis I've seen in ages. We must be friends now.

(no subject)

Remember, when you fight the future, sometimes the future fights back...

(no subject)

word. what she said.

(no subject)

You are one problematic son of a bitch. We were gonna rock this one, and then you post this. Damn you. Well, we'll see what happens when we post.

So, you are taking these with what type of camera? In terms of coloration here, the only thing you are doing is adding a sepia filter? The light over the table in conjunction with the tripod makes for quite a nice visual effect here. In particular, the first 3 shots of the clock on the table are really nice. You were shooting at what?, 1/15, 1/30? or slower shutter speed?

Also, do you do roleplaying stuff, or HPLHS stuff or something, or did you specifically download and print all the weirdo mythos paperwork for this.

You are in Providence?

Moved this back over here

Welcome to "Fight the Future: Extended Director's Commentary"


This
is an assortment of the tools involved. (Not pictured is the Shop-Vac,
because it's really big.) The table is an old butcher's block that I
recently refinished.


Here's
the camera setup I had. After each small adjustment to the clock, I'd
snap a frame. Since I was using a tripod, the overhead bulb was enough
light that I didn't have to use a flash -- this let me get the old-time
noir feel I was going for.
In all, there were 130 still frames.



Smashing the face of the clock. With a Hammer!
The
clock is leftover from when we were renovating this place. It's pretty
chintzy -- the silver rim and entire back are just cheap plastic. I
expected that the clear faceplate was too...

Turns out, after I
gave it a good whack with the hammer -- it's actually made of real
glass! Fortunately, I was wearing eye protection -- so "Time (and Medical Attention) Heals All Wounds" didn't come into play.


And I had a Shop-Vac handy to carefully suck up the tiny shards.

Once
all the glass was clear, I used some needle-nose pliers to play with
the hands of the clock. I shifted them around from Midnight to... a
Yellow Sign. It's kind of hard to make out in the .flv version, but
it's clearer in the big one.

Once I was done with the hands, I
started in on the clock face itself. I used the pliers to bend up the
edges at first -- but then I switched to tinsnips, and then a hammer,
as with each fold, the ball grew stiffer.



Camera's-Eye-View.
In the lower right, you can see what remains of the clock face. The hands are inside there somewhere too.


I used tinsnips to gnaw a hole in the plastic so I could get the motor assembly out.


The
electric drill was probably overkill to undo the tiny screws holding
the outer housing together, but I didn't feel like hunting down a
reasonably-sized hand screwdriver.

Once the housing had slithered away, I attacked the gearbox with the tinsnips until it was reduced to tiny bits.


Cleaning up afterwards.
The Yellow Sign was drawn in dry-erase marker, so it cleaned up easily off the recently-varnished table.


Windex: the ultimate weapon against Things That Should Not Be.


Post-production.
This part took the longest.

Fortunately,
thanks to the tripod, all the pictures had the basically the same
exposure and field of view, so all I really needed to do was scale them
down to a reasonable size. I used Irfanview (freeware)
to do the batch resizing. I also added a couple transition frames at
the end using Adobe Imageready, so that the entire thing can run as a
continuous loop.

I made a thumbnail-sized .gif version, just to make sure it looked OK.


Then I used the freeware progam ImageToAvi to compile the folder of images into a movie file, and VirtualDub (also freeware) to splice in the soundtrack and tweak the contrast levels of the final video.

[googlevideo:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4178063581608550513]
The music in the background is from the film Paprika. Still not happy with the abrupt cut off, but I haven't been able to find a good program to do audio fades.

I had actually finished and uploaded the entire video -- when I decided
that I liked the sepia finish of the still photos. So I ran a batch
process with the "Sepia" action I made in Photoshop and redid the whole
process from scratch using this new set of images.

I spent ages trying to find a streaming video host that a) worked in SF0, and b) didn't suck.
In the end, I had to compromise. Google for the proof submission, and Megaupload for the... shall we say "fine details". ;)

Hope you enjoyed it.

~Fin~

@Frostbeard:

Muahahahahaha!

Most of these pictures are from my trusty little Canon PowerShot S400. I generally just stick it on M with the aperture bumped up a stop -- and let the chip work out the exact details.

According to my exif data, the first three pictures were shot at 1/60, 1/25, and 1/30, respectively. It was a very low-light condition -- just a 40-watt bulb overhead, and a couple other dim lights aroud the room.
I actually like two of the table shots so much that I've turned them into wallpaper images.

The Sepia filter is something I put together myself in Photoshop, since I wasn't happy with any of the default settings.
First it plays with the color depth: it drops the color mode down to greyscale, and then brings it back up to a duotone of black and light orange (EB8B23).

Sometimes I toss in a Poster Edges filter after that, but lately I've been thinking that's overkill, so I've just been skipping straight to a Film Grain filter to give it that old-time camera feel.
After that, it makes a new layer and adds the vignette (either black or white). Sometimes after that, I'll manually adjust the contrast levels of the image beneath the vignette.



The papers are all from previous Call of Cthulhu larps I've run for my friends. One set is a "lost folio" of the Voynich Manuscript that was necessary to defeat (albeit temporarily) a Hound of Tyndalos, and the other is a set of letters, medical records, and clues pertaining to a sort of Whisperer In the Darkness/Mountains of Madness/Herbert West mystery. I think several of the fonts I used were from the HPLHS. Good stuff.

I'm not from Province -- I had assumed ArkhamZero was a team for Lovecraft fans.

(no subject)

The music in the background is from the film Paprika. Still not happy with the abrupt cut off, but I haven't been able to find a good program to do audio fades.

Audacity?

(no subject)

very nice

(no subject)

hey man that doesn't mean I thought you should take the other one down, just that I thought you should take it into the real world.

(no subject)

It's fine -- I was unsure whether to submit it in the first place, since the two were so similar. I'd still like to complete that task at some point, and I'll resubmit my proof once I've fulfilled the actual film festival part.

(no subject)

This is SO Jan Svankmajer!!!! Love it. Love it.

(no subject)

How did I miss this?!?!?
Beautiful.
Absolutely.

(no subject)

Just seen Paprika for the first time, and it has pushed my admiration for this completion up so much. I wish I'd been more evil and not voted before just so I could vote for it again now.

(no subject)

Beautiful.

Ia!

If I could give you another 5 points just for the 'Call of Cthulhu' quotation, I would.