notions

a few different notions floating around my head today...

i have thus far made the magnificent longcat logo that floopy made for me into a 3d shape in blender...

and what i want to do, is to make an animation/film, in which the camera floats around the 3D logo before plunging into one of the eyes, coming to rest, then a hatch opens in the side of the passageway and i beckon the camera into the hatch, the room beyond is my room with my rhodes, piano and such...

although it might be better if balthazara was the one popping out of the hatch...

and actually, i went round to see john sinclair yseterday, his computer is being odd and i picked it up and took it to floopy who had a look at it...

the house john was in is up in woodgreen - 5 minutes away on my bike - it's the home of D, who i really hope to get in an improvisation one day soon, also his two kids stay there with him half the time, it's the london home of john and it's soon to be headpress's office, headpress under whose name i bought my hammond organ, but who are a book publishers...

D took me up to the roof room and there's a lovely view south, in the direction of this flat, and if i took a picture of that view, put the longcat 3D logo in amongst it somehow...?

so, on to the techy side of it and all those who wish to not be geeky turn away now please...

so, a little internet research showed me how to easily export from google sketchup into blender, so i can make things in sketchup which i find quite easy, such as buildings... simple buildings of course, nothing too fancy at this stage,

maybe the view from D's house is cut out as a bezier curve, imported into blender, the bezier curve becomes a mesh and it's extruded, exactly how i did the longcat logo,

the picture itself then put on the front of the shape, (something i haven't yet done but it shouldn't be too hard?)

and now i think about it, i could cut out a few different shapes from the picture, several different horizons, then create a kind of staircase effect, looking straight at it it would look like the picture, but as you travelled over it, different parts of it would become visible...

hmmm, makes me want to go over there right now and take a picture...

anyway, a combination of this and sketchup versions of some kind of town in front and behind the longcat logo would be nice...

then flying around the logo is done in blender although i don't yet know how to do it,

then the chroma keying, green screen as it used to be, get a solid sheet and colour it accordingly, (whichever colour is least in either me or balthazara), put a hatch into the sheet, put the sheet at the right angle, camera on the other side, video me opening the hatching and beckoning,

i also thought about using the colour black as the chroma key colour, putting the camera in the loft in compete darkness, pointing at the hatch, then i open the hatch and appear.. easier... i might try it...?

anyway, having exported the blender movie into vegas, chroma key, or maybe just use the bezier mask to cut out the right shape, but it moves of course... hmmm...

so techy thoughts over...

that's what's swimming around my head at the moment,

we watched the first episode of GBH just now and i have the rest waiting for us, although each episode is over an hour and i'm not convinced dinah is really up for it... we'll see...

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dangerous script proust

last week i was carrying my cards around in the proust book, this on the days when i was wearing trousers with no pockets...

then i lost my oyster card on the day of the gig @ ULU, bought another that came with a plastic wallet, you know the type,

so now my cards are all in the plastic wallet, and what do i do yesterday?

of course, all those eggs in one basket, how could i not lose the wallet...

so anyway, i didn't have a crowd of money on me, no oyster card, no debit card... i had to get home, so i decided to walk from london bridge to where i could get the 29 bus... also i was kind of wistful and it was late in the day, the sun still up...

so i got onto the thames beach just past blackfryers rail bridge (i think) and i walked all the way to waterloo bridge down there, the sky beautiful... windy but lovely...

i reach the southbank and pop in to use their loo and i find a sound sculpture interactive thing called volume, that wasn't as good as it looked like it would be, but probably worth a second look one day...



in time got to the 29 bus and set about finishing this current proust book, at one point a couple got on and sat beside me, insisting on talking, so i had to recourse to the piece of rhodes music i'd recorded to shield me from my neighbour's sound, now shielding me from these inconsiderate fellow travellers...

anyway i reached the end which was lovely, volume 2, it'll be a little while before volume 3 comes round to play... we watched dangerous liaisons last night which - as well as being absolutely delicious - was also ringing several proustian bells for me, at one point keanu reeves passes a note to uma thurman saying "i love you"... just as albertine passes a note to our narrator (the young proust) saying "i like you"...

i was a little confused because i'd seen a korean version of dangerous liaisons quite recently and couldn't work out whether i'd seen the original or not... it is just simply wonderful...

ok and scripts...

this is a little bit techy...

i do certain things every week, or every time i make a cutup film, over and over again, and i'm finding out about ways to automate certain of these tasks... (like changing the velocity envelope in a certain way to deal with my old camera's waywardness)... it turns out that vegas (my video editing software) allows the use of scripts, taking a repetitive action and assigning it to a single button, greatly reducing time spent on these tasks...

exactly what i need, for quite a few different things i do...

but my needs as a video editor are (i think) different from other video editors needs and so i may have to create a script or several scripts for my exact needs...

but creating scripts is really a programming thing, they're programmed in C++ or Jscript...

so this is it, do i plunge into that world of writing my own scripts? am i not so special after all and the scripts i want are out there on the web somewhere? do i carry on in my labour intensive way without scripts?

i've emailed D - who i'm going to see on friday as we're gigging up in leamington spa,

(indiana jones music as i look upon this scripting mess in despair and all of a sudden:

"Do Not Fear non-programming brother, I, D, Programming Brother Will Help You!")

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