6.30.2004

I have found the ultimate solution to all of our Expendable woes: A Digitally Replaced Tyler (Courtesy of Bud Light).
Check it out now, cause it's only good for two weeks.

6.28.2004

Great news! Today, Neight came over and we filmed a short movie.
"Big deal," you say? I think not, Mister Man! This is probably the first time the word 'filmed' has been used correctly by anyone in our little group (as he likes to point out, shooting on DV is in fact taping).

That's right boys and girls, Catman do Film has crossed the boundary between working on video to working on film. We shot the movie on Super-8 Kodachrome and if we need to edit it at all (once we get it developed), all cuts will be made with an actual razor edge. That is so cool.

Since there's no quick way to get actual frames from the film onto the internet and nobody was around to take production photos (like I usually do), here is me posing with the camera. Don't ask about the monkey, okay?
Fuck Fellini.

6.26.2004

Hola! I cleaned up my site today, deleting that useless 'profile' page (well, not really, but it's not accessible from the menu now) and all of the broken links I could find. The art section looks a little different now, linking to the new Catman do Films homepage instead of the old catman do music directory.

Hopefully I'll get off my ass and make a new homepage this summer. I was thinking sort of a dark blue color scheme, and It'd all be done in W3C-compliant HTML/CSS (not the mess of tables and font tags it is currently). And of course, lovingly hand-coded. Oh yeah, I was also thinking of adding (what was it called?)... content! That's the one.

Mmm, I also posted a new POTWIFLI a few days ago. Those silly jews!

6.23.2004

Some of you may have seen Tomas' most recent attempt to shamelessly transfrom their movie into merchandise. Never to be outdone, Catman do films is now offering the limited edition...
t('-'t)
For only $39.95 plus shipping and handling!

6.22.2004

There will be some EDS downtime following a hacker assault on my server last night. My website and any hosted files will be unavailable at this time. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Since you, my loyal readers, will no longer be able to peruse the vast, rapidly changing content of my website for an indefinite period, here are some neat statistics gleaned from my profile in lieu of anything interesting:
This is post #201 of my blog.
I have been blogging since april 2001. I have written 249 total posts in all of my blogs. As of right now I have written a total of 16,482 words. There are 182 outbound links in all of my blogs. On average, I post once per week.

6.21.2004

E-mail hell.
Mozilla Thunderbird

I spent the greater part of today switching my mail client from Netscape Communicator (which was crapping out) to Mozilla Thunderbird. What I didn't realize is that one little checkbox was going to give me a lot of trouble.

When I first set up my laptop, I was using my desktop computer primairly, so I didn't want e-mail messages to wind up only on the laptop. Therefore, I configured Communicator to leave the messages on the mail server, effectively copying them instead of moving them each time I checked my email. This worked fine at the time, because my desktop comp was configured to move the mail and served as the main repository. The problem is that once my windows desktop machine was reincarnated into my linux-based download server, all my mail was left to pile up on the bambi server.

I didn't know about this problem until today, when I had Thunderbird check my mail for the first time and watched in shock as it began to download over ten thousand emails dating back to the year 2000. That's around four years worth of spam crammed into my inbox. Yeowch.



After a few hours of siphoning out wanted mail into the "not spam" folder, I whacked away at my inbox with Thunderbird's adaptive spam filter. What makes it adaptive is that the filter actually improves with your input of what is spam and what isn't, making it more efficient with each message marked as junk. Anyway, my inbox is in order now, I've imported my adress book from Communicator, and I'll stop ranting about tech stuff nobody understands or cares about.

On a side note- I have five Gmail invites left. If you want one, send an email to fadookie@gmail.com and I'll consider giving you one.

6.20.2004

Some of you may remeber how earlier this year, I was talking about building an amp for my guitar. This was not one of those all talk ideas. In fact, I built and tested a functional preamp tonight (It helps to have a dad with a bachelor's in electrical engineering).

Me testing out the preamp box. I like disco, disco is my favorite sport.
That's me testing out the completed preamp box. Incidentally, you may recognize the backdrop- we shot Expendable's war room sequence in my dad's project room. Here is a close-up of the curcuitry:

Technofication! Fast Fourier Transfomation! EEG!
I'm proud to say that I placed and soldered all of the components myself. I did ask for my dad to supervise me- it helps to have someone who knows what he's doing when you're working with a 700° soldering iron. Yeowch!


While I mounted the PCB board in its metal casing, my dad wired a patch cable that would let me hook up my guitar to the RCA input jack on the preamp box.

Since I have almost no skill with the guitar whatsoever, I think that working with the technical aspect would be a good idea. Hopefully I can practice with my new preamp (and the amplifier I'm planning to build soon) and get better, but just building stuff is enough to keep me occupied for the moment.

6.19.2004

School is out! Do the Hitler dance!
Third Reich's The Charm

6.16.2004

Good times at Carlmont High!
Here's a rundown of the past week's high points.

Movie: The Expendable premiere went better than I thought it would. People liked it! Tomas also showed Zeta Squad, which was better than I thought it would be. It was good to see all of our hard work pay off.

School: It's almost fucking out! The only real final I have left to take is in math, but it'll probably be really easy. School gets out this Thursday- Finally!

Driving: My permit is valid! My permit is fucking valid! I drove down to and around Palo Alto today with an instructor from Stanford driving school. When I got home I drove to Yumi Yogurt with my mom. I didn't realize what a behemoth her car is until today. It's like a whale.

6.14.2004

Going All The Way.

I've been up all night getting the final cut of Expendable ready for the premiere tomorrow. It's still rough around the edges and the sound mix sucks, but it's in good enough shape for the premiere. I've already layed off a copy and a backup, and now I'm working on getting the blooper reel onto tape- I also got rid of that over-used "woo hoo" track in favor of a 50's indian (as in india) rock song.

The cut that will appear on the DVD will be much more finished and will hopefully have some decent sound effects. I also plan to include commentaries, more bloopers, cut footage (and footage from the scrapped water dog shoot), original movie posters, and a cast interview.

6.08.2004

Ernest just gave me a CD with the muzzle flare on it and we checked it out at the Comp Sci lab. It's pretty cool, and will look good when I add the proper sound effect.
I've got to rush to get the final cut done by friday. The version released on DVD will be much more finished than the one I hope to premeire this friday, but the cut should at least be decent. I have an idea of how to get around the skipping problem by exporting the final versions of edits into movies read straight from the hard drive. I'm working on getting the sound effects from MOHAA. Wish me luck.

6.03.2004

After incessant nagging and badgering, I've posted a new POTWIFLI.

Also, Kurni has been gracious enough to host the Expendable Trailer on his server, along with Served Cold. Here is the URL to his "films" directory:
http://24.7.55.129/films/
Thanks a bunch Jonathan!
New and exciting stuff around the corner. Neight and I will be starting work on our first film project soon. This is not the same as the one previously discussed. I'm not really at liberty to disclose too much at this time about this or the other two projects.

The editing station has been spewing a lot of crap in my direction as of late, and it's getting consistently more difficult to edit. I believe I can still pull everything together on time, and if worst comes to worst, we can always show the rough cut at school instead of the finished movie.

I have most of the specific sound effects we'll be using, and I'll be able to take the rest of the ambient fire straight from medal of honor. (I'm really glad I bought the game- even though I don't play it much anymore, it's been useful for sound effects and music for Expendable and the Grenada Project.)

With summer and freedom up ahead, this is looking to be a pretty good month. Stay tuned for more updates- same bat blog, same bat channel.