My Monster

A couple months back I put together this demo video for the song "Sickness" by my pal Mike Shockey's band My Monster:



I had a hell of a time getting a version online without shredding the image quality. This version's - nyeagh, it's adequate. But I was going for a very precise visual feel.

See, my original thought was to create a rotoscope-animated video of "Sickness". I tested the Photoshop effects in the clip above as an alternative to that. Rotoscoping is pretty laborious, you know: each minute of A Scanner Darkly (for instance) took 500 animator-hours to trace and color. At that rate, a 4-minute music video would take a guy a 40-hour-a-week year to finish.

This (greatly-crappier-than-A-Scanner-Darkly) rotoscope test, depicting Michael Shockey as a rockstar, took me one long night to make:

Here's a flashy version of the same test.

So - there are some interesting possibilities here....

Parting thought: if a full "Sickness" video were made - and it's a great song, by the way, deserving of the effort - I think a combination of the two styles may work best (Photoshopping + some rotoscoping). You can catch a hint of that in this clip, which shows original video with overlaid tracing and coloring.

PDO

Pickle's Day Out, yo.



Speaking of YouTube and the word "pickle", I don't mind admitting that this video scared the living hell out of me. ...Yet here I am, days later, still thinking about the thing. You ought to give it a look.

New Orleans, June 2006

I made a trip homeways last summer, and while down visiting a friend in Atlanta (hi Eric), I decided to make a side trip to New Orleans. For those of you not in the know, New Orleans is not close to Atlanta. But my thinking was that (1) travel and adventuring were paramount, and (2) I needed to stick the damn car rental people for as many miles as possible, since they were certainly sticking me for all the insurance-fee dollars they could.

East bound and down, baby.

Hence - a trip to the French Quarter to get a beer. This took some ungodly amount of time, 12 hours one way or something. No big deal if you pull off into the rest stops when you can't stand it anymore and get an hour's sleep here or there. And I would do the whole thing again in a heartbeat. My single regret, obviously, is that I only stayed in New Orleans for about three hours: I needed to get back up to Louisville to my dad's house....

--Well, my other regret was that I had no camera, leading me to pick up a disposable in a truck stop. Ran me about $30 when you add in the processing costs. And it turns out that available light at 5am in the French Quarter gets you precisely nothing on film. Even if you are standing beneath a lamppost.

But the sun was up enough to catch this shot out of my passenger window on the way out of town. I was quite struck by the fact that this apartment complex, right off the side of I-10, still said "HELP" on the roof about nine months after Katrina:


I know. But you really can sort of barely see it if you click on the picture to zoom in.

Here's a shot of a strip mall that I pulled off the freeway to investigate. The front had essentially been torn away from the entire building, and the contents of all the stores had been bulldozed into a vast pile in the middle of the parking lot. You didn't have to look hard for this kind of thing. There were miles and miles of it right off the side of the freeway - let alone what you'd find if you actually ventured further south into an area like the Ninth Ward.


Pictures of Andersonville National Historical Site in a minute....

Waste of time

Well sure, working on this clip helped smooth over my nascent knowledge of Premiere Elephants (Elements). Which isn't such a waste of time.

But I question the value of Peeps as subject matter.

St. Stupid's Day Parade 2007

It was a fine afternoon today as a decently-sized crowd (a couple/few hundred) gathered at the foot of the Transamerica Building:



Our first stop as we headed up Columbus into North Beach was at the San Francisco Scientology headquarters, where we issued a few homages (taunts). For example: "Give me an L!" ("L!") "Give me a Ron!" ("Ron!") "Give me a Hubbard!" ("Hubbard!") "What's that spell?" ("Bullshit!")


The view from the head of the parade, looking backward up Columbus. Imagine drums, brass, and hundreds of exuberant voices calling out, "No more chanting! No more chanting!" etc.:



Frank Chu, famed bearer of the "12 Galaxies" sign, regales the St. Stupid Day celebrants as they gather in Washington Square Park with an address which can only be described as - yes, stupid. I couldn't make out much of what Frank was saying, but it seemed to regard his personal frustration at not receiving enough coverage on Fox News:


Then Dr. Hal Robbins, of Church-of-Subgenius fame, took the stage to deliver a few inspiring words in praise of stupidity ("Ignorance is a state of not knowing. Stupidity is a state of never being able to know. And I know that we all know that none of us can know." Or something like that).

"Do not look upon one another on this day and say, 'I am stupider than you,' or, 'I am dressed much more stupidly than you are.' No, by merely coming here today we have each of us shown beyond any doubt that we are all stupid." (--This was a relief, since I'd felt sorely underdressed for the occasion.)

Dr. Robbins' best line: when he vouchsafed the importance for us all of achieving, "a work-free drugspace."


In all: stupid. Too bad next year it falls on a frigging Tuesday.