Laphroaig

I ended up buying that bottle of Laphroaig as a (very) indulgent present to celebrate my month in Erskineville.

Holy shite. Its not called liquid smoke for no reason. It was an odd taste to start with, but after three drams [!] of the stuff I really grew to like it (well, obviously I grew to like it much earlier on, hence the three drams). Its an extremely different taste to the 12 yo the Macallan (which is casked in Sherry oak casses and thus a tastes, well, Sherry like) - its much rougher, warmer, and very very peady. It was like drinking a campfire.

I really have to save up and buy me a bottle of the 15 yo! Also, I'd like to try the Lagavulin another Islay Malt. They're growing on me. Though I'd like to try a Highland Park, a highland (duh) scotch thats meant to be less Sherry and stronger (aka smokier) than the Macallan.

on the importance of crew

Paraphrasing from a blogwar over at esotericrabbit:

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Chip:and any day of the week....I’d back a director with vision and conviction, over a well written script.

Me: and every time someone backs a director over a well-written script, we pop out another shit movie.

give me a well written script and a tight crew and cast... and i can guarantee you they'll produce a good movie without a director. it happens more than you think :)

Clint: WHAT THE FUCK?> Who controls a crew…who communicates and converses with the DOP and Production Designer (and all the other crew) that the desired texture and atmosphere are evoked in a scene or a shot. I don’t care how many collaborators there are on a piece, without a single vision, a clear insight, someone who intimately understands the tiniest details, can pick the smallest mannerisms in an actors performance, I don’t care if it’s the best script in the world, it will fail! Watch the “Behind the Scenes of Magnolia” and then tell me if PT Anderson wasn’t there, that the film would have been even close to the film that eventually hit the screen! A great script….But fucking spot on direction in my mind…

Me: You must work with pretty shitty crews (and/or exceedingly small productions) to have that misguided attitude.

Crew, at all stages and levels of the game, are highly experienced, highly intelligent people. They're most always more experienced than the director - and often smarter too. The gaffer has probably spent more days on film sets than you (assuming you are a director) will in your entire life. He knows how to light and he doesn't need some smart ass film school graduate to tell him how to light. He knows how to light & he knows what light means. Same goes for your DoP, your Production Designer, your Sound Recordist, etc. and all their crew. Almost everyone on the crew understands how to do their job, including the storytelling aspects. They know how to make something look [insert emotion here]. Hell, its the kind of vague direction most of them deal with all the time. "Can you make this look sad for me?"

... and its not like they need a director to keep the machine running. That's the job of the ADs...

Given all of this, is it that much of a surprise that a crew can make a movie without a director? Hell no.

Can they make a good movie without a director? Hell yes.

Often, its in situations where they're working with inexperienced (or just clueless) writer/directors and everyone *else* on the movie is doing the 'vision thing'. The "director" gives vague direction which, more or less, coincides with the script and everyone else has to 'translate' that direction into something tangible in terms of mise en scene, sound, music... whatever. DoPs do the coverage, designers design, composers write the music, the actors act.. they simply do their thing. The thing they've been doing for a long time and are very good.

And this comes back to the script thing. The better the script is, the more it works, the more that kind of stuff is 'on the page' (not literally tho) and the less need there is for someone to simply "interpret" the script to make it work. Everyone follows the script and it works. The best example? Angel Baby. It won awards for direction but the real story' (cough) is that he really didn't know how to make a film, so the crew did it for him. But it was such a great script, it didn't matter!

his isn't to say a good director isn't important. They are, but the point is a crew don't need a director to make a film but a director needs a crew to make a film. (Truism, I know but something that a LOT of directors forget)

I don't care how brilliant your fucking vision is cause without a great crew, you've got a total of jack and shit.

The irony is that crew WANT to work with good directors. There's nothing like working with someone who inspires you to go the extra thousand miles, who pushes you to do brilliant work, and who brings to the work imagination, insight and intelligence. Crews just have highly developed bullshit detectors cause they've been disappointed thousands of times.

A great film does need a great director to bring everything together in a single (but united) act of expression, but it also needs a great script and a great crew. Anything else is saying that for to produce a great piece of music all you need is a great conductor and who gives a shit about the actual score or the orchestra.

I'm passionate about this because, well, I am. Its something I try to remind myself everytime I enter a production. 'As a director, what am I bringing to the table on this production? Why am I here? What is it I'm doing that is necessary?'.

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Updates as they happen :) I'm being nasty, I know, I just think young directors seriously underestimate the talent and importance of their crew. Every single person I know in the film industry (and I know quiute a few) is smart, experienced, and dedicated. Amazing people who work in the industry cause they love movies and they love making em not cause they want heaps of money (so little of that around anyway!) They're the kind of people you want to work with not merely boss around.

Which Incredibles Character Are You?

Which Incredibles Character Are You?
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Then I did it again and got:


Which Incredibles Character Are You?
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Are the scotch crazy, or is the scotch which makes em crazy?

Whisky drinkers are nutters:

Talisker isn't for everyone. If you're new to single malts you'll probably hate it, but that doesn't mean it isn't a great whisky. Sooner or later, you'll find yourself on a cold winter's evening by a fire, contemplating the mysteries of life. You'll reach for that bottle of Talisker because it seems to have answers in its fiery independence and refusal to conform. It doesn't ask to be liked, it doesn't care what you think. It has an aloofness that only comes of wisdom and maturity.

-- via Malt Whiskey.com

(Odd that the site is spelt with an 'e' when whisky as in Scotch is spelt without the e)

Scarily, tho, I actually agree with his assessment of Talisker. I had my first bottle last year during the election. My scotch companion, Dave, hated it. He mixed it with Coke (which he never does) and even then Talisker is SO potent you can't taste the Coke (!).

I really want to get my tongue on a Lagavulin - meant to be very very good. Although, the liquor store near work does have Laphroaig - a rival whisky also from Islay.

That said, the reviewer, Charles Shields, isn't partial to Glenfiddich (except for the 15yo). But the good ole' fiddich has a warm place in my heart, cause it was the first whisky which made me realise that whisky could taste better than red label (ie good).

(Hmm, the site hasn't been updated in 3 years!)

sudo kill -maim 783

If only it were possible to reek terrible and bloody vengeance upon software. If it were, then I think that would solve about 90% of the stress in the western world.

I'm working on this project thats been going on since January. Its about 6 hours of footage - not special footage - but the problem with 6 hours is that EVERYTHING takes a long time. I swear, on the 2.5ghz G5 the FCP project takes about 10 minutes to load up.

While most of the original bitch work on the project was done by the incomparable Jamie Nimmo, I've had the 'pleasure' of DVDifying it.

Well... what should've taken about 2 days has taken nearly 7. Why?

Well, firstly every time I tried to export the timeline from FCP so I could, y'know, encode the footage and put it on a DVD, FCP would randomly *hang* (not crash) somewhere seemingly at random during the export. I quickly determined that it was something to do with the render... BUT it took three days for me to isolate the problem. When you're dealing with that much footage, the whole process slows to a crawl. You make a small change, start rendering, 10-20 minutes later the render crashes, you force quit FCP, you load FCP, 10 minutes later you make the changes... repeat... and repeat... and repeat as you try to isolate every possible bloody combination of Things Which Are Known to Make FCP Spew. The testing cycle was seriously long. Every time it appeared I made a breakthrough, the render would merely crash later on during the sequence. This is a fundamental flaw of the FCP render method and why, say, After Effects solution is so much more elegant. With AE you can see what is happening on a frame-by-frame basis and even get an error report written to during the whole render thing. With serious apps like Shake, you always render into image sequences cause then you can easily pickup where you crashes. Not with FCP - even the render scratch is a mess.

... and guess what I finally discovered the problem was with? The disk. Even though I ran Diskwarrior on the damn thing - twice - I only finally twigged as I was pouring through console logs. I had taken samples of the FCP process during the hang - which reported no crashed threads - but I had no crash logs cause FCP wasn't crashing, just hanging at about 85% CPU activity. Weird. Finally, I noticed a weird little thing. The system.log (not console.log) reported three Disk IO errors on dev/disk2s3/ in about 5 minutes... and the time of the final disk error was the last modify date of the FCP render files. Ahar! Using the good old df command in the terminal I was able to determine that yes, that device was the drive that housed the project.

Thank bloody god I had all the projects assets (which were over 1000 stills [for some time I think it was because we used TIFFs]) backed up on another drive and I was able to spend some time relink the latest version of the project on another drive... and that worked.

Did it end there? HELL NO.

After spending the requisite 2 days authoring the actual DVD (including encoding), I left on Friday night think 'cool, all I need to do now is build and test'. Oh boy, was I wrong. I load up the DVDSP Project today and one of the assets has disappeared. Well, it hadn't disappeared in the sense that DVDSP couldn't find the asset. It could find it, but there was no actual VIDEO in it. All my motion menus (like 8 of them, including chapter menus) were all like empty. WTF? After some dicking around with the PAR files and trying to relink to the same asset, I just decided to reencode the asset. I went to my Ref file and encoded it. You see, when dealing with 1.5 hour quicktime files I prefer to use ref files rather than render then export the whole thing again. Now, I KNOW I hadn't touched the render files, cause I wanted to have the option of going back to the originals. Well, after encoding all the footage AGAIN, I discovered that - um - the refs to original files had broken. The files where there, but they were unable to be linked back to. So I had to render this 1.5 hour video again then re-encode it.

I opened up the DVDSP project and, guess what, the other video assets had disappeared in exactly the same way [grr]s Dunno about you, but for a project that was due to the replicator LAST WEEK, I wasn't looking forward to re-render and re-encode 4.5 hours of shite. So I dropped in the new m2v file and saved the project and started relinking. After getting a bit worried, I closed DVDSP and re-opened the project. Guess what now? The NEW asset had gone AWOL too. Hmm. Strangely, none of my motion menus (which weren't pre-encoded) had gone offline. Ah, guess the problem is with pre-encoded m2vs then. Easiest workaround (not solution) was to re-render all the remaining assets and import them, un-encoded, to DVDSP and rebuild the DVDs and encode-on-build. Not really looking forward to the time on that one.

So, I began to rack my brain about things which had changed in the system since the last big DVD I did which was about a month ago - possibly less. I upgraded to 10.3.8. That was a big one. I waited long enough to see if there any huge problems before I jumped... Hmm. 10.3.8 could certainly have been it, but I didn't want to downgrade either... so I searched my brain (and package receipts) some more. Then it hit me... After the CEREC project, I decided to change my preferences to place more files inside my DSP project package. That couldn't be it? Surely? So I tried shifting all my PAR files outside of the dvdspproj package... and guess what... it worked! I stressed tested it again and again and it worked. Damnit. Stupid PAR files stored inside the package were causing me the nightmares.

Phew.

Moral of the story? When testing, no matter how much project burnout you have, make sure you pass small amounts of data into testing pipelines. I could've discovered the cause of bug earlier if I wasn't so intent of trying to forget about the project. Controllable, discrete sets of data re good for mild stress testing then you isolate bigger possible solutions and use them with larger data-sets. Hmm.

Stupid Design

The New York Times reports that "[s]everal Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures."

-- via Balkinization.

Whoa. Can you ignorant yourself to death? Boy, I hope so.

There's a good essay (which I haven't read all of) called Metaphor, Morality and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust by George Lakoff that's well worth reading.