workin' on a remix of a live webmix audio file.
Diggin how its comin out, I think I'm happy with it.
Just burned a copy to test in the car, if its alright I'll post it tomorrow.

Got a little distracted last night by the riots outside my house. I left, then tried to return around 2:30. Riot police wouldn't let me onto my block, so I stayed at my buddy's house until 5 am. well 4am, the time changed while I was over there.
Riots got my attention for about 300 photographs, then I was done.

A Post-Posting Post.

So now that I've had time to visit my work on some various computers and browsers, I have some new insight into it.

First of all, it doesn't run as fast as I'd like. The animation lags way behind the music. It still kinda works, but the effect isn't quite as I imagined. I'm still pleased with the track, and have some more on the way. DJ4Q has a potential future ahead of him. I'm gonna keep working the animation, if anything comes out of it, I'll let ya know.

Software failures and Browser Incompatibility

...Posted my narrative this morning, as students wandered across campus blinking with early-morning eyes. They look as if they were torn violently from sleep and turned lose onto the pavement, like mice in a maze.
If that’s how they look just after waking up, how must I look after 60-odd hours of wakefulness? I shudder to imagine.
Of course I could have been finished earlier. One of the problems with an entirely digital studio is that every setting of every parameter for each moment, sound, action, picture, or movie is adjustable. I have found myself spending hours EQ'ing a half-second drum hit, days building video backgrounds that never get used, and an immense amount of time listening to the track, tweaking samples, and rearranging beats.
I have decided, now that my project is online and as done as it will be for the time being, that I wanted to simply make an audio track. I get ahead of myself, biting off huge tasks that sound great and are feasible... but are maybe more suited to personal projects without time limits, or group projects with a division of labor.
Digging through vinyl for one and two second samples is a meditation of sorts. Old records wear their age like a badge of honor, cracks and pops forming the sound into what we recognize as old, recycled, and newly ready to go.
In the course of recording DJ4Q's track, I managed to stumble across a plethora of prospective beats, tunes, and samples. Now I have side projects waiting in the wings, and perhaps a start on the audio project I have coming up.
There is a negative side to this experience as well.
I got back into flash for this project, for the first time since 2001, and ran headfirst into some of the problems that made me stop using it in the first place: flash runs slowly on Macs, I couldn’t export my movie as a QuickTime, the audio would not match for the life of me, flash won't let you scrub the waveform it displays for sounds, the preview button was opening (the hated) Dreamweaver, losing action script inside a symbol in a movie clip in a scene... There are issues.
As I worked my way through the roadblocks, I gave myself an extra headache: I forgot about embedding flash movies within flash movies, so instead of creating a few short animations and linking them together like acid loops or FLPro, I made one very, very long animation, each bit separately adjusted. This is one of the reasons I had beat-matching problems, and why my animation just doesn’t seem to run quite...right.
Well, the whole point of school is to learn, not to already be perfect, so I guess I'm at where I should be. I will definitely continue to work with DJ4Q, and would love to eventually have an entire space for him online, with no connection to my name, my school, etc.
For this particular animation, I will match 4Q's hands to the cuts, as soon as I can find a way to lock the audio/visual timing down.
Check out DJ4Q at ucsu.colorado.edu/~valens/inte.html

The Seventy Two Hour Haul

Its funny how time slips by.
Just a second ago I had over a week to complete my latest project.
Now I am working against the clock to finalize an unfinished piece. Well, not unfinished as such, but nowhere near what I thought I would have.

I spent several hours alone, and several hours with The Plant Managers' Pickle D, working my audio track. Got a track now that I'm quite proud of, It actually sounds somewhat professional, albeit it was made in Apple's Garage Band.

My original proposal had been to create an online comic. This turned into an online cartoon, which turned into an animated movie, which turned into an animated backdrop set for displaying the song along with visuals.

Audio is always important, but I hadn't realized that the song would be my main focus for this particular piece. There is just something about digging through records with a good friend, listening to hundreds and hundreds of samples until the sun comes up. Well, last night I had to drive Pickle D to the airport at 4:30am, so he was gone when the sun rose, but the feeling of accomplishment when you listen to a track you’ve made in the car the next day… indescribable.

So with a friend visiting, I got much less work done this week than normal. That’s why I stayed up to do homework until I drove to the airport last night… uh this morning…uh, no actually that was about 26 hours ago, so yesterday, uber early morning.

Between all that and classes today… wait I mean yesterday… yeah, between all that I managed to find time to clean my basement, do laundry, dishes, vacuum, and be rejected by the girl I was pursuing.

I have three hours until stagecraft class, where we will be given a weekly exam.
Wanna lay odds I do poorly today?