735 – Filmmaking, music, and other paths to an early grave

Something I’ve been toying with for a few years mentally is the idea of a mobile production office. On top of this mental toying, was my idea that I may have to go around the country to promote my movie Crashing Down if I don’t get a good enough offer to pick up. While the shooting has been slo(add several ohs here)w, it will be finished eventually, and I’ll have to sell it. I don’t want to settle on a crappy, one-sided deal just to get it sold. I know others have gone around and 4walled etc to get their films to be worth more over-all, and I think that may be necessary, especially now that so many indie outlets have closed. A bus made up for living/working could facilitate such a project.

So anyway, I bought an old flatnose Bluebird All-American school bus to convert. It was an awesome deal that I couldn’t pass up even if the timing was in the middle of production instead of afterward.

Eventually, it should end up looking something like the bus that Jake VonSlatt converted, except with office space. This bus is HUGE, so office space will not be a problem.

Did I mention this bus is huge?

Driving it back from Arkansas was a hell-of-a-thing. I’ve driven the big rigs before (people that know me will be saying “dude, is there any job you haven’t done?” it was only a brief training job), and this bus, though not as big, was just as hard to get around corners. The first corner I took put me in everyone else’s lane. I could see their little faces with “0″ shaped mouths and upraised hands. But after a couple of corners, I got the hang of it and couldn’t continue to have multi-lane fun with an excuse.

It’s parked and ready for… something. I guess I’ve gotta get out there and pull the seats. Good thing others have already done this so I can see the ‘right’ way to do it.

We decided to put up 2 scenes from the movie Crashing Down just as teasers (and to help in the financing hunt of course). I tell ya man, even though it’s only 2 scenes, it was a LOT of work. These aren’t what they’ll look like in the final movie, but they’re close enough for show-n-tell. Being that this film is based on Dante’s Inferno, there’s always some correlation to something from the poem. In these 2, the first one is the main character passing through the gates of hell, the second is some scenes later when he’s made it into the first circle.

Enjoy, and please, let us know what you think!

Another day, another pass through the audio editing process. Reaper turned out to be a dud, which is a bummer, as I really liked the interface. Everything was going great until I dropped in a few EQs and a noise filter or 2. Ugh! Static!

Random static was introduced in various places. I watched my CPU usage and it was barely moving, so I know it wasn’t that. Besides, I’m running a Black Edition AMD Phenom 955 quad running 4ghz with 8 gigs of ultra-low latency ram all overclocked to their rightful speeds on a fast tweaked-out raid.

I know there’s no bottleneck there. And the audio hardware is an M-Audio Pro Fire 610 that has never batted an eye at anything thrown at it.

So, I returned to the old stand-by that I’ve used on and off for years; Sonar.

So far, it’s running pretty solid. I had to do a few things to get the Cineform codec to work, but we’re all good now. As I’ve said before, Sonar has some quirks in the interface that bug me, but it’s a solid program that’s never choked on anything I’ve ever thrown at it.

I would’ve tried Samplitude, but they didn’t have any trials on their site that I could find.

Screw em, Sonar can do surround sound too.

Mmmmm surrounded.