Well, I'm still alive, in case anyone's wondering. Busy, but alive. We have finals next week, and I had a bunch of papers due last week.
On Tuesday, we had a little film festival type thing where we showed our intro-projects. If you ask me, it was pretty crappy, but considering how clueless we all were, I think we were happy just to have something to show. I also slapped together a short trailer for my stop-ducky project, which turned out to be better than our actual movie. People have commented about how they're looking forward to the actual thing... of course, they didn't know that I had used all the juicy shots in the trailer.
To mitigate that rather problematic over-hyping issue, I started working on some "special effects" (exhibit A). I was initially planning on doing a lot of the FX in GIMP by hand, but after realizing that there was no way I could spend so much time on it, I started working on DuckyMagic(TM). DuckMagic is a suite of programs (read: a dirty hack) slapped together with C, ImageMagick, PHP, AppleScript and QuickTime Pro. I've written small programs that take two PPM files, do stuff (like make stuff disappear, merge, crop, etc) then spit them back out, and it's all converted to/from JPEG using ImageMagick. The resulting image sequence is then imported into QTPro and saved as a movie file. So instead of spending hours on short clips, I can toss it a whole folder full of images, wait about 5 minutes, then watch it right away in QuickTime. Very slick. Now I just need to work on the actual story.
On Wednesday, I went to the Chicago premier of "Fog of War". Director Errol Morris was there, and a co-president of Sony Classics was apparently there for an earlier event which I missed. Anyway, for those of you who don't know, "Fog of War" is a documentary about Robert McNamara. I guess he doesn't seem so evil to our generation, although if you think of him as being the Rumsfeld of the Vietnam War era, that gives you some idea as to the contrversies he's faced. What I really liked about the documentary is that you hear one of the most prominent figures from one of the most controversial time periods in our country's history talk about his personal impression, and the "big picture" (or the "picture" people didn't see then). Interestingly enough, Errol Morris was a "protester" during the War...
