So yeah, just a few more days of finals and stuff and the year's over. Holy shit. That's scary.

I'm supposed to be working on my warfare paper, which is to say, I've been reading about 16th-18th century Eruopean artillery and siegecraft all day. Very interesting stuff, and would be even better if I didn't have to write a 10 page paper in the next 15 hours.

For the most part, I'm looking forward to summer break, especially since I've got a couple of cool projects lined up. One of them is so cool I won't blog about it (yet), but the other one is basically my BA project. I was talking o Yitz the other day, and it occured to me that there will be a whole lot of idle processing power in the MacLab (i.e. over a dozen PowerMac G5s with 1.6GHz or dual 1.8GHz CPUs). So, what better time to generate some massive battle scenes? Also, it might help me find a BA advisor and get it approved if I already have something to show.

I'm also starting to think about my next totally awesome kick-ass movie project (and ignore the fact that a week ago I swore I'll never work on an insane movie project again). Gwen and I are tentatively thinking about making an action movie together, combining my DuckyMagic with some of her ideas (including her martial arts and dance skills). The problem is, you can't do stop motion with humans (damn animate objects!), and it's next to impossble to do digital effects that look any good when your source material is low res (i.e. DV quality = 720x480 pixels, for Ducky, we did effects at the original 1600x1200 resolution, then scaled down to DV at the end). I'm looking into shooting in 16mm, then telecine to high-res, but I'm not sure how feasible that is (most telecine shops will go to DV for an affordable price, but don't even mention the possibility of going to, say, HD).
Oh yeah, before I thought about film, I thought about creating my own high-res video camera by bundling a bunch of iSights together. The problem is, with a resolution of 1280x960 (i.e. 4 iSights), that comes out to 3.686MB/frame or 88MB/sec (=707Mbps @ 24fps), which is just below the transfer speed limit of even FireWire 800. No wonder George Lucas had to get a camera custom made to shoot Star Wars in digital (although to get quality equivalent to 35mm, apparently you need 4000 lines vertical).
On the other hand, maybe what I really need to do is figure out ways to do kick-ass stuff without special effects.