DepthWish Productions

Friday, September 30, 2005

Here is a picture of Taipei 101 I took recently while on an LX2 shoot. More about that here.

Recently, I've been getting into to music mode. Getting geared up for the music and sound design stuff that'll need to be done for LX2. I've started by making a few purchases including a headphone mixer, a pop filter screen, and EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Silver Edition, as well as an upgrade to my audio / midi sequencer. I've upgraded from SONAR producer EDITION 3 to SONAR PRODUCERS EDITION 5.

The Headphone mixer will come in handy when doing ADR - What "ADR" stands for I'm not sure, but the process involves replacing the dialogue recorded "on set" with audio recorded in a studio. One of the problems with shooting the way we shoot is that we have pretty much zero control over ambient sound, making it hard to get good quality audio. Even big budget movies have these problems and must resort to ADR. On a recent video blog on www.kongisking.net, one of sound guys working on the Kong project says that as much as 90% of the dialogue we will hear on Peter Jackson's remake of the 1933 King Kong movie will be ADR'ed! So, I don't feel too bad having to resort to audio trickery and asking the actors to visit my little studio for a half day to rerecord their lines. Who knows, maybe Judy will make cookies for them!

I'd been eyeing and earing the orchestral sample set for a while and it was on sale so I decided to go for it. Reviews seem to say that it's a great product for getting that big Hollywood music score sound. I'm tracking the FedEx package as I write - It's currently in Anchorage, Alaska. Can't wait to load it up. Check out some of the sample MP3s. Wow!

What can I say about SONAR 5? It keeps getting better and better. The list of new features is impressive. I'll admit that Cakewalk products don't have the sex appeal of some of those German sequencing packages. Did I just use sexy, German, and package in the same sentence? Baby, yeah! I'll probably get a lot of google search hits for that. Hehe

:: posted by Darrell 10:26 PM

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Love Me, Don't Kiss Me!

Well, the three gritty kitties have found homes. One is in Danshui and the other two are neighbors in Tien Mu. What was supposed be a temporary home for the 3 kittens turned into a 3 month adventure. Anyway, they are lovely and I hope they are happy with their new families. I've decided that I want to get into this blogging business more seriously and start writing about whatever comes up and I'm going to get really opinioned and start alienating and offending my friends and the people on this island I live on. So, lets begin! :-)

I've been on a little holiday recently and I've bought a mountain bike, so I've been taking rides everyday up and down the river meeting all the stray dogs that live in the area. At one point I counted 16 dogs in a pack! That's not individual dogs along the course of my journey that was one group all hanging out in the sun. They seemed content enough and I don't want to sound like I'm complaining about the dogs. The dogs are fine. It's the fricken idiot people that are the problem! The people who abandon their animals and the people that think dumping their garbage in the park for the dogs is "raising" a pet. The Taiwanese use the word "raise" to describe pet ownership. I would correct them, because to me "raise" means support the development of the "thing", whether it be an animal or a child, until it can take care of itself, or you slaughter it for food. (Anyone here raise chickens? See, that sounds fine, right?) This isn't the case with pets. "Have" or "own" a pet sounds fine to me although some may take exception to those terms as well. The point is, for many people here, "raise" is what they do. When the animal is cute and young they raise it. People take their pets for drags in the park (usually behind a bicycle but sometimes a scooter) When pets mature or become nuisances, the pets get tossed! And you're probably reading this and your saying to your self, "I've learned nothing new buy reading this paragraph" because you've seen this stuff, too. Or, maybe you're a pet "raiser" or a dog "dragger," and you HAVE learned something. Well thanks for visiting! And like the picture says, "Love me don't kiss me!"

:: posted by Darrell 10:19 PM