Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Stalking the Waving Monk

The stalk is of the scene in which the monk waves from the porch to beckon wayward souls to enter the Rockhouse and the Sanctuary.  The scene will only run for about ten seconds but it's needed for continuity to the video between driving down the road and blazing lasers inside the Sanctuary.

Windspeed has been under observation all day and it was excessive but there was the thinking wind always drops off at around dusk.  That is exactly what happened tonight and then I decided on making the move.

Lugging the smoke machine out there is a bitch but that part did work.  Getting an extension cord out there was more hassle than I anticipated.  It's a heavy gauge ten-meter power cord and tangles in those come direct from Gordias.

The next move was to fetch the power strip and the LED for colored light effects in the smoke.

The power strip, however, is AWOL.  I was certain of its location because there's a La Brea tar pit for cables and it was in there.  It must have migrated during the course of some other hare-brain plan so that was a dead stop.

It was an obvious hassle bringing the smoke machine back inside but it's ok since this attempt got so close.  Another ten minutes of plugging things and then fifteen minutes for the fogger to heat and it would have been Action ... Roll Cameras ...


The monk outfit has not been trialed because it's a cheap Halloween outfit and will likely fall apart easily.  The object is to show cheerful Friar Tuck but he's wearing Raybans, a wizard hat, and a multi-color scarf.  wtf ... some monks grow grapes for wine but these monks grow reefer.  It's all part of the same divine Providence.  Praise be.


There's an optional scene which will use a Super-8 stop-action trick and you have seen this in Beatles movies.  Using this technique, a figure will appear ... stop camera ... figure moves ten feet ... film and stop again ... repeat.  That gives a novel, disjointed movement but there's another possibility using transitions so the figure appears and disappears as it approaches the steps.  That technique requires Final Cut but it could be good for showing the figure fading in and out due to "The End of the World in Fort Worth" with fear consuming them.  The figure is almost consumed and only just makes it to the Sanctuary.

All of this has significance for the audio recording because it needs to be clear how long these scenes will run.  Ten or twenty seconds of added scenes require 'x' number of bars of music or things get out of sync.


So ... stalking continues.  There is no medal for coming close but it does feel good to have got that far with it.

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