John August

fixed

Trailer competition, second update

Projects, Software, The Nines, Video

Just so you know, the radio silence around the trailer competition is not for lack of interest or intent. Stuff got very crazy, very quickly, and we had a hard enough time getting the real trailer finished up. (Plus there was other stuff going on.)

We have all the clips ready to go, but we’re going to delay the launch until sometime early in September. That will give people — the New York and Los Angeles people — a chance to see the movie. And it will give us about five seconds to breathe.

Because I’m a curious geek, I threw all the trailer competition footage into Apple’s new iMovie 2008. The good news is that the application seems optimized for MP4 footage — it was really simple to throw the clips together. The bad news is that the program is almost unusable, at least for anything beyond the most basic vacation footage.

Some frustrations:

  • It freezes the last frame of every clip. My workaround was to use half-second dissolves on every cut, which is incredibly hacky and unacceptable.
  • Only the roughest volume changes are possible.
  • You can’t split audio from video.
  • The spacebar works differently than any Quicktime application. It doesn’t play/pause. It jumps within the clip.
  • It uses a text-selection metaphor for grabbing footage, which is innovative but really imprecise.
  • The “handles” for marking the edges of clips work differently depending on which mode you’re in. It’s bewildering.

I really wanted to like the program. It demoes well. But it’s a disaster.

Press Day

Meta, Projects, The Nines

Today was press day for The Nines, which meant six solid hours of talking about the movie. And it was fine. I conducted all of my interviews sitting next to Melissa McCarthy, so it was a good excuse to exercise our pact of mutual appreciation.Ryan and I have a similar covenant, but the world is pretty sick of it after the last publicity barrage. So we left him to fend for himself. And I slandered him, repeatedly.

Nines postersThe event was held at The Four Seasons. While driving there on Burton Way, I passed a construction site, and muttered under my breath about when the fuckin’ Nines posters were going to get plastered on every available plywood surface.

And then I saw one. It was enough to make me start believing in that book The Secret.That and a disbelief in the laws of science, logic or the fallacy of egocentrism. So, seeing the poster, plus those three things.

This picture is actually from St. Andrews at Hollywood Blvd. So there are at least two places in LA to see the wilding posters.

secondlifeNear the end of the press junket, we held a roundtable in Second Life, which was actually held in the SL re-creation of my house.It’s on Metaversatility island, if you want to stop by.

Lest anyone doubt that it was really me at the other end of the keyboard, here’s photographic proof. It was frustrating only because the questions came too quickly. I wanted to answer all of them, but by the time I’d finished one response, five more had gotten stacked up.

Google-Mapped, part two

Follow Up, Los Angeles

Matt sent me an LA Times article this morning which confirms that Google has been busy adding Street View to Los Angeles.

My earlier suspicion that I’d been van-captured has proven true. So far, my mug doesn’t show up in any of the shots, but that’s likely because they seem to have only commercial streets included in the database. Kinda hoping that continues.

One thing I’ve noticed so far: at least along my stretch of Wilshire, the images are a block-and-half off. Here’s our old editorial office. In the image, you can see the intersection is Plymouth, but the map shows it between Windsor and Lorraine.

Student Films Across America

Film Industry, Los Angeles, News

Tonight, I attended the LA screenings of Student Films Across America, a traveling film festival that highlights great shorts made by film students nationwide. I was one of the judges this year — months ago, I watched a bunch of screeners. So it was nice to see the final results.

And here’s where I beg forgiveness. After arriving late, waving hello, and watching Kathy Huang’s keenly observed doc Miss Chinatown, U.S.A., I got sucked into a Hollywood vortex of lawyer/agent/studio phone calls, which forced me into the hallway, and ultimately out the door. So I never got to shake hands and congratulate the filmmakers. I’m doing that now.

Sorry. Congratulations. And the reason for my absence will hopefully become clear soon. (It has nothing to do with The Nines, for a change.)