let the games begin

wow, now it's time to get down and dirty...

Interesting times, people not just using the web anonymously like in the past, putting their real ass on the web to be potentially stalked and publicly shamed. I posted all day back in the dial up days, nobody knew me. Well if you wanted to know who I was, I was just some typical internet kid. Watching star wars movies all day, harry potter occasionally and browsing the web for anything and everything ghostbusters related. That was it.

To see the parkland school shooting kids online posting takes me back. I mean I don't feel dramatically different than I was back in high school, but to actually be among high school teens again and experiencing their life, does take me back to that. Which was a unique if awkward experience for me I'd prefer not to revisit. I enjoy making money and just living my life free. Much better...

Plus there's gorgeous women everywhere to potentially get with, why the flying crap would I want to go back to being a weedy little high schooler again struggling with my libido?

Just some advice to them. Don't make the internet your life like I did. I will be perfectly open and honest about it. The internet broke me when I was a kid. I never conceived of being traumatized by it, but it happened. I had a nervous breakdown. I could think of nothing else but that day for years and it took a long time for it to heal, I can only guess because of my youth and just lack of understanding of the adult world... I was broken for a very long time. Luckily I had star wars, had movies to help me get through it... but yeah, I will be honest. It tore me up back then what happened and my spirit was broken for a long time.

But they're strong people, gonna be stronger when they get older, I'm sure.

It's about to go down now... and I'm trepidatious about it... Going to begin editing all the middle stuff of the film. 6 sequences still need to be completed. I'm eager to begin. I feel good about how it's going to work and feel when done, so awesome and I don't know why I'm so anxious. This is not the hard core editing I've been doing for months now, it's just the much easier middle section that should be nothing... don't know why I'm jittery about it.

Only one thing to do now and just do it...

Gonna be a Ghostbuster

Life goals isn't it, what the cool kids are saying on twitter.

A few words about twitter, wow what an addictive son of a bitch thing. Yunno I'm from a time when there was no twitter, but damn why didn't something like twitter exist back in the ancient early 2000s?

Woulda made dial up worth it. No message board drama for me. People actually trying to have fun interactions... brief nonsense of the day or fun tweets. It would have been perfect back in those days. I don't see the point of it now. Every website is twitter, the net being so fast now, no need for brief quickie posts to read or RSS feeds, or usenet posts, or if you want to get old school irc chats. (i used to frequent then became moderator of the real ghostbusters cartoon irc channel.) We all can interact instantly now. so what's the point of a service dedicated to that. It's AOL all over again. Twitter is the mcdonalds of the internet universe.

Well I had some money left over from my app gig thing so I did what I've been wanting to do for a decade and a half. I now own a ghostbusters proton pack.

The child in me is going insane over this. Hell, I'm going insane over this.

Ghostbusters 2 was my first movie as a toddler. My father, one of the few things I'll ever remember him fondly for, took me to go see it. Blew my brain out of my skull.

I'm debating whether to mod the pack and turn it into a more screen accurate version or just never open it.

Listen. I've been studying how to build a proton pack since I was 14. It's been 17 damn years of never getting around to it. I estimated it'd cost 200 dollars once I bought all the materials and then got to work. It wouldn't just be a proton pack, it'd be like a back pack to hold stuff in or a water gun, I don't know, was thinking of how I could make it useful and not just a replica...

Well, I'm smiling ear to ear. It's over. I've finally got one...

Nobody told me they went back on sale at spirit.com... went there recently to just take a peek at the page where they're being sold and was like, wtf.... I can buy it now?

76 bucks. To mod it into a proper replica going to cost an additional 60+ dollars. If I mod it, it'll be complicated and I might screw it up but I do want to make it look right.... but yunno, it's more about the principle of it. I think the fact that I have what I've dreamed of alone is enough. I don't fret over details on my toys anymore. Got bigger concerns... Toys won't pay rent or do anything useful really, just be something cool to look at for a while...

Well it's on its way. Once it gets here, gonna get a few pics up etc.

The long road ahead

Principle photography has been completed for a while now. I will not be shooting a second more of this movie no matter how much I itch to do it. I'm going to just edit and use what I have from here forward.

I just feel so happy right now. It works, the whole ending bit works, it's over. I worked very very hard and I have a good ending to the movie ready to go, some fine tuning all that's necessary and of course finish the post effects stuff.

It's a huge relief but I'm not out of the butt yet on this one... Lots more to do and an un forseen problem has arisen.

No hard drive space.

I edit like this... I don't want any footage coming from the USB externals so I copy everything I need to my three main system drives and go from there with that stuff..

Didn't know I'd max out space on the drives like I did, they have no space left and yunno, still got lots of editing to do...

I do have 50gigs left on my main system drive so I'll see if I can mange to cobble the rest of the film together from this and hope it's not going to die from the stress of it all.

Boy this thing is a wopper, I'm going to stick to short films in the future. I have ideas for little movies, but I'm honestly never going to make them this big or crazy. I just never did this kind of epic scale film making so I said, go for it... Yeah now I'm kicking myself....

Honesst to God, this would be done if I didn't want it so big, my bad.

But at least I'm getting closer to it being over. Yeah, it's full of cool bits and tricks I invented for doing movies like this. Hell, considering how good the finale came out, I do indeed have sorta an idea to go big and screen it in theaters, it'd actually be a fun little thing to watch. I don't know. I'd be one of the few people to tackle static shock anyway...

Thinking about doing a Sliders thing.. all these damn awful movies and tv shows being made, but oh end an actual decent 90s show properly with a quality conclusion? Never, more Full House and Roseanne for your ass though...

Well damn, just had to blog out a bit after sitting here doing some fx work and editing to kinda get the final battle to flow nicer. I'm getting to that point as an editor where you get sick of tweaking the footage and just want to not give a shit right now.. so yeah, but I'll get back to work and try to slam out the whole mid section of the film together sloppily within about a week. Then it's just plug in all the fx work, and it's over... fuck it's over...

Tripping

Thinking about all the sudden waves of stuff going on... I've lived and seen too much war and death, got to say. You kinda get sick of that, if that's all your life is. I feel for these guys wanting safer schools, but I'm not oblivious to the fact that the world seems to only care if it happens to them. Did anyone care when or does care now about what happens all over the world, the innocent people dying every day?

You know what Dump thinks about this shooting, "oh boy, this is making me look bad." That's what he thinks. If you think he gives two scoops of shit about the making kids safer, ha ha ha ha ha ha... does no one remember he was gung ho about killing tons of kids by taking their health care away. Fools have no idea what kind of evil they're dealing with... none.

One thing concerns these politicians, money. Period. They're not going to budge. Once you get old like me, you start to see how the world works. If there's a mountain of cash to be made doing X, it will by any means necessary be done. Period, full stop, end of story. They just don't care, these money hungry corporate weasels out there... good luck making them see beyond the gold at the end of the rainbow. Good luck...

I was just thinking about it. Yeah if this shooter was black or anything else besides being some sort of seriously awkward commentary on the president's fanbase and their lack of mental stability... oh you'd see some actual progress, calls for all kinds of new restrictions. It truly is astonishing, just because the dude is white or whatever, light enough, he gets a break. Oh you can't beat that whiteness, oh you can't beat that shit. Go shoot up a bunch of people, it's alright, just a little off or something.

I don't know. I don't hang out with white people, I don't know what's going on in their universe so I can't say I have a clue what would cause a white person to trip out and shoot up a school. If you don't like being white so much turn black, come on over... see how it is....

Trust me, you'll want to go right back to where you were and enjoy having unlimited POWAAH.

Damn though... it's just such a joke what's going on. And hard for me to not laugh about how if this was a daca kid, you'd see calls for them all be shipped home. In fact, that was the initial reaction. Oh he's hispanic, probably a daca kid. Damn, people are idiots.

Anyway, my point of this post was to kinda talk about my project. I have been working on some trippy visuals for the final battle. Insane stuff I just decided to do because I was working on some fx and decided to see what would happen if I duplicated and cloned myself in the program. Turned out to look pretty decent so what I'll be implementing is just that, a clone and weird willy wonka aspects.  Trippy in an appropriate manner of course.

Gonna try to not get too embroiled in politics as I gear myself up for the marathon that will be a few days of editing the rest of the movie.. jesus save me please...

made progress

There's an art to procrastination I guess. I was just sick of being so lazy about it I dogged down and just hard core edited the final fight as best I could. It's now up and that's it. That's how I'm going to end the fight. It needs to be polished and I'm definitely going to need to finish the fx, but it amazingly works... I dig what it is, how it flows, and I was there, I endured the bitter cold temps to forge the footage before its needing to be edited. Now of course I have more time to actually do the project since the release has been moved to solo... so yeah I'd like to reshoot chunks of it and now with my distilled water diet, I actually could get ripped and shredded as hell for it and shoot it with the proper physique I wanted...

But I'm not. 

All that work I put in to attempt to meet my christmas deadline it's just a lot of very tough gorilla film making I'm not wanting to just throw away and so I'll be keeping it....

I'll use fog and gas effects to hide my fat anyway...

Can't believe it's taken me 5 years to get here but I'm finally at the actual end of this project. 5 years, jesus, I'm insane.

But that's life. Go after what you love and don't let nothing impede that.

What next, gonna make some notes on changes I need to do, then focus on finding the proper bits I need to finish this thing once and for all. Render a giant work assembly cut of the film. This will be a film, actual lengthy film, not some little quickie fan film or something... It's gonna be big bloated and insane... like me... heh.

Just exhausted as shit. Reading too much politics on the net. Too much garbage to try to make sense of. Ignore the internet, just ignore it.

Gonna take a good long break, then get back into it...

Finally watched Mad Max Fury Road

I neglected to view it for whatever reason. It was hyped to the moon as this masterpiece of film making, I didn't want to just watch it passively wanted to really get deep with it. It's not that complex a film now that I've actually taken the time to watch it. Wow Zoe Kravitz is in it. She's my like mirror image. Always love seeing her. She was cute in this and never more attractive, great work by her. Highly underrated actress. I mean it's tough to find that kind of actress I'm sure, looks and skill. Why she's not blowing up and becoming a huge star is beyond me...

Little bit of history, I grew up on Mad Max and was all about the series so yeah my loyalty to Mel is one of the primary reasons I was kinda put off this movie and didn't want to really see it, but you got to take this acid trip of a film at least once in your life if you are a film enthusiast. It's very engrossing yet visually and artistically rich, just full of vision and passion for film making which is what George Miller's all about. No hollywood execs in a board room dictating shit, this is purely one man's insane vision as is Miller's MO and take it or leave it...

His style isn't for everybody but I'm an extreme artist myself and love stuff like this, so I was all aboard the crazy train as the story went and just whipped us as an audience all over crazy town. Jesus Christ, I'm still kinda dazzled by the insanity I witnessed in this film.

Its only real flaws is the story is paper thin, a bit rushed, since this characters are cardboard cut outs you don't really know why they do anything or whatever they just do it and, I mean I'm used to this, I sat through thunderdome and that movie had the same stuff so I was like I knew it was coming. His characters are cartoonish in prettymuch all his mad max films. To expect him to make them deeper is on you...

It's got this waterworld plot. Trying to find the promised land thing. I guess that's what the movie is a sort of homage to water world just as water world kinda ripped off Mad Max. Don't know if that was the intent, but it's clear to me how similar this movie tries to be to water world only actually done by the guy who invented everything water world stole from in the first place.

It's a movie that you should give a watch. It sorely misses Mel. You can imagine Mel playing Max in it, His characterization is spot on exactly the same old version Mel played. Hardy sucks imo. He's just a pale half assed imitation of Mel and I rejected his performance in my head. I wasn't buying him as Max, gibson is the only Max, forever.

But it's a good mad max fan film at its heart and a damn fun ride and return to that universe.. check it out...

Starring into the abyss...

Needless to say I've become distracted from my project as I'm addicted to news about the latest school shooting.

One wonders what these guys are doing in jail on a daily basis. Do they get video game systems like in some jails. Are they given books, tv to watch, good food? Lord knows they can't have internet but in some jails you get limited net time...

I've kinda become obsessed with the prison system from watching Lockdown a lot during my Fletc training for TSA.

Through my research on jail, yeah it's hell, depending on the ones you go to and if you're convicted of certain crimes.

Sad to say but I've mostly been educating myself on jail just in case I end up in the wrong place at the wrong time and get sent to one for being the black dude in the area.

Mandatory black education, what to do if you ever get sent to prison for being the black guy around.

Apparently the asshole's going to avoid the death penalty... so after all his badassery and filling innocent people with bullets, he's too scared to die? Shitting me? I wouldn't be surprised if he's going to get sniped out by some of the people he pissed off. Hopefully the cops make a mistake and sit him next to a window and then oops aw poor guy. this is sad. I mean, what he did was so bad.... he deserves to be killed. I can't even imagine being able to live your life normally ever again after going through that shit, and knowing the person who did it is still in this world, still able to enjoy his life somewhat....

This whole thing is such utter bullshit...

It's depressing and I don't feel like working on my project knowing such a world as this is the way it is and nothing's being done to make it better. We gotta give kids a good childhood, it's priority number 1. This at least should not be up for debate. Whatever it takes, give them a good childhood.

Well I don't know what to say or do about this... I don't know if I can muster the strength to work on my movie feeling so bad about living life and so like depressed and seeing people hurting... it's hard to feel motivated... I know right, having empathy, wanting people to be cool...

I don't know. I'm starring into the unknown. Looking at my project. Looking at this wacky president making light of the deaths of kids, and I'm not feeling good about any of it.

Stay tuned. I'll be holding on, putting faith in the future. What little there be left. And once we can see the sun rise again and look beyond the darkness, we'll be there at last, at the end of all these troubles.