Characters with Hearts of Gold

I’ve been playing with Magic Bullet Looks, but I’m still working on the blog entry. My AfterEffects trial ran out before I could get into some serious work with it, so I’ll have to see if I can get a new trial installed to play with it. There’s a lesson for you: never install a trial until you’re positive you can actually get time to play with it!

Meanwhile, here is this week’s (or last week’s) entry.

I’ve been tardy about getting my testing done because I’ve been busy writing scripts. We’re still a few shy of having enough to look at, pick a few, and shoot a select few.

I have the advantage of writing for two main characters that are well established, and we’ve steadily added a pool of recurring characters that live in Miller & Mullet’s world, so I don’t have to look too far to find foes, foils, or friends. I’ve used them in the scripts for the shorts, and Mullet’s used them for the comic book scripts, so we’re working with the same materials, and we’re fleshing out characters that we can continue to develop.

Several of these supporting players date back from the Babysitters script. Two of them, Officer Bob and The Shark, first appeared in Babysitters (played by Teige Reid and Dave Pearce, respectively), and they (the characters) have since appeared in our comic book series, Miller & Mullet in Space, although they don’t resemble Teige or Dave very much. Officer Bob is a corrupt cop or ex-cop, and The Shark is a hustler and conman usually involved in Bob’s schemes. These guys are natural villains in Miller & Mullet’s world. Morally, Miller isn’t much different from these people, but he lacks the ability to pull off a scheme—or at least come up with something that actually works. From a writer’s perspective, it is a lot of fun to have three swindlers locked in a room together, and I expect that we’ll see more of them going forward. Between Babysitters and the two issues of the comic book, these two are our most fleshed-out villains.

Two other characters we’ve repeated are Honey and The Pimp, both of them appearing in Babysitters. Ron Fromstein played The Pimp and Tasha May Currie played Honey. These characters haven’t appeared in the comic books yet, but they play important roles in the lives of Miller in particular.

Honey is the prostitute with a heart of gold, or at least our version of that cliché. If she’s a reluctant prostitute that the cliché requires, we don’t see that part of her character as she’s quite enthusiastic—or at least willing to provide service—when Miller appears (we’ve never shown her with other johns, so that might be the next step if we want to play with the cliché). Honey probably loves Miller, but she doesn’t hesitate to beat him savagely when he rips her off. Yet her feelings for Miller allow him to take advantage of her (before she retaliates). A strange, sadistic relationship, to be sure.

The Pimp, Honey’s “boss,” is a vicious psychopath who hates Miller and carries a corkscrew as his primary weapon. Honey and The Pimp haven’t appeared in the comic books, but I’ve written them into a couple of scripts.

There is no shortage of people we can bring back from any of the movies or comics—these four are the most important recurring characters in the stories we’ve written so far, and I expect that they’ll continue to remain important.

Another character who has never appeared on-screen is Miller & Mullet’s agent, Larry. Larry seems to get them work, albeit birthday parties and other jobs they’d like to leave behind for greener pastures. We’ll have to put Larry directly into a story at some point, although the idea of an unseen recurring character is interesting, too—think of Charlie of Charlie’s Angels.

I’ve written three or four scripts that include a blind person as a character. In Babysitters, we had Humphries, a blind person (played by a rampaging Sandy Jobin-Bevans) who Miller robs to pay Officer Bob and The Shark. In a couple of shorts, I’ve written other blind characters as foils who get caught up in various misadventures courtesy of our heroes. In these cases, the characters are more vulnerable than the average person is, so you save some exposition by not having to explain why they’re trapped in the situation with Miller & Mullet—it’s as obvious as the white cane and dark glasses that they’re using. I’m not taking out any prejudice against blind people, honest: I have a white cane that a blind friend donated to the cause, so we can come up with a blind person with a white cane. If I had access to a wheelchair or one of those clunky hearing aids from the 1950’s, I would certainly create physically challenged and deaf characters.

There are some other characters I’d love to have in our shorts, too. If I could get a police uniform or two, we’d have natural bad guys or foils. Give me a clergyman’s collar or nun’s habit, a firefighter’s bunker suit and I’ll make use of them. The thing about no-budget filmmaking is, of course, you don’t necessarily have the budget to dress the cast as you’d want, so you have to make do with what you can get access to. In Babysitters, we bought a police officer’s blue shirt for one scene, but otherwise we’ve never supplied a costume (my favourite costume is still the bright red marching band jacket that Steve Chamberlain thought his jockey character should wear while he doped a horse). Of course, if we weren’t trying to keep the world around Miller & Mullet realistic, we could adopt more deliberately unrealistic standards for costumes, like kiddie hats and plastic raincoats to portray firefighers, but we’ve chosen a different direction for the shorts.

Next time, I’ll either get on with the evaluations or I’ll write about finding props in the garbage….

It's a RAID

I’m still playing with the software tests, so here’s an exciting article on hard drives and hard drive maintenance. I spend a few hours each month taking care of the drives, and I believe it’s helped me avoid problems ranging from dropped frames to corrupted files.

Last week, my G5 was equipped with 575 gigabytes of hard drive turf. For an average computer owner, this is a lot of space, but video editing really eats up the bytes. I needed to add more hard drives, so I opted to buy a RAID, which adds an additional 1000 GB (or 1 TB, but I wanted to spell out the 3 zeroes—cheap geek thrills!) of capacity to my Mac.

I have a 1.6 MHz G5, which came with an 80 GB boot drive. Back in 2003, that was a pretty generous boot drive. I took the two 120-GB ATA drives that had been mounted internally in my G4 and put them into Firewire enclosures for 320 GB in total. OS X is not a space hog like that Windoze crap, so less than 4 GB of real estate is occupied by the operating system, leaving well over 300 GB in free space for apps, docs, and media files.

I used my G5 for everything: preproduction, post-production, grocery lists, money management stuff, and games. I kept the media files (clips, audio, graphics, rendering files, etc.) on the external drives, and I put everything else on the boot drive.

But my iTunes library kept growing as I ripped more of my CDs, so I added a 250 GB SATA drive in the empty bay and moved all the docs off the boot drive. I partitioned the SATA drive into an 80-GB partition (for backing up the boot drive) and the rest for docs.

I added Final Cut Studio 1 to the mix, plus a bunch of other apps, and I also added Internet access. The available space on all the drives began to shrink.

I added a couple of apps to help keep things clean by removing temp files, etc., which can clog up space. The first was a freeware program called MacJanitor which runs built-in Unix maintenance programs that normally run overnight, but with people like me who don’t keep computers on constantly, this program helps. I eventually replaced MacJanitor with a bigger app, Onyx, which does everything MacJanitor does plus a whole pile of things, especially cleaning up temp files. For safety, I bought Micromat’s excellent TechTool Pro, which has a suite of tests, diagnostics, and optimization tools.

I used a shareware program, Carbon Copy Cloner, to back up the boot drive about once a month. Since I set up a subscription with Mac.com, I use the Backup app included with the deal, I haven’t used the Cloner, but it’s a great tool.

The DV Shop recommended against defragmenting media drives—they recommended reformatting once the project is done. But with our projects still ongoing, I’ve had some of the clips on the external drives for a few years, so I periodically use Techtool to defrag the hard drives.

Every time I ran software updates, I’d lose more space. Eventually, I had just 9 GB free on the boot drive, which means I was using 89% of the drive. I’ve read in a few places that you shouldn’t exceed 80%, so it was time to change the boot drive. I hadn’t experienced any slowdowns with the nearly full drive, but I didn’t want to have anything go wrong during post-production on the DVD.

So… my first thought was to swap the 2 internal drives, using the larger partition (170 GB) on the 250 GB drive as the new boot drive and the original boot drive for media.

My external drives were filling up, too, with the DVD projects taking up space as we shot them, and I was keeping the olde stuff on there in case we needed it for the DVD as well. Out of the 250 GB or so of media drive real estate, I had about 60 GB left open. This is probably enough space to get through the DVD production next summer.

Then I saw an ad for Carbon Computing, who carries Elephant Storage disk drives and— boom!—another option appeared. With Serial ATA drives coming down in price, the Elephant 1 terabyte RAID (two 500 GB SATA drives in a case) was just $400 CAD. I couldn’t find 1 TB RAIDS as cheap anywhere else.

Weighing the two options, I decided to put the money down and expand the media drives and take care of my current and future hard drive problems with one device. I bought the RAID.

The RAID is not large at all—it’s not much bigger than the 2 cases the ATA drives are mounted in. It has a Firewire 800, a Firewire 400, and a USB 2, and it comes pre-formatted for OS X. The default configuration is as a striped RAID, the drives alternating, but can be reformatted to mirrored status. I opted to keep the striped RAID going—this was going to be my new media capture drive.

There is no instruction manual in the box, or on the drive itself, but there is a downloadable PDF at the Elephant website. The Elephant website is somewhat vague about the company’s particulars, so given that Carbon is the only retailer listed I think it’s probably part of the Carbon Computing company. I have no complaints about the product so far—everything’s assembled, you get USB, Firewire400 and Firewire800 cables, and the powerpack. The case is similar to the Mac tower’s metal case, and the front grill glows blue when it’s on.

Setup was painless. I plugged in the power supply, connected it to my Firewire800 port, and fired up the RAID. It appeared on the desktop without any problem. I turned on the other 2 external drives (one in a Firewire 400 case and the other connected via Firewire 800) and copied both to the RAID as the first test. I didn’t time them, but the Firewire 800 drive transferred files faster than the Firewire 400 did.

Next, I copied the contents of the two internal SATA drives to the RAID. I used Carbon Cloner to copy the boot drive, but I just dragged the other drive to the RAID and it copied. Overall, the internal drives copied much faster than I expected, but as expected the boot drive cloning was the slowest part of the process.

After I’d copied all the drives, I tested random files on the RAID to make sure everything opened and worked normally. I also ran Tech Tool to make sure the RAID was okay, and all the tests came back good.

One quirk, probably a bug from the depths of Firewire 800, is that I can only disconnect the drive to shut it down if the other Firewire 800 drive is also on and connected. Not a major problem, but I have to wait until the G5 shuts down before I can power off the RAID.

Next came the scary part. I deleted the contents of the partitioned drive and reformatted it as a single 250 GB drive. I considered using the install DVDs to create the new OS, but I opted to use Carbon Copy to duplicate the boot drive to preserve my settings. The boot disk now fills 71 gigabytes, so there’s plenty of space for more stuff!

I then went into the OS X Control Panel and picked the 250 GB drive as the startup disk. Then I rebooted while holding my breath, and when it restarted, everything worked fine. I spent quite a while making sure that all the apps worked, the external drives connected properly, and that all the docs opened properly. I ran Tech Tool’s tests a few times to make sure all the drives were working.

Once satisfied, I reformatted the 80 GB boot drive and copied the documents from the RAID over to it.

Next, I reformatted the two external drives to free them up. This wasn’t as stressful as all the contents worked fine on the RAID. I then set up Backup to backup the boot drive to the Firewire 400 drive.

The Firewire 800 drive is now my floater—extra space for post-production on my G5 and to move big files between my G5 and my iBook. I’ll probably backup the iPhoto and iTunes libraries as well.

The speed of the RAID is noticeable. I don’t have the software to time things out (nor do I really care to do so), but Norton whipped through an antivirus scan that would have taken hours, not minutes, on the external drives. And file transfers are faster. Clearly, the SATA interface and the striped drives are much quicker than a single ATA drive with an Oxford 911 enclosure.

Well, that’s all the excitement for this week. I hope to get one of my evaluations posted next week—honest!

Walk Hard: the Review

Happy New Year! This week, I’m posting a review—the software testing is going slow with all the holiday distractions, but I hope to have enough done to post some results next week.

Mullet and I saw Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story this weekend. It likely won’t stay in the theatres that long as it failed to make the top 10 box office list, which is sad.
The movie itself is a really good parody of the music-related bio-pics that have come out in recent years, particularly the Johnny Cash bio Walk the Line, along with a swipe or two at the Ray Charles bio Ray. Walk Hard also references Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson, as well as portraying The Beatles, Elvis, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper.

I thought about my favourite comedic music-related movie, This is Spinal Tap, afterwards, and I realized that there was something missing. Don’t get me wrong--Walk Hard is funny (the punk song, the Beatles, and the angel-dust freakout being my favourite scenes), but it wasn’t a great comedy like Spinal Tap is.

Webster’s online dictionary defines parody as:

a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule..

It also defines satire as:

1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly

The difference, for me, between Spinal Tap and Walk Hard is that Spinal Tap is a satire of the then-dominant heavy metal/hard rock segment of rock music in the 1980’s, and Walk Hard is a parody of musical biographies. Spinal Tap shows a heavy metal band on the brink of extinction, with interal dissent, led by their slighty-smarter manager, through a North American tour in support of an album that few outside the band seem to want to hear. Gigs are cancelled or changed to smaller venues, the set list changes to older material, and the manager eventually leaves in favour of the lead singer’s girlfriend. Only a place on the Japanese charts and a subsequent tour keeps them together in the end. Throughout the movie, the music business is ridiculed by showing a rotating cast of record company personnel, promoters, radio, and retailers spark, mismanage, or barely survive mishap after mishap. The band’s personalities collide frequently, with large egos battered and bruised as they take 2nd place to a puppet show and end up at an Air Force dance. Spinal Tap is not a parody of anything else other than rock documentaries of life on the road, but as a satire it shows no mercy.

Walk Hard, on the other hand, mocks not the subject of the musical bios but the bios themselves. It mocks the plot and characters of Walk the Line most of the time, but breaks it up with parodies of Brian Wilson’s wall-of-sound 60’s burnout, Dylan’s wordplay, the Beatles’ trip to India, and even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. You could argue that Walk Hard holds up human vices and follies to ridicule (Dewey’s drug addictions, multiple wives and children, etc), but when the movie does so it is lifting something from Walk the Line and exaggerating it for comedic effect.

The poster itself parodies The Doors original poster and DVD artwork, but, alas, there is no walk in the desert for Dewey, nor do we get a chance to see him confront the rise and fall of disco, punk (aside from a drug-fuelled romp through his biggest hit), New Wave, hair metal, boy bands, etc., etc. A satire certainly would have done so, but the parody has to follow the path of its target, so we skip from the 70’s to the 90’s via a hilarious transition device that I’m not going to spoil here.

Parodies have returned with a vengeance the last few years (Epic Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie, etc., etc.), but there have been very few satires by comparison. Scream satirized the horror genre, and itself was parodied by Scary Movie. Walk Hard avoids the gag a minute frenzy of those movies (and the earlier parodies like Airplane! and the Naked Gun series). This, however, seemed to confuse some of the audience we were part of—a few walked hard for the exits, actually. Knowing the sources of parody helped, to be sure, but these people were not in the mood to sit and wait for the jokes.

There are some great comedic performances in Walk Hard. John C. Reilly, a great character actor in both dramas and comedies, proves he can carry a movie (and sing). Jenna Fischer is also great in this as the femme slightly-fatale, as is Tim Meadows as Dewey’s longtime drummer. The four men playing the Beatles steal their scene effortlessly, as does Jack White as a knife-packing young Elvis Presley.

Go see movie. It’s better than recent parodies, but it’s not on the level of a Spinal Tap.