A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

To my adored TV talent, whom I have already emailed but just in case:

Tonight's Gameshelf shoot is CANCELLED. If you were planning on coming tonight, please don't, unless you happen to want to watch the taping of this week's "Dead Air Live". We had a scheduling foul-up.

Relatedly, I've lately been thinking about ways I could become less dependent on SCAT. This accident (not the first of its kind, for me) encouraged me to go ahead and purchase this setup, after it received the blessings of Joe-the-director as probably being OK for what I need. It will allow me to do one-camera green-screen shoots in my own home. This is good.

I'm helping to crew tonight's Rock Candy Show taping. Only one band this time: Octave Club [noisy MySpace link]. As always it's free and open to the public, so come on by if you want to be blasted with some free live rock n roll in our cute lil TV studio.

The website says that taping starts at 7 and that's a damn lie because I just spoke to the director. It will probably be 8:30 or so.

The fourth Gameshelf has been available for a while via RSS, but I didn't link to it directly because it wasn't quite done yet. Last night I sunk around three hours into both cleaning it up (it had a bunch of broken transitions) and carving 18 minutes off of it. This puts it below the 30-minute mark, which means I can hand it to SCAT and they can air it at some random time. Yes, this is important, in some abstract psychic way; I used their resources to make the show, and I owe them a product, even if my series has been long since canceled and they couldn't care less about it at this point.

Download here. Show notes here.

A lot of what I cut was pure fat, but there was a good amount of severed muscle squirming on the floor before I was done as well. It almost goes without saying; I don't have video editing experience beyond The Gameshelf but I have done enough text editing to know how every cut into one's own art is a mix of pain and relief.

I hated, for example, cutting out my explaining the show's theme (which I replaced with a new title card at the start of the show), and then slicing out my talking about Carcassonne's meeple-placement restriction rules. Both of these would have been nice to keep, and I would have considered it if I wanted to go shoot additional footage to illustrate my speech. But I didn't, and that left us with several minutes of jmac sitting in his chair babbling and flapping his arms, and that really isn't all that interesting to watch, even for me.

My biggest take-away was the value of limiting illustrations to a single clip. There were many bits in the first, 45-minute cut that had Matt or myself talk about some game feature, and then we'd watch as this happened 2 or 3 times in game play. And these were the first things I ended up slicing out. Multiple clips are good if you specifically want to show how something in the game changes over time, but otherwise it's unnecessary. It happens once in the final cut, during the Carcassonne segment, to show grr_plus1 sneaking a guy into another player's city, and then [clock-wipe] here he is some turns later, reaping the benefits on the scoreboard. The other redundant clips I originally kept because someone cracked a joke or was otherwise entertaining, and it was hard to let go, but onto the floor it all went.

Anyway, I am satisfied with the show now and am done with this episode, unless I have made some truly epic mistakes; please let me know if you find any.

Dear local yokels:

There will be a Gameshelf shoot of some sort on Saturday, Dec, 10, from noon to four in the SCAT studio in Union Square. Theme and games TBA.

Let me know if you're interested (or conditionally interested) in being talent. I am presently working on switching these sorts of announcements over to email, since I've become recently convinced that the talent pool I'd like to have is larger than that which is currently available to me through LiveJournal. (Apologies to anyone who I badgered into getting an LJ account over this, ha ha.)

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As a random fun thing, you are all invited to tomorrow night's (11/30) taping of The Rock Candy Show at the same location, 8pm. (In fact, tapings of the show are open to the public, but few know about it, and it's not like the drink selection is very good anyway, so the audience is usually limited to whoever the bands happen to bring along.) I've been helping the show as a cameraman for several of its monthly shoots as a way to return the favor to its producer for being The Gameshelf's director.

Tomorrow's acts include Yoni Gordon & the Goods and Molecule. I have no idea what they sound like, much like I have had no idea about any of the other musicians who've shown up. But I've more or less liked them all so far.

Got the giant hard drive today. Installing it into the G5 (alongside the HD it already had) was a breeze. Am hwarfing all the current Gameshelf footage from earlier this month onto hard disk right now... it's too bad it can only do it at 1x speed, meaning that it will take several hours to transfer, with me manually swapping tapes every hour. But it will be so worth it, I think.

I wonder what the current state of hard-drive-using camcorders is. I am assuming they exist. I'd certainly favor using one over MiniDV.

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Somewhat relatedly, did something fun last night: helped crew a debate in the SCAT studio between the Democratic candidates for the 2nd Middlesex district state senate race. You Somervudlians can catch it on Channel 3 at 7pm on any Wednesday in August (except for the 31st, I'm assuming, since that's a day after the election in question). When you see the camera trained on Casey or Callahan, that was my masterful handiwork, ha ha. (Another camera was on Jehlen and Mackey, and a third on the moderator/audience.)

I wasn't really paying attention to what they were saying (since I was paying more attention to what I was doing), but two big topics I noticed were gay marriage and T expansions into Somerville. I'm interested in hearing about that latter topic in particular, so I'll be tuning in myself.

It'll also be shown on Medford, Winchester and Woburn local access, but I dunno when. "Check your local listings." Hm, if I remember I'll post something about it to davis_square next week.

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Screwing around with Apple hardware? Being part of the media coverage for a local political event? It's like 1996 all over again for me...