Gone to America

I’ve been pretty busy this week, but unfortunately not in a very financially rewarding way. The short I’ve been doing for the last while (A Reasonable Hypothesis) has completely wrecked my head. For the first time since I can remember, I’ve been completely sound-blocked. Nothing I have tried has worked. At all. It’s bizarre. Luckily the director has been working on this short for four years and is very patient – delays are par for the course. He’s been very understanding and helpful, and I think I’ve finally cracked it. After nearly three weeks, my God – it’s only twenty minutes long! What’s wrong with me! It’s been very frustrating, but I think I’m over the worst of it now.

On top of that, for the last two nights I’ve been helping out with the mix of a video installation at a place called Monkeytown. It’s been interesting, to say the least – there are four large screens facing each other, with a speaker at each corner and one suspended in the center. There’s also a sub. It’s billed as 5.1, but it’s not really true 5.1 (that would be LCRLsRsSub) – more “quintaphonic.1”.
The movie (Killer Capote) is about 53 minutes long. There are essentially two movies playing simultaneously. Each image is mirrored on the opposite screen, so that any audience member within the box can see the whole thing without looking behind them – I think. The sound pans around madly, between the speakers, or coming out of multiple speakers, or the reverb coming out the center, or whatever. Phase issues abound, of course, but they’re only really noticable if you’re moving around. It was fun, but it did mean keeping artist hours, which seem to be between 5pm and 3am, more or less. This was a drain. And the setup took about five hours, what with file copying and such, so what was a one night job turned into a two night job.
I don’t really know how it’s going to work – we were working to just one screen, flipping back and forth between the video streams. I’m hoping to go along this weekend, probably Saturday, to see how the whole thing hangs together.

Tomorrow night I think I’m going to some party to celebrate the end of the Q diamond line. I don’t think I’ve ever been on it, so I suppose this is my last chance. I’ll let you know if it was in any way an interesting experience.

And I’m ending the polls. The last poll:

I stated: I’m finishing up the polls.
You responded:

41.6%
Noooooooooooooooo! 33.3%
Oh, really? 25%
But… But… Oh, whatever. 0%
Sorry, what? I was distracted there for a second. 0%
Fair enough. 0%
About time.

12 votes. I’m sorry to have caused so much pain. I was going to hold a poll about what to put up there instead, but nobody made any good suggestions, so I won’t bother. I’m going to leave a minimal holding poll in case something occurs to me I want to hold a poll on, but I won’t be checking it or updating it except in exceptional circumstances.

I have my new hat! All’s right with the world…

Thanks to all those who emailed or otherwise let me know they appreciated my work on Timbuktu at the DIFF. Of course, none of you commented, as I asked. What an unruly bunch you are.