theMediaman.com

I’ve been taking these Film Studies classes for almost two years, off and on. I’m just now starting to feel like filmmaking is a future for me. Earlier courses like Special Effects or Film Technology felt like something I was doing with my spare time, in a field I was interested in… sort of like Reg going to a lecture on Feynman. It’s something I like, and want to learn more about, but has little relevance in my daily life or career.

The two courses I’m taking now really change that. The first is Screen Writing I. Only since last night have I really been able to develop my solo project to the point that I know what it’ll be about! There’s still a lot of research and creative work to do, but I really feel as though I have my first ticket into the filmmaking world in a script outline.

Conversely, I’ve encountered my first doubts about filmmaking.

When I started the term, I took Script Writing because I knew it was important to have… not a compulsory course, but one that I should be taking. I was not looking forward to it. The second was Digital Film Production, and I’d been waiting for the course to start for about a year. It kept getting cancelled for lack of registrations. Now that I’m actually in it, I’ve been feeling more and more anxious about the class. In fact, the roles in my mind have reversed… I look forward to my Screen Writing class every week, while I view my Digital Film Production class as a chore.

One stigma against the course is that I had to sink $850 onto my Visa in order to get a DV camera. That was something I wasn’t ready to spend, and really served to remind me how boned I was when I was told that the company I work for wasn’t going to buy a prosumer camera.

Beyond that, the most recent class assignment was to produce a montage by producing two videos, then splice them together. The first one we watched was a confused, deep-underlying-meaning, emotional, complicated, layered, artsie film. At the end, it slaps you in the face with a 9-11 reference. I found it no more appropriate to the content than if they used other shocking imagery like a dead baby, physical abuse, or - if this movie had been made in the 60’s - a mushroom cloud.

I was really quite angry watching this film. It really, really pissed me off. By the end of it, I was fucking furious. Not for any of the content, but that it was such a piece of pretentious bullshit and would be considered “Art” because of such pretentiousness; ignoring the possibility that it is a meandering visual compilation, and says nothing of real significance.

My most disjunctive blog entries have more direction than this crap did.

And so here I am. Thrilled about Screen Writing, and discouraged by Digital Film Production.

More than ever, I want to make films that people want to watch. Not make films that will confuse and, possibly, enrage. Many of the students in this class have taken Film Theory at York, U of T or Carleton. Consequently, they talk about revolutionary filmmakers and films from 1910 through to 1980’s and rattle off names of these people and movies I’ve never heard of; done in casual conversation like you might hear me mention Bruckheimer, Spielberg, Cary Elwes, Mitch Pileggi, The Ring, Back to the Future or Star Wars.

I understand the purpose of these classes, but my list of compulsory courses includes Film Production I, II and III. They are like this current class, but with celluloid and guillotines rather than 0’s and 1’s.

I understand the importance of doing things “The Hard Way” before learning the quickest and most efficient way of doing it. I can look at HTML code and tell if the designer had programmed a page in his or her life, simply by how the WYSIWYG editor of choice compiled the page. I know you have to study what Issac Newton wrote about the physics, before you learn in what ways he was wrong.

Despite all that, the idea of making a movie on celluloid seems somehow… dirty. And unnecessary. I have no intention of shooting on filmstock. But I have not one, not two, but three, two-term classes to take on Pretentious Motion Picture Production (I added the “Pretentious”), when even the teachers will tell you “the certificate isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, it’s the value of what you learn that will get you a job”.

I can learn theory. That I don’t have a problem with. But students with no artistic vision creating confusion in movie-form and saying it has a deeper meaning feels to me like covering dog-doo with a tissue and saying “it has a hidden layer”.

Confusion = Art is what got me out of Art twelve years ago. I landed in Physics (vast difference), and have since drifted back towards an artistic field. Once again, I’m brushed up against those who would be considered better artists than I am, simply because they can communicate “The Point” of what they’re trying to say in a way so incomplete, and full of extraneous information, that most viewers will miss “The Point”.

I’ve ranted enough for now on this topic… but I feel that this is far from over.
 

The last post I had detailed my struggle with the new Asus motherboard. When I left off, I was planning to do a clean install of the operating system… and that worked. It seems that the problem was not simply a broken motherboard, bad design on Asus’s part, the Windows XP’s inability to boot with a new motherboard, nor the fault of the user (me). It was a combination of all four! Four separate problems, pretty much all unrelated, and all combined to keep my computer out of commission for a full week. But that’s done now, and after a LAN party at Jenning’s place it’s loaded up with dozens of games.

Speaking of Jenning’s place, he’s got a new condo at Lawrence Park. I’ve been keeping half-an-eye on new condo developments for the last couple of years, and the one thing that really bugs me is the wealth of space wasted on two bathrooms (for 2-bedroom condos), when many kitchens in the same place are too small to accommodate more than one sink. I’ve browsed around on the site for a bit, looking at different layouts, and some are rather disappointing. However, Jenning’s (look for “Violet” under Phase I suites) was really spacious.

The kitchen had lots of counterspace - only 1.5 sinks, but the big one was bigger than average. The living room was small, but didn’t feel it - probably a combination of the huge windows, and clever, triangular design that makes a comfortable and friendly area. The bedroom was a decent size, and my only gripe would probably be that the bathroom is where a hallway should be! In all, it was a very big-feeling place for a condo that’s only 636 sq. feet.

Gawd, I’m sick of living in a basement!

But I usually feel that the alternative is to get a cruddy, eighteen-foot wide, half-a-million house just for the privilege of “Living in the Tee-Dot”.

Good thing I’m not a materialistic man.
 

After the last overheat-and-crash of my computer one week ago, I picked up the A7S8X-MX Asus motherboard. Under $60, onboard audio, NIC and video. That’s when the problems started.

I’ve spent the better part of three evenings and two hours on the weekend trying to get the damned thing to work. Everytime I solve a problem, I’m stopped by another road block. Here’s what’s happened so far.

Please note, this isn’t a usual blog entry. This is mainly documenting a process, in case someone with similar problems comes to this page. If you’re expecting something witty, you’ll have a better chance, just reading some of my older entries.

After installing the motherboard and putting in an Athlon XP 1900+ (Palomino core), I couldn’t get the damned thing to even POST. After a long while, I figured out that this is the first new motherboard I’ve encountered in YEARS that doesn’t seem to have a jumper-free configuration. You have to set the Front Side Bus speed manually. Out of the box, it’s set to 100 MHz. Check the manual on how to set it to 133 or 166 (depending on your CPU).

After the first POST, I swear I saw something that unnerved me. “BIOS checksum failed”. However, the system rebooted and seemed to work fine after that… I’ll come back to this later.

It would finally POST! But it wouldn’t accept my AGP video card as a primary display device. There’s a setting in the BIOS that lets you choose the PCI, Onboard or AGP as the primary VGA, but whenever I chose AGP, it would give a half-assed “AGP Failure” beep sequence and fail. For the time being I had to boot from the onboard video which, unlike onboard audio, network, SATA, etc., did NOT have the option to disable it.

Booting into Windows with a new motherboard is always a crapshoot. Sometimes it’ll work, updating the drivers, and sometimes you need to reinstall Windows. However, I’ve always been lucky in the past, and hoped the same would happen now, but it was not to be.

BSOD.

Blue Screen Of Death.

Preparing myself for a clean copy of Windows XP, I put the install disc in the drive and booted from it. BSOD.

I tried just booting from the CD with the IDE cable for the hard drives disconnected. BSOD.

I tried disconnecting everything but the CPU, RAM and the DVD-ROM drive. BSOD.

I tried my older, Athlon XP 1700+ CPU (Palomino core). Boots into the install process without a problem.

I reconnected the hard drives tried to boot into Windows. BSOD.

I might add here that the error messages would change with every BSOD, so clearly the problem is more severe than any one thing that can be nailed down.

I dug out an old, 20 GB drive and installed Windows XP Home Edition to it. No problem. Installed the video driver from the Asus CD. Worked like a beaut. Installed the custom IDE drivers from the CD. BSOD. I had to reinstall XP again.

Forty minutes later, I’m sitting at functional desktop, and remember the “BIOS checksum failed” screen. I go to the Asus web site, download the newest BIOS (released about a month or two ago) and wrote the new firmware to my motherboard’s brains. I rebooted.

After some testing, I still couldn’t boot from my original hard drive (BSOD), but I could suddenly install an AGP card and have it as my primary VGA.

Tonight I plan to connect all three hard drives (20 GB new OS, 40 GB old OS, 120 GB data drive) and back up all important data. Then do a clean install on the 40 GB drive and see if it’s possible to get that BSOD screen again. After all that, if I still get a BSOD, I’m taking back the motherboard.
 

After watching “Serenity” in theatres last Friday, I was trying to figure out exactly what to write here about it. Turns out, someone outlined 90% of what I wanted to say in his own rant. Read DOM’s post about Serenity (about half-way down the page) at Megatokyo.

Here’s the summary, to give you the idea of how I identified with this post:

• Heard and read from a lot of psycho-devoted fans about how good the “Firefly” TV series was
• Personally never liked any Joss Whedon series (Buffy, Angel). Could be attributed to a severe drop in television-viewing over the last eight years.
• My interest was peaked from a particularly exciting (read: kick-ass) trailer
• Never having watched “Firefly”, I decided it would be best to hold out and see it without any preconceived notions about the show. The X-files movie handled non-fans as well as the fans. The X-men movie did not.
• Considered not going opening weekend, or even wait for the DVD to come out. The situation arose where friends were going to a movie on Friday anyway, so I came too. It was partly my choice to actually GO to Serenity tho’.
• Dialogue was clever, but not so much that it became cheap humour
• Excellent at moving between scenes driven by dialogue and action.
• Didn’t have that “dedicate my life to this series” attitude, but I enjoyed it as much as I expected to
• Surprising to have a science fiction movie live up to the hype when so many films over the last five years have failed to fully produce on lofty expected results (ie. Star Wars and Matrix)
• Background was presented well, bringing non-”browncoats” up-to-speed, without boring the true fans
• Getting outshot by Flightplan is an insult. The opening weekend only brought in $10 million, while the Jodie Foster plane-drama took another $15m.

The only other thing of note with this movie is that there’s no naughty language. None. It’s like a $45 million television episode. In Hollywood where “vulgar language” can make it into any PG movie, it was suprising to see a film aimed at the 20+ crowd have such clean dialogue. Really, the only thing objectionable about the movie are the caniballistic, zombie-like bad guys… and a couple people get stabbed and shot. But that’s nothing we don’t see in prime-time.
 

My motherboard has been going senile over the last year-and-a-half, and is finally causing the CPU to overheat and reboot every time I run a process that’s intensive (like compressing files). I bought an Asus A7S8X-MX micro-ATX board. Handy, since the small board also comes with onboard network, sound and video. That’ll come in handy next year when this computer is demoted to my secondary system. A smaller motherboard gives me more options as to the case that I can create for it!

Currently, I can’t get the damn thing to POST. I thought I might have fried both my Athlon XP 1700+ AND my slightly newer 1900+, but when I reinstalled the old motherboard (A7V266) it POSTed fine. So now I have to return the motherboard, slightly less than certain it’s not just the inexperience of the person who was doing the installation (me).

I’ve done more Pentium 1 CPU installs than I can remember, including two seperate instances of getting a motherboard to recognize a CPU that it’s not supposed to support. But any modern, high-heat CPUs tend to confound me. It’s far too easy for things to quickly go catastrophic if the install is not done right.