This is what our living room looked like after the floors were ripped up due to water damage:
The machine on the left is an industrial dehumidifier, and the one on the right is a blower. We had three other blowers set up in the rest of the apartment, to ensure that the air circulated enough for the dehumidifier to pull out all the residual moisture.
Sadly, if you remove the machines, this was exactly the state of our floors three years ago when we bought the place and ripped out the carpet in preparation for the wood floors to go in.
Live at the Forum, Melbourne, Monday 2 April 2007 (from Wikipedia)
The first time I heard Lisa Gerrard was during the denouement of Gladiator. Maximus has just defeated the Emperor Commodus, at a mortal cost to himself. What could have been merely tragic is elevated to triumph with the exultation of "Now We Are Free":
I decided I had to hear more of Gerrard's work. I discovered that she had been in a band called Dead Can Dance before going solo. Previous to Gladiator, she'd also provided the music for The Insider (with Pieter Bourke). I picked up a couple of her solo CDs -- Duality and The Mirror Pool -- fully intending to listen to them immediately.
For some reason, I never got around to it, until some friends and I decided to go on a road trip to Alaska. We loaded up the car, grabbed a stash of CDs, and hit the highway.
When we finally got to Lisa Gerrard, we were somewhere in the Northern British Columbia Interior, driving along the Alaska Highway. It was really late, around ten or eleven p.m. This was in July, and we were far enough north that there was still light in the sky that late at night. The road was dead straight, lined with firs as far as the eye could see, and the arctic light was quite surreal.
This sort of landscape was made to be paired with Lisa Gerrard's powerful, haunting vocals. My soul was lost.
Watching her in concert, I had no idea how such a distinctive sound could be produced by any human, let alone this woman. The way she uses her voice is less "singing" and more like playing an instrument. When she did speak -- briefly, to introduce her fellow musicians, and to thank the crowd -- her voice was breathy and slight and completely dissimilar from her performances. She explained that singing stressed out her voice (no kidding) and made her light-headed; in fact, for each piece in the show she used the support of a stool for balance.
Her works and her voice don't speak to my conscious mind. They thrum around in my unconsciousness, stirring my heart, filling the spaces between the atoms. They are both melancholy and triumphant, both desolate and beatific. They are an elegy for the world.
On Wednesday, May 16, I went to a presentation by Lindsay Adams put on by the Vancouver Siggraph Chapter. Lindsay is the Senior Compositor at Animal Logic. He gave an excellent presentation on the compositing work they did for 300.
Interesting takeaways:
There were very few real sets used. Occasionally, there would be a bit of rock wall (that eventually was heavily enhanced with CG/matte work). The rest was all digital/comp work.
A concept artist on set did quick comps to get initial production approval, which were then used by the team as a guide for their work.
They did a first-pass comp of all their assigned shots in about 5 weeks. It let them get production approval much quicker and reduced wasted effort.
The skies were all matte paintings / photos that were warped, morphed, and transformed to give the appearance of motion.
The skies had a neat coffee-stain plate overlaid onto them that production really liked – they felt it gave the film more of a graphic novel feel.
They filmed live plates for a number of elements because they just looked way better than CG: smoke, dust, some water.
The process to achieve the desaturated/palettized look of the film was called "The Crush" – Animal Logic (and the other vendors) delivered shots that were "Half Crush", and a final production studio took it the rest of the way. This was to achieve a consistent look for the whole movie.
The on-set lighting was very diffuse and flat. All of the shots were "re-lit" in compositing using comp tricks.
For shots with variable timing, they’d always work over-length and on the slowest timing, and adjust to the final timing variations as the last step. This gave them the most flexibility to changing production demands.
To multiply the Persian army in the close-up shots, they took the plate, isolated various actors, and duplicated them using flopping, re-timing, etc. Because they were mostly hidden by the "hero" close-ups, it worked.
Lots and lots of hand roto work to get the CG spears and swords matched up to the actors’ props.
Their most complicated shot was the "Crazy Horse" – in the final film, this shot was the first one which had Leonidas breaking away from the main Spartan group, attacking multiple enemies and launching a spear. They shot this on stage with 3 cameras mounted on the same head, shooting fast (i.e., slo-mo) at different zooms and focal lengths. In comp, they managed to blend all of these together into a single shot, using warping to merge the different camera shots together, and retiming to get the slo/fast/slo effect. Plus all the usual crazy layering.
A very detailed look at what goes on behind-the-scenes. It was also neat to see the full extent of what can be accomplished using compositing.
The worst intersection in Vancouver... the absolute worst... is the traffic light clusterfuck at Terminal and Main/Quebec. Who designed these intersections? Did anyone do an analysis of what the optimal traffic light timings would be? It certainly doesn't seem that way.
You'll be waiting at a red light for what seems like at least five minutes (which is really an eternity for a traffic light), have it turn green for fifteen seconds, and be unable to proceed because the section of road in front of you is completely full and waiting for their own traffic light to turn green.
I can't believe there haven't been more road rage incidents at these intersections.
Every time I have to traverse these asphalt minefields, I'm sure I'm shaving a day off my life expectancy. Which is troubling, considering that my drive to and from work routes me through this twice a day.
Of course, with all the construction going on in Vancouver right now in anticipation of the 2010 Winter Olympics, these intersections are becoming competitive:
After much prompting from Kyenta, I finally succumbed and subscribed to Facebook. Dear God, is it ever addictive. Not so much the status updates and wall-writing, which are sorta fun. No, I'm talking about reconnecting with old friends from high school.
When my family arrived in Montreal, I was enrolled in Ecole Secondaire Dorval, a French school that "specialized" in accueil programs for immigrants. Yes, Quebec does have English high schools, and yes, English is my native language. This was cause for quite a lot of resentment on my part. But that's another story.
I made a number of friends in high school, and as is usually the case, lost touch with all of them after going on to college and university. As Stephen King wrote in "The Body" (from Different Seasons):
"It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant."
Once I joined Facebook, I immediately saw a few familiar names and faces. I must admit, I was apprehensive about contacting them. What if they didn't want to reconnect? What if they'd changed? What if I'd changed? And did I really want to relive all the pettiness and insecurity of high school?
Thankfully, I was wrong. It isn't like that at all. Reconnecting with old friends on Facebook is like finding a dusty diary that you'd lost many years ago, opening it, reading familiar passages with a fresh perspective and discovering completely new pages.
A friend of mine was joking that my condo must be built on an Indian burial ground. He might be right. In the three years we've been here, we've had:
A car accident resulting in a write-off
Building re-plumbing
Slow contractors
The death of one of our cats
A burglary
A flood
I realize that not all of this is specifically condo-related; and of the ones that are, I'm well aware that I'm remembering the hits and forgetting the misses (or is that remembering the misses and forgetting the hits?).
Still, that's not much consolation right now.
We're currently coping with the last one, a flood caused by a broken water pipe that resulted in damage to most of our new hardwood floors. Luckily, our insurance and the building's insurance is covering most, if not all, of the cost. In terms of logistics, though, with the hardwood floors all ripped up, we're right back where we were before we moved in: bare concrete floors, damaged walls, damaged bathroom floor tiles, and furniture and personal items in storage.
On the upside, most of our stuff made it through with no damage (which is a minor miracle). And our temporary digs are just off Commercial Drive, which we're discovering is a pretty neat neighbourhood.
When people discover that I've written a novel, they're fascinated. They ask me lots of questions, which I'm happy to answer. Almost invariably, though, they also ask me if it's been published yet. They assume that once you've finished your book, the hard part's over; publishers should be falling all over themselves to get your stuff into print.
Ah, if only it were that easy....
Writing your novel, while a significant milestone, is only the first step. (Let's ignore for a moment the many, many revisions you've probably gone through.) Very few publishers accept unsolicited manuscripts or (God forbid) book proposals. First, you need to search for an agent to represent your novel. This involves finding someone who is (a) willing to represent the type of novel you've written, and (b) accepting new clients. Each agent has different requirements for solicitation. Some prefer only a synopsis; a few like to get the first ten pages; one or two accept the first three chapters.
You write your synopsis, sweating blood to condense your hundreds of pages of finely developed characters and intricate plot twists into one sparkling page. You hand craft your query letter, making sure you're witty--but not clownish--and bold--but not ostentatious.
You get your packages ready, submit to three or four agents at a time (making sure you note in the query letter that you're sending out multiple submissions), and sit back and wait. And wait. And wait. After about three or four weeks, you send out another three or four packages, rinse, lather, and repeat.
And you collect the rejection slips. Until you hit that one agent that is the perfect match who is willing to represent your novel to the publishers.
This is only the second step. Your agent will probably have a number of suggestions and recommendations. And after that, your agent will then need to find a willing publisher.
At this point, I'm not allowing the "finding a publisher" part to take a lot of my headspace. I'm solely concentrating on the "finding an agent" part. So the mailings continue....
