Machinal tech week
I’ve been going hard at Machinal video all week and am eager to get into the space for tech week. My hard drive crashed on Monday, which meant I had to start from scratch with the 2-3 transitions I had edited. This was a horrible, horrible thing but four days later I feel pretty well caught up.
There are still a few challenges looming.
For one: althought Vicki has played with MadMapper quite a bit, I’m less familiar. I’m not sure what the balance is between what I need to do in FinalCut and what that program does as far as fades, transitions, and looping footage.
Many of my projections are animated, with certain things popping, disappearing, fading, etc. ACCORDING TO the actors’ dialogue. This is a challenge because the actors’ performances will always vary in time. One night a scene may take 3 minutes — the next night the audience may laugh at every line and the scene takes 5 minutes. So if I want the projection to become extra bright 2 minutes into the scene, how do I know when that is? Again, most of this will be taken care of by MadMapper, but some things are more complex — things that I probably have to take care of in FinalCut without knowing EXACTLY what a moment looks like.
On an optimistic note, the footage looks great. Here are a few samples of the footage you will see in the show. These are raw trials: ultimately this footage will be mapped in a cool way onto cubes and big shards of muslin!