Success!

Man, I am so happy about yesterday. Things went great. To think I almost decided to do homework instead of filming on Friday. Why was it a success you ask? Well let me explain...

First off, wow, I haven't updated on this site in a little while. At least it feels like that. I'm writing this entry first for inferno cafe, and will just copy it over to my livejournal for the sake of documentation, I guess. My livejournal just keeps track of Happy Pill stuff, that's what I want for it anyways. But this I want everyone to read because it is just such good news, and infernocafe.com gets at least 1000% more readers. So yeah, anyways, I headed to my house with Alyssa and Bryan, and we just chilaxed for awhile. Excuse me for the unimportant details, backtracking is helping me remember what happened yesterday. So we were relaxing and Alyssa started watching Happy Pills again in my room, and at that point Lucio, Dante, and Andrew had gotten in my house. I guess I didn't lock the door. After some more time wasted we got our equipment and headed out the door. We decided to do the "TJ" pill. This is the Happy Pill starring the kid who is best described as the "cool" camp councilor. He is much like and a junk food mascot, but he plays it safe. He's like a teenage version of Tony the Tiger, mixed in with one of those guys from a D.A.R.E. "Smoking is not cool" assembly. Anyways, enough about that, we went to the park to film. The skit pretty much consisted of Dante acting out TJ arriving at the local public park for some healthy walking. He spots me and Andrew trying to tag a wall up top some bleachers about 200 yards away. He darts all the way over to us to give us a lecture on that destroying public property is un-cool. He tells us that we need "a lesson on cool...TJ style!" and that was it for that day, as the sun was coming down and we were(duh) losing light. We went back to the house and Lucio made us some dinner like the pimp he is, and relaxed some more. Eventually we decided that we should go out and film again, this time to South Shore. I must say, South Shore has some great lighting for a place that closes at NINE! We took a nice brisk walk there and parked our asses outside of KB's toy store. For those of you who don't know yet, South Shore has rather quickly completely remodeled the outside of Walden books, and most of the area around it. There is even a giant, empty, and completely white space next to it. I wanted so badly to break through the glass and slide around in there, for the floor looked wet and smooth. ANYWAYS! Lucio was lying his head down on top of his camera bag and sitting on one of those little tree garden things that are set up throughout the mall. He looked asleep. When I lifted his head up he started singing some song that he must have just thought up and stopped when I dropped his head. Dante and Andrew started playing with Lucio while he did this. It was so funny I pulled the camera out and started to film. They stopped but I demanded they start acting out something with this concept. So that's what we did. I filmed Andrew and Dante walking up to Lucio and they pretended they didn't know him. They said "Who's that guy? Is he okay?" and approached Lucio. They lifted up his head and that's when it starts. They ad-libbed a entire (roughly)six minute skit. It was genius. It had it's ups and downs, but the point is they did this whole thing off of the top of their heads. It was only about four takes, the whole thing. Damn good for something we randomly thought up. You just have to see it to get it, I think.

Andrew and Alyssa parted ways with me, Lucio, and Dante. We walked Dante close to the Bayfarm bridge and me and Luc headed for my house. When we got their it was pretty late, but we still decided we should try to capture what we had got. Now this tape we had been filming actually had a lot of stuff on it. Me and Lucio realized that it seems like we have not filmed much this year, but actually we do have a bunch of stuff we just haven't captured yet. I re-captured Asshole business man skit, the Lucio is so cool skit, TJ, some of the Ad-lib thing. There was some more on that tape, but I don't remember what it is right now, but I definitely have more to go back and get. Besides some of the horrifying echo sounds my camera and computer were bouncing off of each other, there were some strange things we had encountered while trying to capture this footage. Every once in a while, the computer looked like it was lagging while trying to capture the film, while the camera's screen played normally. I had assumed it was just the program lagging, anf that it would be fine because this cord I am using basically captures whatever it sees on the camera like a VCR would to a TV show. The more this went on I realized that there was a counter under the screen of the editing software that said "dropped frames". It's number was going up pretty quickly. I realized that everything that looked as though it was lagging was actually dropping the frames we were not seeing. I let this go on for a while and gave up about a third of the way through the ad-lib skit. I told Lucio this was good enough for tonight and I bid him ado. I went back to my comp and looked at the MPEG. files that had been captured. Well, there is some really good news, and some slightly dissipointing news. Which would you like to hear first? Just kidding, I give the you the good first.
YEA HAW! The Asshole bussines man skit came out with sound this time! YAY! No need to fret Brian, we can just continue from where we were! Whoopee! I think it was lucio's camera, it made everything come out just fine. That is so cool. The bad news is that I was right about the dropped frames thing, mostly. The good news is that the editing software seems to save more frames than it appears to drop. While watching parts of the footage that I clearly remember haveing lagged, it played back on the MPEG very smoothly. Let's say that it saves about 75% of the frames it tells you were dropped. So if there was a minor lag, it will pretty much be gone. If it was a medium lag, you will hardly notice it, or it will be forgivable, but if it was an entire 3 seconds of dropped frames, which happened a couple times, the lag will be large and noticeable. I'm hoping that re-capturing this footage will turn out different than the first time. I don't think the skipping is a permanent thing. I just think that's how the cable, camera, and software were working together that night. So yeah, very successful day! Can't wait to start cutting the movies up!

About Halloween. Today I am doing as much homework as I can so spending tomorrow on Halloween won't hurt my work too much. My mom wanted me to go over to her house to help her make me my costume. I mean, in a perfect world my mom would just make it for me, but I understand she would like me to come over and help her. But I do have a lot of homework and I can't do that today. Most likely. Though tomorrow seems fair for me to go over there and help out with my costume. If I do, I will be able to hang out close to evening most likely. Which will be when we go pillaging anyways. But if she somehow makes it by tomorrow, I will be able to hang out earlier. But it looks like I won't have my costume ready very early on. So it looks like I will be able to hang out sometime later in the day. But not too late. I'll keep you all posted on plans for Halloween. I really don't know what else to say, but I have to get back to work. Peace out.
- Mad Davy Flint

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