Month: April 2022

Master and Commander

Posted on by Geoff

 

As I wrote earlier, I have taken a bit of a hiatus from writing The Relentless. That ends tomorrow as I go back to work on it. I will be using my totally reworked office.

I spend a great deal of time in my office every day, and now when I am in there I feel like a master and commander. My new office is the office of my dreams. It is certainly overkill for a writer, but not when you also do video, graphics and 3D.

The main monitor is an IPS 42 inch 4K with a staggeringly good picture. There is a side monitor for control panels for when I am doing full screen 4K renders which display on the main monitor. To the left is my older computer with three monitors. All I have to do is rotate my chair 90 degrees to switch workstations.

I also have a tablet, a raspberry pi and a phone on my desk, so that is technically five computers and seven computer screens. Thanks to Logitech’s amazing flow technology, I can drag a file from the main monitor to the right so it appears on the smaller monitor as is the normal procedure with multiple monitors, but if I drag it to the right, it is actually transferred to the other computer and it’s far right monitor. My wireless keyboard has three buttons so it can switch between the two computers and the Raspberry Pi. This level of integration makes working between the various systems quite easy.

I also have Alexa, both on the computer and in a Dot on my desk. I use the Dot a lot to look up (or I guess hear up) information or do math without having to leave my word processor.

While I embrace the latest technology I am also old school in that I love printed books and have an extensive personal research library. I have 18 feet of bookshelfs with six shelves per case for a total of 108 feet of shelf space. It is great to have except when I move. A lot of the volumes I have are specialized and have information that can’t be found on the Internet.

Having an efficient office won’t necessarily make your writing better, but it does makes things faster and easier. I am looking forward to tomorrow and getting back to it.

What’s Up with Us

Belle wanted to take a couple of days off. We were going to make it a four day getaway, but then our cat Leeloo got cancer so we had to cancel and stay close to home. She passed before our vacation but it was too late to make new arrangements. Our plan was to do local activities.

The Magic Castle has a member’s only lunch on Fridays. Having a fancy meal in an ornate private club is a long ways from our small desert town roots. We ran into a lot of people that we knew. There was someone I wrote about in my book, The Greatest Adventure, who had an impact on me in my younger years but had completely disappeared off the radar. I was in the Magic Castle library, which is not just about all the great books and research materials, it is also where you can get the best gossip and information on what is going on in the world of magic. I asked around about whatever happened to this guy. The response was “Oh, he is upstairs meeting with Milt [the 91 year old co-founder of the Magic Castle].” I had not seen him in over 30 years but recognized him immediately when he came down. Like me, he had gotten away from the world of magic, and like me, after many years, he recently returned. He had a very good reason for keeping a lower profile as he had been working in law enforcement. He is now retired and becoming active at the Castle again. It was really great to see him after all these years.

We then went to the Academy Museum, from the same folks who bring us the Oscars. It opened last year and we thought we should finally go take a look. It is described on their site: “The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is the largest museum in the United States devoted to the arts, sciences, and artists of moviemaking.” It is in what used to be the old five story tall Macy’s department store building originally built in 1939. The building is interesting in and of itself, one of the greatest examples of Streamline Moderne (Art Deco) archictecture in Los Angeles, and it has been fully restored to its former glory.

There is a strong focus on education and explaining the various aspects of film making, along with a lot of rare one of a kind pieces. The Wizard of Oz area has a lot from the movie, including the Tin Man’s oil can (they actually used chocolate syrup) and Dorothy’s dress and ruby slippers. There is the last remaining version of Bruce, the shark from Jaws. They have the full size backdrop two stories tall of Mount Rushmore from the classic North by Northwest. There is the only remaining of the three Rosebud sleds from Citizen Kane. I saw the typewriter that Psycho was written on, and tons of amazing costumes.

I was very impressed by the Toy Story Zoetrope. You can see a Youtube video but it is nothing like seeing it live. It is large and made up of 214 Toy Story maquettes on a turntable. It starts spinning and they turn on the strobe lights (a better solution than the traditional slit) and suddenly the characters come to life. It is something you really want to see in person to fully appreciate.

There are several places in Los Angeles that offer exceptional open air views. One of the best views is from the Getty museum. On a clear day you can see all the way to the ocean. I very much like the view from the Griffith Observatory. On famed Mullholland Drive you can get a great view of the Hollywood sign and the surrounding city from the Hollywood Bowl Lookout. I am now adding the Academy Museum’s Dolby Family Terrace. You cross the glass (but slightly opaque so not quite as terrifying) Barbara Streisand Bridge to what is basically the roof of the David Geffen Theater. It has a domed glass roof but is otherwise open air and has a great view of Hollywood and beyond.

The view from the top of the Geffen Theater. You can zoom in and see the little white dot on top of the ridge line next to the gold building near the center of the picture. That is Griffith Observatory.

The white building near the center of the picture is the SAG-Aftra building, where Belle used to work. Between here and the SAG building is the La Brea Tarpit, where Belle would often stroll during her lunch break.

The Island

Posted on by Geoff

 

Coming up the week after next I will get back to working on The Relentless. The next sequence takes place on the island, which is a privately owned island used as part of a weapons smuggling operation. The idea was one of the earliest for the story, beginning with having Wal get his hand chopped off in a humorous sequence. Making that funny should be fun as it is also quite dark.

I needed a facility for the hand chopping sequence, so I set it on a remote island. Once I had the island concept I started thinking about other things that could happen on the island. I had to get them their, and that led to creating the character of Captain Lia Purdie who becomes their regular pilot. I wanted an exciting way to physically get onto the island, so that led to the freefall drop for Barry and the wingsuit sequence with Maggie and Grace.

I had come up with two sequences for Grace, and once I fleshed out what would happen on the island I realized those could take place there. Here Grace uses James Bond to talk down a nervous security guard, and she encounters a younger version of General Williams which provides a little more backstory about the two of them.

A lot happens on the island. After that is the tower sequence, after which the characters begin to figure out what is actually going on, and the big finale in the evil villain’s lair. I am close enough to the finish line that I can see it quite clearly, and I am anxious to get back to work on it.

What’s Up with Us

I will finish the non-fiction book I have been focusing on next week, take a few days off for my birthday, and then back to working on The Relentless. The non-fiction book will come in at about 150,000 words, which is roughly 300 pages.

A lot has been going on. I had to deal with the death of my father and put in a lot of time helping my elderly mother. Belle has been getting a lot more shows as things get better Covid-wise, and I am helping her develop new material as she expands into new markets. She is finally starting to get some traction breaking into the wedding market.

We made a lot of progress on building the workshop. It has C&C, laser cutting, 3D printing, and tons of tools, many of which came from my father’s workshop, and some of those came from my grandfather’s fix-it shop. In terms of hardware, we are now better supplied than some hardware stores.

Our first major project with the workshop is redoing our green screen studio. By making a few adjustments we can make it a little bigger. We are building a new flatter support for the green screen, and building a cabinet and setting up a monitor for a teleprompter and another monitor so she can see what she is doing.

Speaking of monitors, I am trying to figure out the best 4K monitor to go with my new AMD based Ryzen 7 5700G with a Geforce RTX 3060 graphics card. Not the top of the line I had hoped for, but still many many times more powerful than my older system. It was quite challenging to get and I had to jump through a few hoops but it is now actually on my desk.

The second studio we are setting up is one for motion capture. We will be able to do face, hands and full body. With the power of real-time ray-tracing, I will be able to do live puppeteering of 3D characters, which will get me back to doing some type of performing, which I really miss but my condition makes difficult.