Monthly Archive for September, 2011

Principal Animation for Your Face is a Saxophone Episode 2 is Complete!

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 6:36 PM on September 30, 2011 in Filmmakery. 2 Comments Tags: your face is a saxophone. Short URL: http://plankhead.com/vB

Phew.

About ten minutes ago, I placed the final keyframe for the second episode of Your Face is a Saxophone. I am too exhausted to pick out some kind of image with which to illustrate this occasion.

Left to do:

Rendering
Commercials
Editing
Sound editing

All of this will need to be done by October 12th, as I’m screening the episode on October 14th at FurFright. At the very least, it will be a rough cut. I’m hoping that I can make it final in time.

That’ll be the first semi-public showing. For the first public premiere, I’m going to look into screening it at Occupy Wall Street sometime after the weekend of FurFright.

There are some fundraising- and promotion-related things I need to do before the episode will be online. This will be on, um, oh, what the hell…

Your Face is a Saxophone — Episode 2 will be online October 28th, 2011 at
6:00 PM EST

There. Okay. Ugh. I need something extremely alcoholic right now. Brb drunk.

Yahoo Mail is Censoring Emails About #OccupyWallStreet (UPDATE: Yahoo responds)

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 9:29 PM on September 19, 2011 in Commentary. 3 Comments Tags: censorship, lolwut, occupy wall street, yahoo. Short URL: http://plankhead.com/kf

Any time you try to send an email from Yahoo Mail with the text string “occupywallst.org” in it, it will be blocked from being sent due to “suspicious activity”.

What.

I first heard about this from this post, and as you can see in the video, I can confirm that it is, indeed, happening. David, our Chief Operating Plankhead, also confirms that this is happening from his Yahoo account.

UPDATE: Another good example courtesy of slybster. This one’s a bit clearer:

UPDATE 9/20 2:56 PM EST: @Yahoo tweeted:

Thanks to @YahooMail users & @ThinkProgress for catching problem w/ #Occupywallst.org mail. Prob is fixed, but there may be residual delays.

I figured it would end up being explained as a bug. But that’s a really weird bug. I think we need more of an explanation, Yahoo.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 3:00 PM on September 18, 2011 in Crosspostery. 0 Comments Tags: activismism, economicry, geololitics, occupy wall street. Short URL: http://plankhead.com/Kg

Yes, this is quite literally a photo of democracy

My latest post on Falkvinge&Co is a reflection on the first day of Occupy Wall Street.

On the day the occupation of Wall Street began, one chant from the crowd stood out for me: “This is what democracy looks like!” In six simple words, it summed up what this revolutionary action was all about.

Continue reading at Falkvinge&Co on Infopolicy

Zombies, Dude! — An Experiment in Flashmob Filmmaking

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 9:42 PM on September 11, 2011 in Filmmakery. 0 Comments Tags: my stupid ideas, participatory culture, technical jargon, video. Short URL: http://plankhead.com/MI

This is the result of the first prototype of a workshop I’m planning to call “Flashmob Filmmaking”. The idea is to get a large group of people together to make a film — from pre-production to post — in two hours. Writing the script, shooting the footage, and cutting it together, all in that short span of time.

When this idea hit me, I envisioned it as something to do at some kind of fandom convention — a place full of regular people who’d be interested in doing something creative. But I needed to make sure it worked first, so I tried it at a party.

As you can see, it definitely worked. For the most part. We did go slightly over two hours total, so I’ll need to refine the formula to keep things moving along.

And I need to figure out a better solution for shooting footage that can be edited right away, without wasting any time to capture, transfer, or transcode. We shot this on a camera hooked up to Adobe OnLocation on my MacBook, and carried the laptop around along with the camera. Then, I put it into Target Disk Mode and connected it to my larger and more capable iMac, and used ClipWrap to make the footage editable into Final Cut. Unfortunately, the process of Target Disking and ClipWrapping took up a good five minutes — which is fast compared to capture or transcoding, but still too long for this purpose. I’ll probably need to get a camera which shoots to SD cards in a QuickTime-native format (or maybe ClipWrappable, since that process only took about a minute; I can live with that).