A New Writing Exercise and an Old Video – 2022 March 6

I’m a bit stumped by my next writing exercise. My last video still isn’t finished. I made some progress though. It has been a learning experience.

The Script group had their 100th meeting (I joined about meeting 24). We had a lot of discussion and so we ran out of time to do the writing exercise. The title was "The Dread of the Daring Rocketeer". I haven't done anything on it yet, other than come up with name for the rocketeer: Don Brown.

I showed the script group the first version of "The Desperation of the Wretched Senator.” They had a lot of suggestions. Mostly they felt it was too slow. I went back and electronically sped up the dialogue. Then I adjusted the pitch so that the characters didn't sound like Mickey Mouse breathing Helium. I eliminated some of the pauses in conversation. I sped up the walking as well. I can't do that in NAWMAL, so I had to do it in the video editor.

I wanted to add a final shot that I couldn't do in NAWMAL, so I used Blender instead. It is only a short shot, but it has already taken me more time than the entire rest of the video, and I'm not done yet. It is looking good. It has been a learning experience, and I've picked up a few tricks.

I removed Blender 3.0 and went back to Blender 2.79. The main reason was that the new version was slow. I had installed a software fix so it would work with my graphics card. That worked, but I think that may be why it is so slow. It may be time to look at a new computer. I read that the best choice for people doing video on their computer is to buy a gaming computer. I’m likely to procrastinate on that for a while yet.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Blender, Old Filmmakers, and a New Video – 2022 February 27

This week I installed Blender version 3.0, joined the Older Filmmakers ZOOM meeting, and started work on a video based on my writing exercise "The Desperation of the Wretched Senator.”

Blender

I got version 3.0 of Blender working this week. I found a software workaround on-line and installed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PgDDIxXUbE  That did the trick.

I watched a bunch of videos about Blender 3 and Unreal Engine 5 on YouTube. They both look like they can let me do the kind of videos I’d like to make. I’ve used Blender a fair bit in the past, so I decided to start with it.

I watched a few “how to use” videos and tried out some of the techniques they showed. There is a lot more I need to master before I can switch to it for my animated videos. I haven't figured out how to get it to do the fancy character animation and talking that I need to do that.

"The Desperation of the Wretched Senator”

I don’t like to do stories that are overtly political. But, with a title like this, that is kind of hard to avoid.

I posted the audio version last week. I hadn’t intended to make a video but changed my mind on the spur of the moment. It only took me about a half hour to produce the first version of the video using NAWMAL. Since then, I’ve spent about 3 or 4 hours tweaking it. I adjusted the camera angle, facial expressions, and timings. I ad some fun creating pictures for the senator to put on his wall.

The voices bothered me. I’d done both the male character voices and used VoiceMaker for the female character. The female character only has two brief lines, so I didn’t change that. The two male voices were just too similar. I rerecorded the “Gentleman’s” voice and dropped it into the program.

The video is pretty much the way I want it now, except I want to add one or to brief scenes outside the senator’s office building. I’m not able to do that in NAWMAL, so I am going to do those with Blender.

I tried to create the scene for "The Desperation of the Wretched Senator” using Blender version 3. It worked so differently from what I was familiar with that I struggled to do anything. In the end, I switched back to Blender version 2.79. I have both 3.0 and 2.79 installed on my computer. At least I knew how to do simple things with that. I’m not done yet, but I did make progress.

Older Filmmakers Club

Monday was another old filmmakers club session. I felt it went well and I think we helped at least one person connect with someone to help her make her film become real.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Title Generator Improvements and a Writing Exercise - 2022 February 20

I did another upgrade to my random title generator and posted another writing exercise.

Random Title Generator Improvements

People have asked me to change my random title generator so you can see all the titles you've generated so far. It was only showing the last one generated. I tried several times to implement that, but without success. This week I tried again, and I got it to work.

The main problem was that the webpage uses JavaScript, and I'd never bothered to learn the JavaScript language. I just did things by trial and error as I needed them. This time I was a bit more systematic about it. The main issue was that I didn't understand how you output the results from a function to the webpage. I had copied the code to do that from an example and since it worked, I never bothered to find out how it worked. Once I found out how to do that, it came together quickly.

The method I used to create the list of titles was to concatenate each new title followed by a line break code to the front of a text string. The webpage then displays the text string. I talked to a friend of mine, who has a bit more computer programming savvy than me. He wasn’t familiar with JavaScript but did have some useful questions. He asked if there was a limit to how long a string could be in JavaScript. Some languages have a fairly small limit. I investigated to see if that could be a problem.

It turns out there is a limit to string length, which differs from one browser to another. In Firefox it is 1,073,741,822 characters and in Chrome it is 536,870,888 characters. In a sample of titles I generated, the average title length was 44 characters. That means that Firefox can have 24,403,223 titles before you hit the limit and Chrome could handle 12,201,611 titles. I estimated that if you generated a new title every 10 seconds and worked 8 hours a day with no breaks, it would take 23 years to reach the limit in Firefox and 11 ½ years to hit the limit in Chrome. I concluded that string length wasn’t likely to be an issue.

We talked about a few other potential problems that could come up with the generator when other people use it. He suggested that there wasn't much to gain by trying to fix every possible problem. He thought working on the word lists would be a better use of my time. I agree. My goal is to get up to a billion possible titles. I think I can do that.

“The Desperation of the Wretched Senator”

At our script writer’s group, we did a writing exercise based on the title “The Desperation of the Wretched Senator”. I’m wary about dealing with conspiracy theories and politics in my writing, but with a title like this, there isn’t a lot of other options. I recorded and posted the exercise on-line.

·         https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-desperation-of-the-wretched-senator 

 Blender and Computer Issues

They have released version 3 of Blender, so I wanted to upgrade to it. I got it installed OK, but it turned out that it doesn't support my graphics card. If I want to use it, I'll need to get a new graphics card. My computer doesn't work with Windows 11 either, so it may be time to get a new computer anyway. I'm not looking forward to doing that. I've spent a long time getting this one the way I want it.

I did find a post where some guy found a software work around for Blender and unsupported graphics card. I may try that.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog