late

YESTERDAY:

It marked the first day of rehearsals. Preparation was needed before we started.

Like any good morning, I awoke to the sounds of Robert’s voice downstairs. He had stopped by to drop off the projector mounts, the projector and the mac mini. He will be back later to drop off some 3chip cameras.

The mounts were still in their raw form, so Steve applied a layer of black spraypaint to cover them up. We also had to widen the mounting holes just a little because they were too close together. 4 1x2 wood pieces were cut to place between the projector and the projector mount in order to raise them up an inch. This allowed for the power plug to be plugged in. The wood pieces were painted and the mounts got another coat too. They were left to dry.

While inside, Ashley practiced and edited some of the music. Steve finished up adding closedcaptioning functionality to the video syncing software. All of our “popsongs” will have closed captioning running, which is controlled by me using a footpedal, one word at a time.

Tina arrived a little into the afternoon. She has been working on props/imagery/generalcoherence.

With the paint dry, the mounts+projectors+Macs were brought to the practice room and set up. It took a little work, but the two projectors finally lined up. My laptop was setup to control the two minis. Video set up was complete.

Steve started setting up the all the audio tech stuff. Mic checks were run, and then Steve showed us the wonders of a little black box he had. Turning the volume up, and starting to create some feedback, Steve pressed a button and the blackbox eliminated the feedback. This was done several times to different mics and at different volumes. Ear protection, consisting of two fingers, was worn.

We heard news that Aaron was not gonna to be able to make the rehearsal tonight, seeing how he had just drove back from a gig in Chicago, and he was feeling quite under the weather.

So, I stepped in, and we did another runthrough of the script. This time we were mic’d and it was recorded so we could play it back over and over, and grind the lines into our heads. After that, or maybe before it, we had some amazing pizza from Donatos.

I started to edit the newly recorded script while the musicians, Steve, Tina and Ashley started to rehearse a bit.

When I was done, we did a couple full-run-throughs of one of the songs with the video, subtitles, and music. It was quite hard for the first run to get the subtitles exactly right. But now I have the song memorized for the most part (only 6 run-throughs later) and it was getting easier at the end.

More video ideas were discussed for different scenes. Videos that were going to be mixed were added and saved for the different scenes.

Ashley and I threw in the towel and went to bed, while Tina and Steve continued discussing and finalizing video for scenes.