MAY 2023 Project Report Music, No Commentary

In May, I got back to working on shots for "Lunatics!"

As a warm-up, I created some of the billboard crowd panels that I needed for finishing up shots in the launch preparations sequence.

These were also among the files that I had to recover from Git problems.

I started work on the (re-)animation of the Soyuz pod-staging shot. This shot was previously done with a rig that limited how the pods could travel away from the vehicle. This has since been corrected, and I needed to re-do the shot with the new rig.

The Soyuz also has decal and texture detailing now.

This is always stressful for me, because I liked the old shot, so I'm sort of competing with myself.

I discovered a new collection of film and television stock sound effects that are apparently in the public domain, which would mean we can use them.

There are a couple of anticipated uses of a brief "national anthem" signature to be mixed into some future episodes, so I also collected some public domain recordings of several different national anthem instrumentals to be edited, taken from Wikimedia Commons.

I made further edits to the "New Contributor Guide" on the website, including some project history.

My previous video-embedding tests for LunaGen used 3rd party videos which have since become unavailable, breaking the test. It was always my intent to replace those, so I did that this month.

It's the first time I've uploaded videos to Vimeo in over a year, and the first time in several years for YouTube. I have to say, the experience reinforced my decision to use PeerTube primarily from here on out (I will still upload key videos to Vimeo for the next year, at least, though0.

Using Git and Git LFS for storing and versioning production files has turned out to be a disaster, to be quite frank. Among the tragic outcomes, I somehow managed to get LFS placeholder files into a conflict with their antecedants, resulting in Git saving files to disk which combined them. This seems to have only happened with SVG files, but that's a lot of the artwork for the project!

Fortunately, it's not too hard to unwind this damage, but I needed to write a script to crawl the source tree and fix them all.

This month was our deadline for principle photography on "Field Trip", due to student commitments, and we made a brave try at it. We visited some more possible filming locations and the students worked on a "retro-low-budget-sci-fi" set for it. However, in the end we missed the deadline and the director had to bow out of the project.

So "Field Trip" is on hiatus until we can make new filming plans with new crew. That might happen next year.

And as usual, I had some construction and maintenance work to do.

HIGHLIGHTS: 00:00 Summary 00:15 "Lunatics!" - Crowd Panels 00:23 "Lunatics!" - Soyuz Podstaging Animation 01:20 A video template for presentations 02:18 Sound effects collection from Archive.Org / FreeSound.org 04:10 Reviewing national anthem recordings from Wikipedia 04:18 New Contributor Guide 04:27 LunaGen Dev: Embedding Videos from YouTube, Vimeo, & PeerTube 05:42 Bunsen Dev: Tested reverse-engineering configuration 05:51 Script: Recover files damaged by a Git LFS self-conflicts 10:45 "Field Trip" - Location Scouting (Creek Location) 11:11 "Field Trip" - Set Building 11:33 "Field Trip" - Boom microphone for location dialog 11:47 Studio interior work 12:02 Shed lighting / electrical 12:50 Music Credits / Support URLs