So a couple years ago my Oregonian (I say that because he now calls it home) friend Finn comes to visit. He finances, devises and builds this grand green screen project for Left Brain Films that never really got together. I still have a ton of green fluorescent painted foam core boards in my closet, as a matter of fact. This is incredibly disheartening, as the maiden voyage of this new and improved modular green screen system was to be a 4-person lightsaber fight involving Josh, Finn, Carrie and myself. The green screen was needed to provide a conceptually infinite canvas for us to fight in, because we had no ideal place to shoot such an animal. I still have storyboards and ideas for this fight that I hope to scan and place on the sort of ultimate-edition LBF DVD I'm working on.

Finn is the only person other than myself who ever got a copy of the existing, not-so-ultimate LBF DVD, the data components of which have been scattered and disorganized - they were once all gathered together, for the making of that DVD, but hard drive issues and space constraints caused some files (though mercifully backed up -somewhere-) to be lost, and others to get separated from the group, because rendered video files do not adhere to the buddy system at all well. I am trying to reorganize all these files, and collect a ton of other materials, for a truly definitive (read: exhaustive) reflection on the existence of LBF.

But, back to my point. Finn got a copy after God knows how long, because I had finally finished the post production on the movie we shot as sort of a consolation prize, so he could go back to Oregon still feeling like he'd done something cool with lightsabers, even though mainly it was talking about them while working on a dead end green screen. I wanted to make this video widely available on the LBF web site, but it was somewhat long, it was widescreen (wooooo!) and I'd done a careful enough rotoscoping job that I didn't want the video to be postage-stamp sized. It begged to be shown off.

After fighting for probably 3 days with it, the best render I could accomplish at the time was a 136MB QuickTime movie. Obviously, this was not a good fit for general web site traffic. I didn't even make it available on my home web server, because it didn't exist yet.

What a difference two years makes. I now have a 720x480 video in excellent quality, just a little noise in the green areas, that clocks in at a mindboggling 3 and a half megs. Now, 720x480 is not true 16x9, which is the aspect ratio the video was filmed in, and I cannot seem to pursuade Windows Media to let me do that. The MPEG2s that go on the DVD take orders nicely, so the DVD presentation is a sparkling garden of proper widescreen delight. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. You know, once it exists.

Still, I'll take this minor aspect ratio annoyance in stead with shaving 135MB off my distributable file size.

So, 2 years too late, and with many apologies to Finn and cat lovers, behold - Russel the Cat.

No animals were harmed or even involved in the filming of this movie. It was planned and shot in about 30 minutes, so it's not like it's Duality or anything. Get off my back. At least ours is funny.

Though not as funny as yesterday's Rob Corddry movie. Man, that still cracks me up.

I sat pawing through Craigslist postings while tweaking different encodes of this video, and I had vastly underestimated what amateur cameramen get paid. We'll see if those emails go anywhere.

Alright, enough of me for now.

Oh, I guess one bit of geeking out. REASON 3 IS OUT!

WATCH TRAILER AND WEEP!

HOLY BALLS.

This means there will be new music made especially for the new LBF DVD. Mastering suites make me a happy panda.

[if i may be so presumptive as to use the term]