Of tapes and broken glass.
20 November 2011
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Pretty much every day for the past few weeks we've been told that some builders, coming to replace the front windows in our house, were imminent. Finally today, at 9:00am, on the one morning that I had turned my alarm clock off and made a conscious decision to sleep in, they showed up. One of the first things they did was to knock my video projector off of the shelf that it sits on in the living room. Luckily, aside from one scuffed up corner, it seems to be fine. I was planning on taking it with me to studio today anyway, to do some testing for my final video project, so I quickly removed it from the scene. I hope that they've taken better care of my bedroom, though the only easily breakable thing (aside from my big glass desk, which should be well enough out of their way) is an Ikea lamp that I already broke a couple of years ago. And I really should replace that anyway, I got a glass sliver from it last night.
Half way between my house and my studio, which is only about a three minute walk, is a bagel shop. The smell of bagels is seductive, although I seem to get an upset stomach about one out of every three or four times that I eat their tofu cream cheese.1 So most of the time I just keep walking. But today I got a bagel and grapefruit juice, and was going to go without coffee, but began getting a headache almost immediately. So after setting up my projector I went back out for some caffeine. I've only had about half a cup though, I'm still sipping on it now at 6:30.
The test for which I wanted to use my projector was not as successful as I would have hoped. The plan was to project some scrolling text across myself, in the green screen room, video tape2 that, and key out the green, to be replaced with some abstract footage that I'm going to shoot out in the world. Unfortunately, my projector is not really bright enough to illuminate me if I'm already well lit enough to stand out off of the green backdrop. It still might work, but it's going to take some tweaking.
1. I don't know if this is because it gets contaminated with normal dairy cream cheese, which my system can't process after all these years of veganism, or if it's because the tofu really should be kept colder than the dairy and goes off more quickly, or what.
2. I tried to think of some other word to use. As we don't really "tape" much of anything anymore. My old video camera was a digital-8, which did record onto tape. I should try to figure out some way to get all that old footage off of those tapes and onto a hard disk.