These three great songs have been stuck in my head the past couple of days. That’s a good thing, because usually my brain torments me with annoying songs, some of which I haven’t heard in decades. Someone needs to study just what makes a song catchy in a good or annoying way.
This Blew My Mind
Truly, we are living in the future.
Over 50 percent of The Mandalorian Season 1 was filmed using this ground-breaking new methodology, eliminating the need for location shoots entirely. Instead, actors in The Mandalorian performed in an immersive and massive 20’ high by 270-degree semicircular LED video wall and ceiling with a 75’-diameter performance space, where the practical set pieces were combined with digital extensions on the screens. Digital 3D environments created by ILM played back interactively on the LED walls, edited in real-time during the shoot, which allowed for pixel-accurate tracking and perspective-correct 3D imagery rendered at high resolution via systems powered by NVIDIA GPUs. The environments were lit and rendered from the perspective of the camera to provide parallax in real-time, as if the camera were really capturing the physical environment with accurate interactive light on the actors and practical sets, giving showrunner Jon Favreau, executive producer and director Dave Filoni, visual effects supervisor Richard Bluff, and cinematographers Greig Fraser and Barry Baz Idoine, and the episodic directors the ability to make concrete creative choices for visual effects-driven work during photography and achieve real-time in-camera composites on set.
The technology and workflow required to make in-camera compositing and effects practical for on-set use combined the ingenuity of partners such as Golem Creations, Fuse, Lux Machina, Profile Studios, and ARRI together with ILM’s StageCraft virtual production filmmaking platform and ultimately the real-time interactivity of the Unreal Engine platform.
This Is How You Shoot A Video
Surrounded by a roomful of adorable dancing young women. And you just know they all smell amazing.
Not a bad song, either. This one’s pretty old, though. I should probably see what these guys are up to now.
Top Spinster Complaints
From your favorite Victorian era magazine – Tit-Bits – the ladies provide insight regarding their unmarried status:
”Because I do not care to enlarge my menagerie of pets, and I find the animal man less docile than a dog, less affectionate than a cat, and less amusing than a monkey.”
”Because men, like three-cornered tarts, are deceitful. They are very pleasing to the eye, but on closer acquaintanceship prove hollow, and stale, consisting chiefly of puff, with a minimum of sweetness and an unconquerable propensity to disagree with one.”
Ouch.
More here.
Moe Howard On The Mike Douglas Show
From back in 1973. This is too cool.
New Strokes
I’m hearing good things about the next album, due April 10. I lost interest in The Strokes after First Impressions of Earth (2006?!), but I’d be hard-pressed to find a better debut album than Is This It.
Here’s a video for one of the new singles, “Bad Decisions.” If it sounds a lot like “Dancing With Myself,” it’s no accident. The band allegedly gave Billy Idol and Tony James songwriting credits to avoid litigation.
As near as I can tell, the message in the video is that The Strokes will be evolving musically, so if you want rehashed older albums (clones), too bad. Oh, and the band members’ faces are deepfaked onto actors playing the clones. Timely!
The Resemblance Is Uncanny
In the 80’s, Mick Jagger was clearly struggling to find a niche outside of the Stones. He should’ve tried visiting Mayberry.
Let’s NOT Gutenberg!
As you may or may not recall, the Gutenberg editor was released with WordPress 5.0 back in December, 2018. Back then, I installed the Classic Editor plugin and we stuck our Luddite bastard heads in the sand.
The last couple of months, I’ve been playing around with Gutenberg on another blog, and I’m happy to report that it’s easy to use and fairly intuitive. Enjoy this refresher video and let me know if you have any questions.
UPDATE: Errors thrown! Abort! Abort!
Calling Out Around The World
Best YouTube comment …
This has 9 times more views than the original music video.
Rachael & Vilray
Feast your ears, bastards! Rachael Price from Lake Street Dive and songwriter Vilray V. Vilray (no surname) perform new tunes written to sound like those from the 30s and 40s. I’m reminded of a line from A Clockwork Orange, which I am currently re-reading for the first time since college …
Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures!
And here’s the NPR podcast from whence I discovered them …