Dave's Blog

“Gives us the nice bright colors,  Gives us the greens of summers, Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day.” -Paul Simon from the song Kodachrome

Unfortunately, when I started scanning my Dad’s Kodachrome slides from our trip to California in 1967,  I discovered Kodachrome’s dirty little secret.  At first I thought the slides had been kept in a filthy environment, but no, it turns out that when Kodak processed them, they put  a final coating of shellac on the slides to protect them, and that over the past 40 years, that thin layer has shrunk into clumps that look like dirt.

Clumps of shellac on Kodachrome slides look like dirt

The Minolta Quick-Scan 35 slide scanner I used does a pretty good job, but it turns out that the newer slide scanners have a special Infrared detector that can help automatically get rid of the clumpy shellac, dirt, scratches, etc.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to a fancier scanner, so I ended up using PhotoShop’s “heal” brush waaaay more than I ever expected to.   Nevertheless, 300 slides later, I ended up with a pretty good little slide show of our family vacation.  As you can see above and below, the results were worth it!

The color-corrected clump-removed final image

Recently while catching up on the MoonViews LOIRP (mentioned previously here I noticed that project head Dennis Wingo had given a presentation to the Mountain View Hacker Dojo.

Freeduino class at Hacker Dojo

If you’ve not heard of a Dojo before, it is a Japanese word meaning literally “Place of the Way”.  The term is usually associated with places where young people learn the martial arts, but it can be any place where “The Way” to do something can be learned if you’re willing to spend some time there.

Several years ago I was following the progress of a group of engineers who set up TechShop, a membership-based workshop in Mountain View. I am envious of that too! But now that I see how easy it would be to set up a Hacker Dojo I think it would be an outstanding idea for the Tri-Cities! I wish there had been a place like that available when I was a kid! What a perfect way to help kids channel some of their creative energies into useful projects that teach them positive things about technology! Anybody else interested?

I’ve always thought the term Rock Opera described two things that belonged together only in the most twisted of contexts.  Add to that a narcissistic “hero” called White Gold and place him in a whitewashed world called Milquarious,  and apparently you’ve got something the California Milk Producers Board can get behind to propel the “Got Milk?” campaign into the annals of advertising - um, footnotes?  I’m still scratching my head about how my ancient analog animation computer, Scanimate, got sucked into the Vortex.  Literally! Seriously! I’m not making this up!

It seems the look of  ”analog light” - that glowy chromic warmth that characterized much of the computer animation seen on TV in the seventies and eighties - is back in demand again.  It would also seem that all the digital wizardry of modern-day imaging software can’t quite manage to get the same “look”. I guess its like the audio afficionadoes and their love of vacuum tube amps.

Thus it was that I ended up spending three days recently shooting hours of  glowy, warping, swirling animation so that when White Gold and his buddy get sucked into “the Vortex”, they fall through a sea of high-definition Scanimation before landing on… wherever it is.

Joe Mullen adjusts Scanimate (Click the pic to see more)

The Scanimate was never a high-resolution machine, due largely to the limitations of the NTSC Television standard, and to some sixties-vintage pickup cameras.  Enter the RED Digital Cinema Camera,  the latest whiz-bang technology transforming Hollywood from celluloid to digital moviemaking.  Capable of  shooting at up to 4,000 pixel images (about 12.5 Megapixels in consumer digital photo speak) at up to 120 frames per second,  this expensive little toy makes it possible for my old Scanimate to take on a new life in the digital world. And here in East Tennessee, Frank Weeks at Digital Cinema South just happens to have one!

By way of background,  I worked in Hollywood in the eighties at a company that had two of these strange machines.  The obscure company that built them only produced eight of them, and for about ten years, the airwaves were filled with “electronic animation” they produced.  Everything from the sizzling spiraling patterns that numbers and letters transformed into on “Sesame Street”, to the guy’s expanding stomach (”IndiGESTion”) for Alka-Seltzer, to the Death Star sequence in the first Star Wars movie - all were produced on Scanimate.  As far as I know, I have the only remaining working machine.

Joe Mullen, who does motion graphics for Buck.tv recently flew out from LA to supervise the work for three days. Joe said: “The cool thing about Scanimate is that the CRT monitor gives off this kind of analog light that is very hard to simulate digitally.” (see the video below)

So as I understand it, being only peripherally involved in this whole campaign,  “The Battle for Milquarious” officially launches October 5,  so if you want to see what a Rock Opera about Milk - with vintage analog animation - looks like be sure to check it out!
I’m not making this up! Really!

NASA held a press conference today,  on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
They took great pains to explain exactly how the video from the moon was converted and relayed around the world. And they attempted to explain how the original data tapes of the slowscan data had been lost, and probably erased. They discussed and showed some of the work Lowry Digital has been doing to clean up the existing video tapes of the historic footage.  Lowry is famous for having done similar restoration work on many of Hollywood’s greatest classic films,  many of which suffered similar losses of original material.   I was amazed Continue reading "Ummm, Houston, you erased WHAT?" →