Le Maitre Neutron Hazer Maintain

If the Neutron is running and not displaying any error codes via the LED at the rear of the unit it most likely just needs to be adjusted.

First make sure the air pump is running and that the small plastic bottle on the same side as the heat tube is not full of fluid, if it is remove, clean, dry, and reinstall.

If you are comfortable doing so, remove the side cover (10 screws) to gain access to the PCB, just above the fan at the center bottom of the PCB there is a blue potentiometer w/ a white center, use a small flat  screwdriver and in small increments turn the pot to adjust haze output, too far on way or the other will slow/increase the fluid pump and cause no output or cause too much fluid and spit fluid with the haze.

 

 

Those are the notes from Le Maitre themselves on how to get our hazer to behave properly.

Foley For You

Recording the RC car.

So today I bought an radio controlled car. And not for the 9-year-old-boy reason you think I did. No. 

We've needed something to make robot sounds for quite some time now. And the dude at Pilotage Hobby came up with with this RC car as a relatively inexpensive way to get servo sounds. 

The picture above shows the car on its back, on top of a music stand, being recorded by a Rode NT1. 

The servos seem to change in quality over time. We'll see how it all works out. 

Tomorrow will be robot Foley day in the Pandora Machine, that's for sure.

Redbox Android

You know what my take-away was from this negative review of Android Insurrection?

The movie is in RedBox y'all!

Big ol' tip of the hat to Tom "sunglass-wearing cocky bastard" Rowen.

Foley Kontakt

Alejandro Cabrera released a free Native Instruments Kontakt instrument of Foley footsteps. You launch the Kontakt player and then you select "indoors" or "outdoors" and then the type of shoes. Could you use a wider selection of each? Of course. But it's free. Is it worth paying for? Yes. Do you have to? No.

Signo makes a number of different Foley instruments for Kontakt too.
Note that you need the full version of Kontakt for these instruments to work for you (at least for more than about 15 minutes).
I haven't actually tried these in a post-production environment but it seems like you could really do a lot by "playing" your Foley on a keyboard. Frequently one is "playing" footsteps by "walking" with shoes in one's hands so it's not that far out a concept. It's certainly worth a try.
(Kontakt is a software "instrument" you play with a MIDI keyboard or similar.)

Day 14

So apparently at some point I said "Doesn't there need to be a prologue to this movie?" And apparently the answer was "yes".

Virginia Logan takes one for the team.

So now we have a new opening. Steven J. Niles re-wrote a terrible outline I'd created. Then we brought in Anouk and Kire.

Kire Tosevski rockin' the post-apocalypse with my sherpa sunglasses.

Then I got the bright idea that Anouk should play the thing mostly in French and dance around. I did a little dance for her to show her what I meant. She looked at me like I was insane.

The Queen of Mars did that awesome Yellow Sign tattoo on Anouk Dutruit.

Robot 43 (Maduka Steady) comes to the rescue.

We shot entirely in the basement of my building. I'm so lucky to have such an understanding super.

I'm just amazed at how inherently limited the color palette is. It has something to do with the way I suck the color out on camera but still, the art direction is perfect for us.

I just wanted a shot with this kind of depth in this sequence.