Vampire's Thirst

New short film I am working on called Vampire's Thirst about global warming, vampires, and drinks with mistaken identities. Wrapped shooting April 23rd on the Sacramento City College campus.

Blood Mixture by End of Days Brewing Co.

 

Thanks to Gimp Users for the blood splatter tutorial. I knew that GIMP sparkle brush was good for something. Made a cool beer bottle label inspired by the HBO show True Blood. See how it turned out in the image of Blood Mixture by End of Days Brewing Company. (I am sticking with that name for all my future homebrew endevors btw).

Scarecrow fangs from Amazon.com

I bought some cool fangs from Amazon.com that fit perfectly for the vampire. The night prior to shooting, I met with my lead actor (the vampire) and gave him the fangs. Wouldn't you know it, he called out sick. So I had to drive to his house that morning to pick up the fangs and give them to my backup. (In filmmaking, always have a backup). The fangs look great I would buy them again. They even came in cool carrying cases. They don't adhere to your tooth but come with a molding agent. Once fitted, you can use them over and over again.

Film props

Overall I think I spent about $150 dollars on this film. It was a school project so can't expect much. I had to buy all the props for the drinkers such as everything for a bloody mary. At least now I have plenty of vodka to go around. Should have the video edited and complete with special effects in about two weeks. Go to http://www.vampires-thirst.com.

Browsing For Web Design Inspiration

Just for some ideas, I like to browse around to see what other's have done with creating web sites for particular topics. I may start working on a new website with a musician and I am searching for inspiration. Fortunately, I follow a number of independent music acts on Twitter. So it was real easy for me to find good sites for examples. 

From what I could see right away, most of the artists use Bandcamp or Soundcloud as their main web presence for their music. I think that is good. Others just use Facebook which I don't like. You can upload videos and links but FB does not seem very well geared for music. Plus people get easily distracted on FB so your message or product will get lost.

Others use Wordpress or some other blogging platform. What is great about Wordpress is that you can incorporate themes and it seems pretty easy to use. Originally, I thought about using Wordpress to create my own blog but as you can see, I went with Blogger. Wordpress is good for those who are not web developers because you can update your content without having to contact someone such as myself for help, an another web developer, or having to learn web coding languages to update yourself. I think a Wordpress site would be a good way to go but I still need to research how Wordpress would treat audio files. Here are some examples of some musician's Wordpress sites I looked at:

http://benmyersonline.com/  <-- I don't like this site but it's functional.

http://www.evertheory.com/ <-- I like this one but I think you should see the music for listening to right away on the home page.

A few other artists use a good old fashioned website without the additional blogging interface. Here's some that I like:

http://www.empathytestmusic.com/ <-- I like this site because the music is right on the homepage. Plus it looks like the music is hosted on Bandcamp's server so that saves money with web hosting (which is usually pretty cheap anyways). However I have no clue how they coded it because all I see is a bunch of JavaScript and very little HTML and CSS. But I could do something similar.

http://seasonofghosts.com/ <-- This is a really nice website. Very well put together but it seems really big.

I am still waiting for feedback on this web design, so we shall see.

Metallica on Weeklong for Craig Ferguson's Last Stand

These days, I don’t care about Metallica or The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and the host's departure (well maybe I do a little). Back when I worked nights, I used to watch all late night talk shows. Nowadays I am in bed before the 11 o’clock news so I don’t watch The Late Show, The Tonight Show, much less The Late Late Show.

Come to think of it... I don't watch much TV in my spare time, seeing that I work in television I guess I am sick of it by the end of the day. However, when I read in The Hollywood Reporter that Metallica will be doing a weeklong stint to help send Craig Ferguson off, I quickly imagined what songs they would play for each of the five nights.

To start off with, I thought it would be badass if Metallica set the mood with the downright heavy as hell, “One.” Shit it’s a Monday night, we’re in the mood for something dark with a touch of speed metal.

 

"One" is a bit of a throwback so Tuesday night Metallica should play something the tweens in the audience are aware of. Maybe “Fuel” will do the trick. Plus “Fuel” is a slamming mosh pit track and who doesn’t like that?

Wednesday Night, I would go with “King Nothing.” The blood and cum CD cover for Load, from which “King Nothing” was released is fitting for the Humpday theme.

Thursday is the descent into the weekend and Craig Ferguson's last few episodes as host of the Late Late Show. For this night we go baaaaaccckkk. Way back. To say ….And Justice for All. “Harvester of Sarrow” fits in nice here and is under-appreciated in the Metallica catalog.

For the Friday, the final night of the weeklong Metallica stint, it’s a toss-up. A choice the band should make 5 minutes before they go on stage. But my toss-up vote would go to “And Nothing Else Matters” or “Unforgiven.”

Again it’s a toss-up. What tracks would you choose? We’ll see what the band actually plays, starting November 17th late night on CBS.

Another Update to My Website

Homepage with slideshow, crumpled-ripped paper.

Super Busy! Despite all that I have going on, I managed to update my website yet again. After the last update, I was not content with the homepage, footer, about page, and wanted a slideshow. So I did those things, go check it out: http://gabrielohhmedia.com/.

The homepage needed to show off my graphic art skills and I thought it would be really cool to have some crumpled/torn up paper with text on it. First, I tried making a graphic with regular HTML paragraphs superimposed on the graphic. I hard a hard time with that so I included the text on the graphic itself. I made the crumpled up torn paper in The GIMP. Love The GIMP! I used a tutorial you can find here.

In addition, the homepage needed a slideshow, because nowadays, every homepage has a slideshow. To accomplish this, I borrowed a bit of JavaScript from a class I had last May. I just replaced the pictures and tweaked some of the timing. Worked out great. I did find that the images where taking a long time to load so I had to resize the pictures in The GIMP. Again, love GIMP!

I felt that the footer was really boring. I see footers on websites that are cooler than the content of the main article. So I wanted to spruce up my footer. Fresh out of ideas I figured I could use my header graphic, which is just a picture of me, Warholized. I flipped in the image and added some gradient. Nice.

Unintentionally, I changed the font. I wanted a different font for the crumpled up paper on the homepage. Like typewriter style. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to superimpose my HTML text over the graphic, so I changed the article fonts to monospace. This changed the font to monospace on every page so I decided to stick with it. Plus monospace is available on every computer, making it easy on the download.

The about page, the page that explains me, is still needing some work. Maybe another picture of me somewhere. I added a gradient to the article content so as you read down to the bottom, the colors get darker. Well work on that later.

Updated Website

The New Web Page Showing My Web Work

Took some time today to update my website. I added a page to show off my web development and design work. Go take a look, then hire me :)

My plans for later include re-coding the graphics galleries in the graphics page, but I think I am OK with how it looks for now. By re-coding, I mean incorporating a picture gallery from jQuery. Something that can replace some of the CSS3 visibility and hovers that I am using.

Luckily, the most recent Firefox update seemed to fix some of the CSS3-related errors I was seeing in that browser only. The errors I was experiencing were coming from the visibility property and hover selector used in the stylesheet. The errors where making some of the images huge and popup off screen when the user hovered over the image. Again, this occurred in Firefox only. Now everything seems fine. However, I will have to try the graphics page in other browsers later.

Construction Update, Columbus Day, The Sopranos, and 9/11

Light at the end of the tunnel. Actually the rough opening to a gable vent in my new office/garage.

So I have been taking a break from the web development and graphic design game as well as GabrielOhhMedia.com while I continue my office construction project. August was  a very busy month! As you can see, I did not post anything on Blogger this past August. The good news is I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

My goal is to have construction complete by October 13th, 2014 or Columbus Day. Speaking of, Columbus Day reminds me of one of my favorite episodes of The Sopranos, Christopher. This has to be among the most clumsy episodes out of The Soprano's six seasons. Check out a clip:


Here the crew is sitting in front of Satriale's when Bacala states, "Listen to this shit...", and begins reading a story out loud from the newspaper about a group of Native Americans planning to protest during the Columbus Day parade. Silvio proclaims, "it's Anti-Italian-American discrimination!" Which I thought was funny. In reference to the freshness of 9/11, Patsy Parisi exclaims, "Some fucking balls, bad-mouthing America, especially now." Takes you back to when 9/11 was still an open wound in American consciousness, especially on this day of the post. I think everyone was taking into question their own American-ness at the time and not willing to accept any kind of criticism.

Anyways, should everything go well I should be done with construction by Columbus Day. After that, maybe I can take some time to watch this episode somewhere in deeper reflection.

Using Inkscape to draw floor plans

When designing a space or trying to get a top view of a room or building, there are many ways to draw a floorplan. The easiest method is to simply draw the layout on paper. However, if you want to share the floor plan with someone else such as a contractor, prospective tenant, or property owner, you need to make a legible digital floor plan. Being fond of the open source way of life, Inkscape is an excellent tool to use for drawing a floor plan. If you are unfamiliar with Inkscape, it can take some time getting used to. However, within a few hours, any novice can have an intermediate grasp of it.

Recently I have begun a repair/remodel of a garage that I am turning into an office. See my previous blog post about the progress on the office. In preparation for the electrical work, I drew up a floor plan in Inkscape showing where I want the outlets and lights. This will help when I create the circuits because most of my measurements are already drawn out to scale. To draw to scale in Inkscape, you can change the units to feet. (or inches, meters, millimeters, centimeters, pixels) by selecting File, Document Properties.

Example of my office electrical plan. The blue lines are guide markers.

Should you need to print your drawing, you need to scale the drawing down to the size of the paper you plan to print to. First, select the area you would like to print using the Select and Transform Objects (or the mouse arrow on the left side in Inkscape's main interface). Then select File, Export Bitmap.

Change the export area to Selection. In Inkscape's main interface (the place where you draw), change the units to px (pixels). In an 8x11 piece of paper, at 300 ppi, there are 2400x3300 pixels. So after you make the selection to print, select the lock that is in the main toolbar (to lock the aspect ratio), and make your selection less than or equal to 2400x3300 pixels. Then select Export in Export Bitmap. After the export, the Export Bitmap window stays open. You can close this. Check your directory where you exported the image. Open it and print.