It's Not Easy Being Green

Made surprising progress today on the better version of the video:

A 5x7 collapsible chromakey screen arrived at the UPS depository today.

I tried setting it up with my high-CRI fluorescent light but it actually worked better to just use room lights. And tilt my desk lamp over to get a little front light on my musical instruments.

Compositing was straight-forward in ShotCut. Also, I sent Yakima the Photographer/Bard back into Skyrim and pulled some background plates. Plus did another camera fly, this time a straight zoom into Riften. It was a little jerky -- Skyrim is running on the edge already what with the quality cranked up to High for the shoot, and enough fan-improved meshes and textures added on to bring it up past Special Edition standards, and adding the overhead of a Quicktime screen grab is almost too much for my poor computer. But...ShotCut makes it easy to re-time a clip, and at 4x the base frame rate it got nice and smooth.

The next trick is to "bake" the performance clips first, rendering them out as new video files that can then be added back in without all the overhead of multiple layers of cropping, scaling, color grading, and chromakey magic. But it looks like it is going to work.

And not take a lot more time away from the Sea People.

Crumhorns

Add penny whistle to this picture:

My cover of Miracle of Sound's "Khajiit Likes to Sneak" is done. I'm not saying it is good. I'm saying I've learned what I can from that piece and it is time to move on.

Reaper started to develop a real stutter as my track count went into the 30's and 40's. I had to dial up the buffers, and that meant latency was too bad to do real-time monitoring whilst I played in new material. I was okay with the leakage I got around the headphones, though.

I'll post the final version. Probably after I cut some sort of video for it.




On the writing front, I scribbled out some trial scenes and the outline seems to work. It gets a little vague half-way through Act II, though, so until I fill in more of it I don't even know if I am looking at one book or three.

The overall planning scheme worked. Well enough. The trick to this one -- possibly to any historical fiction -- is to control the research. Do enough general research to rough out the plot, go into rough draft as soon as possible, and generate specific research questions from that draft. After all, if no-one is going to cook, I really don't need to spend days reading about food preparation in the Hittite Empire.

The "sort of" is because I need more general research before I can finish the outline. At least it is a little more directed. I don't need to look at "everything." My topics of strongest interest are:

The Luwians and Arzawa.
Ugarit and Canaan.
Phoenicia and Bylos.
Miletus, Sparta, Athens, the Peloponnese.

In the longer-term, more towards fleshing out specific settings; Mycenaean weaving (you laugh -- but I've already found a great web page.) Sailing (perhaps even ship-building) in the Aegean. Daily life in dei el Medinah. Pi-Ramses and the Way of Horus. Cretan mountain cults.

And Homer. Writing those sample scenes showed me that I need to find a certain something for the dialog so that it doesn't feel too modern (or too contrived.) I want to read a lot of epic poetry, in translation of course (I'm not crazy), and start to get a feel for a different way of speaking.

Oh, the terrible shawm of it!

The bulk of the work is done on the "Khajiit" piece. This is a mix-down of work to date. I will be tweaking it more. (I may, for instance, remove the shawms).

There's only one variation left to do from the original song; it's a kind of repeated short chorus. I can record those parts in pretty quickly. However, I've been thinking of going off-model after that point and instead of doing 3 more rounds of the verse and chorus (as the original does) instead do an extended Bodhran break. (And had I patience and skills, a proper recorder consort with baroque polyphony...)

Hrm. I wonder if I could do a slow jazz using the crumhorn as a bass...?