Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well it was quite a crazy weekend! As I said in my last entry, Friday was almost a total washout thanks to the rain. I did get a few good shots to add to the short personal segments at the end of the video, but that was it. The park was open on Saturday but it was hella windy, gusting close to 40mph. So while we did the shows a lot of the shots were compromised thanks to the wind. That and although I tried directing the rest of the cast by telling them what I wanted to capture, we didn’t have time to really rehearse anything so some shots were lost because one of the cast forgot something, like Nolan didn’t remember to take down the hood to his cloak for one shot, which broke the continuity of the segment. So I was biting my nails a bit Sat night when I got home and started breaking down the footage. I didn’t get much work done though because I had told a friend I would go to his halloween party. So I went in my Torch! makeup and one of the girls there recognized me and told me she and her friend had seen the show at the park. Turns out she was a CS major in college and although she was Chinese she loves Japanese stuff – so we had plenty to chat about.

Sunday rolled around and it was still windy – the entire park lost power twice for a few seconds during the day. Luckily it calmed down later that evening and by showtime the wind was barely blowing at all. So I spent the last two shows of the season reshooting several shots, although the final show I participated in the finale and did a high fall off the museum with my baton. After the last show I set up a cast picture and also did two real quick pick-up shots to complete my takes.

Afterwards we all went to the local bar to PARTAY! Lots of dancing, lots of hanging out with friends I won’t see for a few months. We even put on a mini-show for everyone and got free drinks . I also had some business cards on me and was passing them out with the backs containing info on how to see the Torch! movie. One of the cast, Nolan, is even considering using the video to pitch the show to someone running this huge convention down in D.C. in Jan, and one of the brothers that created the show wants to try to book stuff at ski resorts over the winter.

So now I’m just trying to get this video file size down below 100MB so I can upload it to MySpace. I can upload .divx movies and the DivX converter scrunched my 250MB AVI file down to 125MB, so I think I’ll just drop the rendering quality down two notches from the maxed out 10 to 8 and I should be able to squeeze by. It takes up to 3 hours for the video to render tho so I only have a few tries, haha. I’ll get it tho.

Aiighty, back to it I guess. Here are the two cast pictures I took.