Arggh! I've got to many ideas in my head.  So here is my mental core dump
(of some stuff).

Technical:

    I've made a POV movie that consisted of 7+ Gig of uncompressed data and
the problem of total data size is a big one.  If we do this in 11 min
segments we are looking at 40+Gig of data per segment.  What do we need?
Well we need a way to assemble this in a nonlinear fashion (i.e. out of
order assembly) of smallish parts.  Something on the size of 2 Gig at a
time.

    In my attempts I've found I don't really like MPEG for large projects,
quality of this type of animation is hard to control on very large projects.
Here at the university I'm looking into placing the stills directly onto
film and then splicing the sound onto the finished film (I'll talk to the
computer guy at the communications department).  This might be the way to
get the best quality.  Anybody out there with experience at this?

    In my silly opinion this issue needs to be addressed before we get alot
of people fired up about this.  This is going to be, by far, the most
expensive part.  Well . . . I think I just answered my own statement.  If
anyone else want to join me I'll look into the cost of this and see if I can
find volunteers within the communication arena.


Story Board (or what I would like to see):

    As I mentioned before we should do two movies.  A ten minute short and
then the full movie.  So as not to "waste" the short it should be a trailer
for the real movie.  Does it have to actually fit in?  No.  Just look at
early trailers for other movies.  You always see stuff that is never in the
actual movie.  It should be there so the Marketing Team and Legal Team can
show it around to build interest in the full movie.

    As for my story board, note that these ideas came about from the voices
in my head and from reading posts by Gary Shannon, Steffen Walter, and I am
sorry but I can't find the post about a movie with "trash people" made up of
odd parts of stuff.

    Going for television we should make up four 11 min segments.  This will
give one hour of programming with commercials.  The four segments would be
about creatures made up of odds and ends of stuff, like whatever you would
find in a salvage yard.

    The overall theme would be how they help without anyone's knowledge in
small and big day to day problems.  For small things what we need are
stories from people about cool things that just "seem to work out."  For
example, have you ever woke up from sleep just knowing the answer to a
problem?  Well, we have our little heros actually work on it while you are
asleep, and then convey the solutions to you (think of all the cool gadgets
we could use for a scene like this!).  Another segment could cover one of
them just trying really hard not to get caught when it gets stuck in a tough
situation.

    A big problem could be a space battle where the junk left in orbit from
space exploration comes to life to protect the Earth.  I've always wanted to
see a real space battle in the asteriod belt, with loud music in the
background. :)  Or heck, we could have a scene similar to Gary Shannon's
short except that our guys are reparing stuff.

Anyway this was just some brain droppings.

Mark Arrasmith
arr### [at] mathtwsuedu

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