I know nothing has been posted on the site for….almost a year, but various projects and life happenings have put the site on the back burner.  I can’t wait to write the slew of updates on what we’ve done in the past year and what’s coming up, but right now I’m thinking the site needs some serious redesign.  It seems that in pushing myself to understand and modify WordPress I ended up making a blog, which was not my intent.

This will be the major thrust of the redesign: bringing you our videos and images to your eyeballs in a more direct fashion, and leaving the other information for those that feel the need to scroll/click/dig a bit deeper.  Hopefully this won’t take NEARLY as long as getting the first WordPress iteration of the site up, functional, and fully debugged.

Your humble web monkey,

Justin

If you can’t tell, I’ve been having some extended issues with Internet Explorer. For some reason, sometime in the distant past someone at Microsoft thought that complying with the W3C standards wasn’t all that important, which has lead to me having to figure out how IE likes to read style sheets and tweak from there. The process has been quite akin to pulling teeth. BUT at long last IE’s CSS is fixed and displaying the site correctly. HUZZAH!

In addition, I have moved our films over to Vimeo as there have been browser compatibility issues with hosting streaming QuickTimes.

SO. Everything should work and look as it should! Enjoy!

–Justin (OL Web Monkey)

Both “Whale of a Bible Tale” and “Romancing the Rail” have been selected to play at the TromaDance 2009 film fest! If you live in Albuquerque or know people that do, please tell them about this event! Our films will be playing in Shorts Blocks B and C. You can find more information on the location and show timeshere

In other fest news…

Tromadance Indiana 2009 selected “Whale of a Bible Tale” to play back in September, but they didn’t inform me. Come on Indiana, I know you have nets! Send me some bits next time! ^_^

–Justin

Plans are in the works, so stay tuned. Oh and bug Justin to post our stop-motion title screen. *Poke* *Poke*

Just a quick update. I finally buckled down and got my hands dirty in Motion to create the explosion transition for “Don’t Pass That Glass!”. It looks pretty sweet, though I’ll probably tweak it a bit later.

Also, I should be shooting the Udder Scene next Friday, which will add a much needed shot to my opening montage. Slowly but surely it’s all coming together…

–Justin

YAY! Took me long enough! I started this in 2007 and am only finishing it now. It’s amazing what motivators a long weekend and the piece’s near destruction (water splash a couple days before I finished it) can have.

I apologize for the low quality of the pic. All I had handy was a point and shoot camera. Eventually I will have the original framed and priced, and have a limited run of prints produced. Still not sure what to call it…

As for me, I’ve been polishing some of our films for festival submissions. Part of this, included creating sound for our animated logo which you can seehere. I was going to do what we normally do when we need a disgusting visual/sound and grab a can of spinach, but then I thought of a much tastier way to get the sound effects I needed. My homemade jam:

Squish it around for the microphone and then lick my hand clean. Awesome.

I should have the polished versions up, sometime this fall as apart of my continuing site debugging (apparently QuickTime wasn’t as universal as I thought. Oh how myopic having a Mac has made me! ^_^)

Way back when I completed the script of DPTG, I knew I wanted Matt to be the narrator. He has this velvety smooth baritone along with a crisp yet flowing enunciation that made him the ideal person to parody a 50′s educational film narrator. His performance was truly excellent and fucking hilarious. ^_^

Russ Vanover (seen above making adjustments to his aforementioned Space Station) was kind enough to contribute his audio wizardry and equipment for the recording session, ensuring a clean high quality audio track. For this I am very grateful.

All in all, dialogue recording is definitely one of my favorite aspects of filmmaking, not only because it’s something challenging and enjoyable to direct, but also because everyone involved usually ends up laughing till they hurt.

Next on the agenda? Shooting Pick-ups and obtaining stock footage. Stay tuned.

I, after much “encouragement” from  my lab mates, am posting.

ok my job is done here.

-amberguesa

This unassuming silver brick is the latest addition to Obscura Labs’ collective equipment. This might not seem all that impressive, except that unlike most unassuming bricks, this one happens to be a 2TB hard drive with Firewire 400, 800, and eSATA. *pause for me to enjoy my geek goosebumps* We now have the capacity to capture HD footage for multiple projects! First up? Greedy Little Fingers! We’re hoping to capture the footage from the first GLF shoot in the coming weeks and then get cracking on a trailer to give you all a sneak peek of what we’re working on.

Now of course, a drive isn’t a drive on my workstation unless it has a proper name. I have a thumb drive named “Skippy”, a 250GB hard drive named “Aneurysm”, and this new addition I have dubbed “Bucky” after scientist, engineer, poet, semanticist, and all around super genius,Buckminster Fuller. May this drive hold as much information and aid in giving birth to as many beautiful things as it’s human namesake.