Post 38: Right on Track After All

  Rehearsal on Wednesday did't include any video because a power failure knocked the system down an we couldn't bring it back up. 
   It's unlikely to happen again, but we now have a computer expert to run the show in the rafters. He rehearsed today and played the whole thing today. We ironed out a few last problems, misspellings, and extended the credits past the music with a freeze frame on Cherubini.
  Carlos and I did two TV interviews on local stations today.Hope it fills the seats...
  Dress Rehearsal is tonight at 7. Let's hope everything goes well!

Post 37: About Ready to Go!

  Well, I was too busy the last couple of days to post, and all I was doing anyway is finishing up the new Bosh Sequence. I turned out quite nice I think, and in a way is an interesting counterpoint to the First Part of the Offertorium. Total Rococo beauty followed by a visit to the Beasts Den...
  I took a bunch of 10 ft conduit and cornet and T fittings to make a frame about 10 ft x 53 ft onto which to stretch the fabric. The ivory screen fabric is backed up with black.  
  The screen was built and went up yesterday tied to a long truss. It looked really big on the stage floor, and barely cleared the edges of the first balcony, but now that it is way up and back, it doesn't look so big at all...

  I am a little disappointed at that, but we could not have made it any bigger. 
  The projectors, the Matrox Box and the computer are going up this afternoon on another truss about 50 ft in front of the screen.
   We had some difficulties getting the Matrox Box to work with the 3 matching Christie Projectors, bit Corey came to our rescue this morning and it is now working. I breathed a sight of relief when I found out.
   The last issue to solve is how to start and stop Quicktime 7 with a black screen and no geeky Icons or Desktop appearing between movements. Corey suggested to stitch all the 8 videos together as one, but that will be a whopper to render at the last minute...S he is looking for another way. Lab only works with the Mac unfortunately...
  

Post 36: Fun in Purgatory is Possible

   Well, I did get a loaner machine yesterday, installed the software, transferred my files to it, installed more bits of software, codecs, fonts, etc...  Finally got around late last night to trying to render the Offertories, and the machined turned out to be unable to do it. It is after all a 2009 MacPro, with less memory, slower disks, and a more basic graphics card that doesn't seem beefy enough to handle the Ray Tracing that makes the beautiful curves of the theatre possible... Bummer!
  So, after a short ray of hope, I am back to plan B, and will keep plodding along on the Bosh sequence and trying to get my machine to cooperate with the problematic Ray Tracing that I cannot do without...
   I have been cutting out interesting details from the paintings, and having them interact with the vast moving background of the whole paintings, and the effect is quite striking and interesting. The originals are fairly large Altarpieces, but there is such a huge amount of detail, scenes within the painting, scenes within scenes, and so many strange creatures interacting in strange and often humorous ways that there is almost no way to really see them without a magnifying glass. And the computer can be a fabulous magnifying glass, multiplied even by more by the sheer size of the projection screen. Details that are less than an inch on the original can be blown up to 10 feet, and that leads to very to interesting discoveries indeed.
   One can't help but be wondrous at the concoctions and contraptions the genius or madness of the Artist came up with. No doubt some will see him as a sick mind, borderline psychopath, letting loose his basest instincts laying out a collection of sins and punishments...I see it as an exceptional display of creativity and imagination, with  great beauty in the depiction of terrible things, a gift for composition on an unprecedented scale, and a brushwork so skillful a mere lash or dot can suggest more than one would ever expect...

  The more I look at the details, the more evidence I find that Bosh was playing tricks both with the viewers and the patrons who commissioned the pieces... Or may be the patrons were smart enough and progressive enough to go along with Bosh numerous "in jokes" and "hidden tricks"...The masses were likely just scared to Death and unable to get it. 

Post 35: Just Purgatory may be?

   I was very upset to be unable to bring the Sequence to the end I envisioned, and may be overly dramatic in my last post...?
   One has to go on anyway, and as my friend Corey said yesterday when I was moaning about that: all we can do is do the best we can. Computers and video are still a pretty fickle business when you push them to the limits, and as good as it is, technology is still lagging way behind the dreams its potential has generated. I guess I wanted too much, and am now accepting I have to scale back my dreams a little and settle for what can be done in the remaining five days.
   I had started an alternate option as a backup, and am going to make is best I can.
It is centered about some of Hieronymus Bosch large triptychs, some of which I was lucky to see in the Museum in Hamburg many years ago.

  They are truly in my view the most extraordinary pieces of art ever to come out of a painter's mind. One has to wonder where these visions came from, whether Bosh was schizophrenic, or if he simply he had the lucky gift of remembering his dreams. Because this is the stuff of dreams. Some of the images are also so prophetic: flying vessels, submarines, strange machines, giant plants, extraordinary anthropomorphic buildings, on and on... 
   When you start looking at the details closely, you marvel at the creativity, the wit, the irreverence, the bawdiness, the daring... In the guise of treating "official" religious subjects, Bosh thumbed his nose to the patrons and the church itself. One can't help wonder whether he was a flaunting agnostic and heretic in disguise, in a time when these deviant behaviors led to being burnt at the stake...
   To ordinary people, his work can be read on a primary level as vividly depicting the horrors of hell and the delights of heaven.  To a more educated and free thinking crowd, readers of Erasmus in particular, there is much satirizing to be found, much delightful tongue in cheek mockery and criticism of the clergy and catholic tradition and teachings.
   And to me, there is much beauty too, even in his freak creatures. Keep in mind that most every freak in popular culture, whether two headed people,people with four legs and four arms, people with legs sticking out of their belly, cyclops, monsters with two faces, people with three eyes, eight breasts, tails, horns, huge heads, tiny heads, giants, midgets, people with no arms, no legs, hermaphrodites, mermaids, etc..., actually have alway been born that way, and still are today, genetic errors, aberrations of nature.
  For most of these,and many more, Hell is right here on earth, right now.   
                    

POST 34: ALL HELL HAS BROKEN LOOSE

   Well, the Wrath of God fell on me in the last few days... For reasons I don't quite understand, my computer is acting crazy, and failing me. I can still create images and correct things in the Offertorium, but the machine refuses to render the new versions, and after churning for 15 hours overnight, all I have to show for it in the morning is seven minutes of black video.
   Having spent hundreds of joyful hours trying to perfect the most elaborate 3D construction I had ever built in After Effects, I am very upset indeed that my machine, my software, something I don't understand is failing me. A virus, a plague has infected and taken over my binary number cruncher, and kernel panic has set in.
  What sins have I committed to be thus punished? This is a Requiem I am working on after all, and the wrath of God is always an implicit threat... May be too much pride, too much confidence in my ability to push the machine and the software always further, to make the hardware faster, to extract the most exquisite juices out of mere diodes and transistors. They are failing me. Or am I failing them, who knows, I am at a loss...
   I got very scared a couple of days ago, and started thinking of an alternative. I somehow have to make sure I have images for the Offertories, even if they are not what I originally intended. I had been going through hell trying to get things to work and getting nothing in return.
   So I suppose it was only natural to think of and turn to Bosh, Hieronymus Bosh, the genius behind the most elaborate, imaginative, and incredibly vivid visions of Hell ever put to canvas. I found large scale images, and details of some of the most incredible individual nightmarish creatures ever to come out of a human mind. I found solace and modicum of peace in his totally surrealistic and incredibly detailed world, a world I can in some ways identify with and love. There is a beauty in these Beasts one can only fathom.
 But then, could I actually scrap everything I had been working on so hard, and instead of exalting the beauty of Marie Antoinette's little jewel of a Theatre I had lovingly rebuilt out of virtual paper and millions of screen pixels, spend the whole fifteen minutes of the Offertorium in the nightmarish beauty of Bosh's world?
   I woke up this morning wondering if I could possibly show both together in the same piece, and instead of the intended smooth flight of the camera through a perfect theatre, combine in some way in the two parts of the Offertories the story of my plight?
  As Bosh well understood, and you can see it clearly if you look at his images carefully, Hell is more than just burning in eternal fires stoked by red devils with trident forks. Hell is here on earth for most of us. Hell is in the terrible things that happen every day around the world, hell is in the monsters that are actually born every day, in the plight of the deformed children, of the sick, of the maimed, of the soldiers missing parts of their bodies and often part of their brains, hell is in their brains forever shell shocked by what they did, saw, lived, and survived. Hell is the life of their wives and children who have to care for them and love them somehow, a wounded and forever changed version of the one they knew and loved. 
   Hell is in the hospitals, the insane wards, hell is in the streets were we released the wounded warriors of previous useless conflicts and made them homeless. Hell is something millions of people live in every day, starving, sick, slaughtered, bombed, shelled and shredded to pieces. Hell is seeing your child dying, or laying comatose  in a hospital bed, brain dead, or barely surviving in an iron lung, with no end in sight.
   That puts things in perspective. My Hell, the one I have lived in the last few days is not a real Hell, it is a Virtual Hell, and I just have to make the best of it with what I have in the time I have left.
   Let's get back to work and somehow make something out of this mess!