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Saturday, March 21, 2015

Reverbnation



I recently was listening to NPR radio and heard a piece of jazz music by The Maureen Choi Quartet:

Maureen Choi at Reverb Nation

They played "Feelin' Good".

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and when I heard the announcer give the name of the group I went and looked for it online and found the above website.

As well as being music I enjoyed, Reverbnation seems to be an interesting website for one specific reason, it appears you can get your music onto iTunes by being a Reverbnation member.

On the downside, Reverbnation has a lot of ins and outs and is difficult to figure out. There are a couple ways to promote your music, and this had me confused. I am not convinced that paying for promotion is the way to go, but Reverbnation has a pay to play angle.

Considering I heard the Maureen Choi Quartet on NPR, it appears it works, if this was the only way the quartet promoted themselves and ended up on NPR I'd say that is pretty good..

Another downside to Reverbnation is the webpage has en embedded player system. Chrome does not initialize the player correctly so I had to listen via Firefox and/or Explorer. fyi.

-CB

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

As I keep working towards making a feature film...



As I keep working towards making a feature film I keep learning new aspects of how to, and I keep learning more about myself. For instance I found out yesterday that I can discern 36 of the 39 colors present in this chromatograph from a story by LinkedIn:

LinkedIn article


It is interesting as it brings back an old discussion of whether or not we all see the same thing. Clearly this diagram above indicates we don't see the same as each other. Additionally women can also hear a different range of sounds than men.

I also don't hear the same range of sound as most of you reading this. I can hear old analog TV sets when the sound is turned off. My belief is I hear the actual buzzing of the electronic color guns in the back of the tube racing across the TV screen forming the image. All I know is when I walk into a room with an analog TV on, and no sound is audible, I know the TV is there.

And I read a statistic recently of how the movie business is now predominantly male oriented. That the majority of people acting, around 70 percent are males, and women make up about 30 percent.

How do you feel about that?

As I was watching the Robert Relyea produced movie Bullitt starring Steve McQueen over the last few days I was looking to see how the color of the film creates the world the story takes us into. From there I did some research on Arriflex cameras.

Arriflex cameras are making the claim now that they have such high rez on their cameras it is better than film (I believe it is referred to as double hi-def). That is backwards thinking. The ultimate resolver is the eye. And the rods and cones on the retina, and the subsequent transfer to the brain. Film has always been king because it resolves at a molecular level chemically which obviously is smaller in detail than rods and cones.

I was part of a Master's degree seeker's exploration into this neck of the woods about 15 years ago. I made the comment/conclusion that people are going to prefer to live in the composed reality of the digital rather than live in the real world. Max Headroom stuff.

Now though with Photoshop and digital imaging, histograms and such color can be manipulated in amazing ways.

Where is the line between the real and the unreal of virtual reality?

"Ship in a Bottle"

My brother concluded about 20 years ago that we will soon be able to place ourselves into movies as any character we want. In many ways in the world of the gamer this already exists.

I once predicted that our video phones will be answered by avatars of ourselves that we create for the times we don't answer. But I am mistaken. Once upon a time the answering machine was just what one needed to catch messages left when you weren't able to get to the phone. Now though, no one leaves messages anymore, let alone listen to them if you do leave one.

-CB

One last thought, check out this set of responses to a google search I just did about Vinyl making a comeback:

The Week, Vinyl comes full circle