Mike Milo’s Journal

I don’t remember all of these but I can relate to probably about half of them!

01.You have at least one relative who wore a black dress every
?day for an entire year after a funeral.

02. You spent your entire childhood thinking what you ate for lunch
was pronounced “sangwich.”
03. Your family dog understood Italian.
04. Every Sunday afternoon of your childhood was spent visiting
your grandparents and extended family.

05. You’ve experienced the phenomena of 150 people fitting into 50
square feet of yard during a family cookout.

06. You were surprised to discover the FDA recommends you eat
three
meals a day, not seven? ? ? ? ? ? ?
07. You thought killing the pig each year and having salami,
capacollo, pancetta and prosciutto hanging out to dry from your shed
ceiling was absolutely normal. (Wow, that’s really Italian!
08. You ate pasta for dinner at least three times a week, and every
Sunday, and laughed at the commercial for Wednesday is Prince
Spaghetti day.

09. You grew up thinking no fruit or vegetable had a fixed
price and that the price of everything was negotiable through haggling.

10. You were as tall as your grandmother by the age of seven.
11. You thought everyone’s last name ended in a vowel.
12. You thought nylons were supposed to be worn rolled to the ankles.

13. Your mom’s main hobby is cleaning.

14. You were surprised to find out that wine was actually sold in stores.
15. You thought that everyone made their own tomato sauce.

16. You never ate meat on Christmas Eve or any Friday for that
matter.

17. You ate your salad after the main course.

18. You thought Catholic was the only religion in the world.

19. Your were beaten at least once with a wooden spoon or
broom.

20. You thought every meal had to be eaten with a hunk of bread
in your hand. ?

21. You can understand Italian but you can’t speak it.

22. You have at least one relative who came over on the boat.

23. All of your uncles fought in a World War.

24. You have at least six male relatives named Tony, Frank, Joe or  Louie.

25. You have relatives who aren’t really your relatives.

26. You have relatives you don’t speak to.  Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

27. You drank wine before you were a teenager.

28. You relate on some level, admit it, to the Godfather and  the
Sopranos.  I maka a meata ball you can’t refuse!
..forrgetttabbboutit! badda bing! ~

29. You grew up in a house with a yard that didn’t have one
patch of dirt that didn’t have a flower or a vegetable growing out of it.

30. Your grandparent’s furniture was as comfortable as sitting on
plastic. Wait!!!! You were sitting on plastic.

31. You thought that talking loud was normal.

32. You thought sugared almonds and the Tarantella were common
at all weddings.

33. You thought everyone got pinched on the cheeks and money
stuffed in their pockets by their relatives.
34. Your mother is overly protective of the males in the family no
matter what their age.

35. There was a crucifix in every room of the house.

36. Wakes would be held in someone’s living room.

37. You couldn’t date a boy without getting approval from your
father.
(Oh, and he had to be Italian)

38. You called pasta “macaroni”.

39. You dreaded taking out your lunch at school

40. Going out for a cup of coffee usually meant going out for a
cup of
coffee over Zia’s house.

41. Every condition, ailment, misfortune, memory loss and
accident was
attributed to the fact that you didn’t eat something.

42. Those of you who get this…KNOW who to pass it on to!
CIAO!

So Louie Logo is essentially finished and I am on to new horizons. In addition to my pilot Flavio at Nickelodeon I recently got awarded a series of commercials for
Mountain Haven Skin Center which wants to add a light-hearted way to show off their new facility.

I’m really looking forward to this one as it’s short, sweet and they’re only 30 seconds each. So far there will be three of them I believe. It’s going to be fun! I an thinking I will do it all in Flash as well and now that I have purchased a Mac, I should not have the issues I described in my last post.

However, this will be hand animated and not the rotating puppet style I typically do so I might only use Flash to color the images etc.

Of course I could also use Photoshope so I am not sure what I will do yet.

Anyway,the image to your left is from the first commercial we’re going to do. this old wrinkled lady walks into the room, thrusts her feet in the floor stirrups and places the tube on her head.

The device starts up and sucks her face up into the funnel. When it’s done her face is smooth and she looks many years younger! It should be a fun lil’ commercial to animate.

For the past 5 months I have been working on a short film for the PHMA on a film called Louie Logo in “Helmet Safety” about the benefits of using a helmet when you skate, ride a bike, horse, play soccer or use a scooter.

It’s been an awesome experience and I am very proud of the way it came out. My contact at PHMA; Dean Fisher has been the best client I have ever worked with and after this has taken 6 months to do, we have gotten to know each other a bit as well which is nice.

But it has also been an arduous process and I have learned a lot by doing it, mostly by doing things the wrong way 12 times and banging my head against the wall repeatedly (which by the way is a bad thing).

I am in the final stages of putting the film on DVD and let me tell you doing that very thing has not been a picnic.

Entirely animated in Flash, Louie Logo is the first project of this magnitude I have taken on. I have seen many other shows on TV work with Flash and I figured I could do the same.

Most of the shows that are done in Flash are exported to a Quicktime movie or a series of stills and then brought into an Avid system or Final Cut Pro for mixing and editing.

I’m not quite sure exactly how they do it because I have had nothing but trouble trying to accomplish it. I did succeed at the end but you’ll have to read the whole story to see how I did it. ;-)
I tried so many different ways I am literally spewing over with file versions and codecs and exports and details.

I have finally realized after all this that Flash sucks for this and yet it is a vaible tool for production.

The basic process is to export a swf from Flash in a v5 Flash Player format and then import that into After Effects. Then export that file out to a Quicktime or an AVI.

All this works without a flaw. It looks beautiful. Crystal clear and smooth motions.

That’s where the honeymoon ends.

After Effects does not export sound as far as I can tell (if it does, I have yet to find out how), so after exporting the video out of AE, I bring the file into Premiere and add sound efx and the sound track by exporting the dialog I animated to out of Flash and importing that back into Premiere.
Still with me? ;-)

So once I import the sound into Premiere it seems fine at first until I want to edit some of the video footage. In my film there is a small clip of live action video which will not export from Flash because Flash Player 5’s format does not support video so the vid drops out on export and I am left witha big white space in the film.

No problem right? Just splice the video footage in and we should be set.

But no!

The minute that I use the splice tool to cut a point to edit, the 2nd half of the film suddenly changes. Yes, changes. The image switches to the beginning of the film! Amazing! Sometimes (as I have done this more than once) it just goes black instead of swtiching to the beginning of the film. Amazing!

So I can not edit the film in Premiere and Vegas won’t even see the file at all!

So I go back to Flash and try to make it work there by exporting the sound which has 12 layers now in Premier and importing that into Flash. Trouble is slowly over time it drifts out of sync and by the end of the 7 minutes it is like a full second off!

Tough stuff.

I would pull my hair out at this point but I don’t have much so I can’t!

Next I decide I will export a still frame sequence from Flash, import it into Premiere and I should be good to go.

Nope. Don’t work. Every time I try that Premiere will only let me import 100 frames at a time and I have over 11,000!

Nevertheless I try importing it bit by bit but after a while Premiere craps out on me and quits!

At this point I scream.

It has been very difficult to get everything working.

I did figure it out though.

I imported the Quicktime file into Premiere, added another layer on top of that for the live action footage without splicing it into the same layer and that seems to work so I solved the edit problem. That still leaves the sync problem.

Digital video is 30 fps (frames per second) but it renders at 29.97. Don’t ask me why.
Well when that happesn the sound that the file pulls from is still at 30 fps and it slowy rifts off over time.

The solution?

Compress the sound with something like Soug Frge to 99.99 and suddenly it syncs up! Imagine that!

Can you say NIGHTMARE!?!?

So now we’ve got the file in Premiere, with sound that syncs and it looks good.

Yay!

But wait! We’re not done!

The biggest problem is that when I render the file out compressed, it is pixelated and looks essentially like crap. When I export it out uncompressed it balloons up to around 8 gigabytes!

Shoot me now.

The client had asked me to deliver the film on CD so he can dupe it and give it to his partners whcih I can totally dig but the file at 8 gb is not going onto a 650 mb disk. I can;t burn it to DVD because he can’t duplicate that. Besides 8 gb won’t fit on a DVD either.
Sigh…

Well I can burn it to a dual layer DVD but they aren’t as easy to mass duplicate and I don’t have one anyway…

What do I do?

The Windows version of Flash will export a Quicktime but it’s not “really” a Quicktime file, but actually just a swf that can play in Quicktime’s Player.

That means no editing program will see the file.

Well I found out that apparently the Mac although as far as I am concerned is a bit like a Fisher-Price toy seems to have one great thing going for it. Quicktime with the Mac version of Flash can actually export a beautiful Quicktime movie with soud right out of Flash. And it’s hugely compressed too! Imagine that?!?!?!

So although I figured out a way to get the file out of Flash and make it onto a DVD which the client is kind enough to accept, but it was a very frustrating process.

So I bought a Mac.
I need to author a DVD now to make it mass produceable.
The solution?

Final Cut Pro and iDVD.

But I have to break down and actually buy a Mac to use those programs. Bought one last night in fact.
I have not had a Mac for about 8 years now and here I am slinking back in again.

Will the madness never end!?!?

Well anyway, if you’re actually still reading this to the end, thank you.

You are braver than I…

Oh and stay away from Flash! It is evil to it’s core!

;-)

Our country is rotting away by it’s very foundations and what’s sad about it is that it won’t be from Iraq or Iran or China…

we’ll do it to ourselves by slowly stifling our kids with rules and regulations until there is really no where for them to bloom or grow up and they just never will. We’ve spent so long being free that we have become the only enemy that can bring us down.

Take a read at this passage… I don’t know who wrote it but he is so on the money it’s pitiful.

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn’t seem to
get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in icepack coolers, but I can’t remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE… and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked’s (only worn in gym)
instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can’t recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now..

Flunking gym was not an option. even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and st aying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself

I just can’t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah..! . and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played ‘king of the hill’ on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn’t sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contract or for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn’t act up at the neighbor’s house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being su! ch a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN’T- SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN’T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING

Awesome! Check out this trailer, that is playing at E3! You’ll have to watch a commercial first but it’s worth it. Finally we know a bit more about Halo 3! It’s coming in 2007 and it looks pretty cool! Honestlly you can’t see too much except enviroments but for a Halo addict like me, anything is cool. If only the game looks like this! Probably will be close on xBox 360. According to this article the footage you watch is actual gameplay so it just might be. I guess I’m gonna have to break down and get me one of those next year.

As for me I’ve been getting my fix lately playing Far Cry Instincts and Half Life 2 which are both pretty coll games. Far Cry is kinda boring as the enemies are really, REALLY stupid but in Half Life 2 they’re are actually pretty smart. the game itself is beautiful and quite puzzling at times. At least for me. I’m sure some 14 year old would run circles around me but I’m having fun and that’s the point.

Well I finally got my Flavio Blog on Frederator so I won’t be posting Flavio stuff here much anymore. For the next few months it’ll just be personal stuff from time to time. Check out the new blog and post a lot so they think I’m important over there! ;-)

Read below and you will see that it’s the lawyers that are killing this country. All by themselves. If this is true, it is a pitiful example of the cesspool our country is cascading into. Isn’t there some way to stop this? It’s outrageous! No WONDER there are no such things as Mom & Pop shops anymore! Who could afford to stay in business. Are people REALLY this stupid? I had thought we as a people were a bit better than this. Clearly we’re not if this is true. If you’re thinking of getting into law school… think again. We have enough people ruining this great country. We don’t need you too.

Whoops! If some kid reads this and changes his mind and becomes a pizza boy instead, does that give his mother the right to sue me for a life he could have had?

Our System Sucks”    2005 Stella Awards Time once again to review the winners of the Annual “Stella Awards.

” The Stella Awards are named after 81 year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot
coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald’s (in NM). That case inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous, ridiculous, successful
lawsuits in the United States.

Here are this year’s winners:

5th Place (tie): Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded $80,000. by a jury of her  peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running   inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably   surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving little toddler was Ms.   Robertson’s son.

5th Place (tie): 19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses   when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr. Truman   apparently didn’t notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he   was trying to steal his neighbor’s hubcaps.

5th Place (tie): Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just   finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage   door to go up since the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He
  couldn’t re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage   locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, and Mr. Dickson   found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of   Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the homeowner’s  insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed, to the tune of $500,000. In my opinion this is so outrageous that it; should have been 2nd Place