Daniel Orta
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Posts by Daniel Orta
Single frames from projects (June 2009)
Jul 24th
Random frames from single projects i’ve been working on. No color correction.
Imaginary solutions to Imaginary problems
May 1st
I’ve been working heavily on writing a new series as of late, a revamped concept on a script I had thought up of while I was still in high school, carefully writing out the characters, rethinking major plot points, and trying to find some sort of reasoning behind the motivations for each and every one of the characters in the film. Unfortunately, it involves one of my biggest fears.
Zombies.
Yeah, the living undead. I’m fucking SCARED of them. It doesn’t help that some of my best friends are absolutely fascinated with the subject. More often than not, regular conversation turns to the survival of the living during an outbreak. An oddly bleak subject, naturally, but it’s given me quite an amount of fodder to write with.
Writing these series has proven to be the most stressful, crazy thing i’ve written in quite some time, and gives me nightmares. Most the nightmares involve the characters I wrote myself (with some scenarios I later incorporated into the series, thank you), but a lot of the times, I would find myself scared of the dark. I’ve started to stay up late to the wee hours of the morning, something I had never even considered on doing until about a year and a half ago. The relative calm that comes over my neighborhood (and family members sleeping) can be rather soothing, if you can block out the squaking parrots and the ghettobirds patrolling for the latest felon to wander only blocks from where i live. This opportunity has a large caveat- that same lull also brings forth the fear in the imaginary within myself.
I fear sometimes for the imaginary things I had created in my mind- the zombies that once attacked a character in a script now has a slight chance to exist in reality, waiting for me on the other side of my door.
It was a silly fear, but enough to give me certain amounts of stress when writing, and that stress would in turn affect said writing, to the point that it would be… unnerving.
Talking to Primo’s brother, Andrew, I relayed to him my fears in such a case. He smiled, and gave me a solution- “come up with an imaginary weapon”.
I was puzzled, but he explained it rather well- if you fear the imaginary, come with an imaginary weapon to fight it.
As such, I’ve been carrying around a cheap little BB gun pistol, a PP9 replica that’s probably 1/2 (or even less!) scale replica of the actual gun. I know it isn’t real- i left the orange tip on there for safety, but it’s there to fight off the imaginary, to reinforce my own mind that I am the one in control.
Oddly enough, it works. When I walk around my house, I’ll carry the gun in the pocket of my robe or my jeans, or if I have a particularly heavy scare, I’ll walk around the house toting the small pistol in my hand.
The zombie nightmares have gone down to a minimum, thanks to this cheap gun i bought off of amazon.com (it was .99 cents, if i recall correctly. It was something I bought off of the site that was a simple joke).
An odd way to explore the power of the mind and imagination, but there you go.
The BlackBerry switch.
Apr 14th
The Razr I’ve had for about five years now finally gave out. The thing couldn’t send out text messages properly, and placing a call would just force the phone to reboot itself time and time again. I got pretty pissed off at the thing, and so I finally decided to give it up. I wanted a smartphone of any kid, so long as it wasn’t a PalmOS based handheld or something in windows mobile (hee, windows mobile. the thought of its memory manager still gives me the shivers. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea, anyways?). So my options were… quite limited.
If there was an Android based handheld on Verizon Wireless’ plan, I would be getting that phone in a second. All the crazy cool things Android has begun to do really interests me (The newer incarnation of the Android OS is fascinating me), but it’s Verizon, after all- the choices are either smartphones or Verizon OS based phones with small keyboards. So I went with the next best thing.
I gotz me a blackberry!
The Blackberry Curve, to be exact. I had heard too many horror stories with the Storm to even have me consider it- a neighbor had switched to it and had more than one problem with it, goiing through two or three Storms before he gave it up for something else. So I just went for the next best thing on the Verizon service plan it doesn’t cost too much more than I was paying for already, and thanks to a sale, i only paid about $120 bucks for it. (Deus ex machina says I’ll be finding the phone dropping in price after i type this, but I don’t mind at this point, I have it, why regret the purchase?)
The sister and I went together to get the same phone (she later decided to get a pink one, to separate the two. At one point, the service rep almost activated the pink phone on my account) One of the sales reps at the Verizon store tried to get me to move up to the Storm, but i wouldn’t budge, sharing a look of “ooooh heelllll noooo” between myself and my sibling. He later gave me a dirty look when I snorted when he asked me about singing up for the Verizon Hub thing. Who needs it, really?
So yeah, I’m about two/three weeks into using this phone, and I’m fucking loving it. I switched the domain name for teammayhem.net over to be used to Gmail, so I’m able to use a lot of the gmail apps on the phone. IMAP support is incredible on the application, and I’m really liking the OS overall. The syncing program for the Blackberry to sync with my mac is a crashy bitch, so I decided to sync everything to my google account. My address book is on google, and both my mac and my blackberry sync to it, so all is well. Next step is to fix up the calendar to sync properly, but that’s going to be a bitch and a half to try and figure out. Maybe for when I have more time, or a lead I could follow.
The apps I use on a regular basis are:
AIM- I talk to a bunch of my friends on AIM still, and having it on the go is great. It’s fun to be talking to a friend and having them slowly realize 20 minutes into the conversation that I’m actually at the supermarket shopping for beer (Hi Katja!).
MSN Messanger- Again, it’s for conversation, but Levi just spams me with it and sends insults. Lovely times.
TwitterBerry- I love me my Twitter, and this just an extension of that addiction. Works well, have yet to try the TwitPic support.
Opera- The standard browser on the Blackberry is great (and I still use it from time to time) but to view full pages, I switch over to the Opera browser. It’s a full fleged browser on the blackberry, rendering pages at a decent clip to make certain sites easy to read.
Pandora- Pandora on this phone is terrific, just plug it in to my stereo and pick a random band to listen to as i drive. SO good.
The only big gripes I’ve had are the lack of apps on the device. I’ve got my standard set of apps I use all the time, but naturally, there isn’t that variety, that pizazz of titles that can be found on the iPhone, hell, even on the Android system. With the creation of the “Blackberry App World” earlier this month, it’s a start for some great opportunities on the handset, but the pickin’s are slim so far. I’ll probably talk about this thing more once i have more time to send it through stress tests, but it’s a step up from the Rzr.
Desk.
Feb 10th
Holy crap, it’s hailing.
Jan 26th
Took this image (clumsily) of a heavy amount of hail we got on the ground here in California. Never have I ever seen it hit the ground this hard. It sounded like the roof was about to just cave in after only a couple of minutes. It’s finally died down, but i got to slide around on my driveway for the first time.
It was fun!
The Used iPod
Jan 19th
I’ve been the only person in my household with any sort of MP3 player, my classic ipod mini still serving me well on my drives out and about. With my mother receiving a gift of an unopened iPod video, the only person left in my household was my sister, who had resorted upon mix CDs of various genres strewn about my mother’s car, and the terrestrial radio stations she deftly navigated for her favorite songs.
After Christmas, my sister looked into getting her own iPod, using the gift cards for Ebay as her means to purchase a used one at a reasonable price. She finally settled upon the fatty iPod mini, to which she received with much glee, having found it at a great deal compared to most. She wanted me to take a look at it, so she waited patiently as i hooked it up to the mac in my room.
She waited as i made the discovery of music already loaded upon the pink iPod- various punk bands and popular music that made her squeal in glee, things I would never have on my own music collection, Britney Spears and the like. It was only about 2 gigs worth of music out of the total 8 gigs available, so it was an added bonus to the cost of the iPod. I went back to the iPod status menu, looking at the bar at the bottom that showed the size of the various things available on the iPod. 2 gigs of music and… video? Thinking it was more free stuff, i quickly moved to the video tab, only to find porn.
Porn on a used iPod, a title over 50 characters in length describing some act of sexual nature in great detail that I know would probably be illegal in Utah. I stopped, staring at my computer with a dropped jaw and incredulous smile as i called my sister over. “Teresa, you gotta see this!” I said with a laugh as i pulled open the title bar more, describing more raunchy things done with a latina (and a goat, but thinking back on it now, I think that may have been a joke). She looked in horror as iTunes generated an album cover, a random frame from the pornographic movie with the right asscheek of said Latina. “DELETE IT!” she yelled out, covering her eyes as I deleted the video.
I wiped the iPod 3 times, to be safe.
Be sure to check those things you buy on Ebay, mmmkay?
Keeping…
Jan 4th
Keeping myself busy. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been working on my portfolio, realizing I don’t have enough pieces for it, so it’s simply pre-production galore. Trying to secure locations, gather a list of possible actors, figuring out possible shooting dates, the list goes on and on. After New Years, my life has finally quieted down a bit so that I can finally get back down to work.
The work has doubled for me as I’ve moved to HD, or at least not full HD (I’m working at 1080i). My new camera, while being small, is a beast in nature, and now, I’m having some hardships with the format. My computer can barely keep up with the large file sizes, so I have to have lots of patience as files render. I’m also forcing myself away from using Final Cut Pro as my main offline editor, locking down my sound and cuts on FCP, then moving to After Effects for color correction and special effects, lacking down cuts using that program, and it doesn’t help that effects is being a two timing whore. But hey, the camera pumps out an image that’s been goddamn gorgeous, if my photoblog has anything to say other than looking mighty purdy. I’m really excited about youtube’s new widescreen look- for the work I’m thinking about doing, it’s probably the best so I don’t feel like I’m having to shortchange ideas for short films because “they don’t work on youtube” (that whole thing was a rubbish idea in my mind anyways, disregard it entirely. )
Oh hay, here’s another screengrab. This is footage FROM the Rose Parade, or at least the pregame stuff. I’ll be uploading small clips I won’t be using in a short film up on my own personal account on Youtube. Or Vimeo. Haven’t decided which one yet.
There’s a batch of new scripts I’ve been able to finally accomplish, and everything seems to fall into place. I’m going to launch my own personal site soon, and get ready to announce the main projects I’ve been quietly working on for my own since I left Cornstalker. There’s whole batches of ideas that I wanted to try beforehand that i can now successfully attempt to accomplish.
schoools out, for the wiintterrrrr
Dec 21st
Thank god, school’s done. Well, until February, that is. I’m currently relaxing at a freind’s house, letting him and his brother sate their addiction to various shooters and fighting games on my PS3, which I had left at their house in order for me to concentrate on my studies and finals . I swear, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is has been played more often on my PS3 than any other game thanks to those two. It’s a game that’s aged (for the year or two since i’s been out) quite well. Their current addiction is to go through each and every one of the levels on Terrorist Hunt, trying to beat them on the hardest difficulty setting. Their conversations and arguements while playing games together have been utterly amusing to me, down to brotherly bickering (mocking falsettos being one of their favorite methods over the use of a certain weapon or tactic to use. I might record their arguments and have it overlaid recordings of their gameplay, once I get the necessary equipment.
There are no plans for classes for winter inter-session for me- i personally don’t like it, but i haven’;t been able to do any major work on my own projects during the semester, but i hope to get this time to get the projects done. I’m writing up proposals and such for the projects, as they’re going to require quite a bit of manpower. I hate talking like this in a vague sense, but I’m waiting until deals are finished and some major work is done and out of the way before i start talking about things.
Some of the projects i’ve been working on have had me searching for the proper CMS engines to build upon. While I don’t want to build an outright blog and have a chronological order to all the data, I’d rather have a hybrid of sorts- to hold the information I wish in a spacial order, but have a front page blog that can keep people updated on the overall information on the site. Well, only heavy testing will help me turn out results of any kind, really.
Oh yeah, I turned 21. Go me.