RetroRoadTrips

I was initially thinking that I would title this entry ‘Greek farce’ as Greek tragedy, however I might be feeling, seems a tad melodramatic. But then Greek farce sounds more Carry On than stressful, and this has been a stressful month. The usual suspects - computer and technical problems. I won’t bore you (overmuch) with the details - the basic complications have been that all the printed material designs that I had produced were incompatible with the printer’s equipment, necessitating a complete redesign using Adobe’s InDesign. This is software I don’t have, can’t afford and am too inexperienced to use, meaning that I had to use outside help (always costly). The ensuing Technical Tip is that though Apple’s iWorks Pages does wonderful tricks for a £55 software, the end result can really only be printed on a home printer.

The second difficulty has been the continuing problems with my computer. This requires finding ways to deal with ongoing, incomprehensible malfunctions rather than installing a software upgrade (which would be Final Cut Studio in my case, but never change programmes in mid-project is the generally accepted guideline). As the problems involve all sorts of nasties - the computer locking up quite suddenly and then refusing to restart or even boot from the back up Hard Drive, etc, etc - I’ve had to react quite radically. This has meant using Disk Warrior on an almost daily basis. At least I’ve lost some weight this way, though it’s not a diet plan I would recommend.

But perhaps Big Hearted Jim put in a word for me as I’m pleased to report that all the above hasn’t actually stopped the project in its tracks - just made it take longer. Within a few hours I will be going to the printer to collect the printed material. And the DVD only needs a minor adjustment to be ready for copying. There is still the need to set up a web site shop and this, from my preliminary research, will still require another steep learning curve. But the tally of jobs to completion really is shrinking. I’ll hope to update this post later today and maybe even indicate a likely completion date. A collective gasp all round, I’m sure - and, as always, thank you all for your patience.

I’ve collected from the printer and am pleased to report that a good job has been done (so thanks to Andrew and his team at KallKwik). I’m especially pleased with the booklet. The aim is to provide you with an entertaining read, in addition to a pleasant viewing experience.

So a completion date? There’s the web site shop, and the t shirt and print series to organise, but the end of September (or early October) does now sound like it’s a distinct possibility. In the meantime, a week of walking in the Derbyshire Dales seems a fair recompense for the roller coaster ride (a Russian Mountain in colloquial French) of this last month, and my wife and I are looking forward to that. More soon, I hope.

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As the childhood lament goes: ‘Are we having fun yet?’, and just as predictably the short answer is No. This has been compounded by my granddaughter catching Chicken Pox (good), though in a world where everyone works that very rapidly also becomes ‘All hands to the pumps!’ But before I report the bare bones of the latest technical conundrums, here is a small sign of progress - a pack shot (several, in fact, though one here will do - and many thanks to Ian Blantern). The value of such an image is to reassure myself that I’m not completely delusional - the DVD, Soundtrack CD, Booklet and iPhone CD all do exist. As you will see from the range of items, there is quite a lot of packaging printing to be undertaken.

The latest round of fun has to do with getting this packaging material printed. In the last post I mentioned preparing the material - the need to be exact and clear for the printer. What I hadn’t foreseen is that a pdf is not a universal standard, a mistaken notion on my part it would seem. So the current Ho Ho is that graphics produced on a Mac and translated to pdf do not work to full spec on a Windows machine at the printers. Anyway, I’ve now found a printer who has a Mac connected to their laser printer (quite a rarity, and this is a world of graphics?) and will know by early next week if the work will be of acceptable quality. If so it will be full speed ahead and don’t even think about what it costs.

However, all is not lost to the stasis of that perpetual ‘meantime’. I’ve been experimenting with creating a series of prints from the Road Dreams archive as an additional way to represent some of these diary moments. It has occurred to me before that I do rather use the film camera like a still camera. Not in the sense of being static - I rather pride myself on moving the camera itself, as well as shooting from a moving car - but through collecting single scenes in the manner of a still photographer. These are Super 8 frame grabs so the technical quality has a distinct set of limitations attached compared to a still camera, but the images, especially when printed on Art Photo Paper, do seem to have a special quality. I’ll offer a series of signed prints in the website shop when it’s open, so visitors can decide for themselves. Here’s a couple of examples, though it should be noted that these online versions lack the texture of the finished print and they are also screen grabs of frame grabs.

And here’s what one looks like in an A4 size frame on the mantelpiece.

The other positive, though slightly more long term news (next Autumn) is I’m pleased to report that Susan Gross has agreed (in principle, at least) to provide a new Homepage image for the website in the form of a map of America. I won’t try to describe the likely outcome, though I’ve admired Susan’s work for many years. She has a particular style which is full of colour (hardly surprising someone weaned on Kodachrome would respond to that) and fluid shapes. You can have a look for yourselves - www.susangross.com (Go to the Classic site section - left hand column - and view the Hay House, Woman on a Nickel and Peaches illustrations.) This supposes that they get can just get through the fire season in Northern California. In England we do tend to overlook the fact that they have some very extreme weather in the States. On which note I shall take the day off tomorrow and go - gratefully - for a walk with my wife in the rainy Gloucestershire countryside. And if there is enough time (the life span variety) I hope to eventually construct a website devoted to visiting country churches. Last week we came across the grave of Colonel Chard, the hero (one of several) of Rourke’s Drift - more commonly identified in contemporary times as Stanley Baker in the film Zulu.

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I’m afraid the reference to a meltdown doesn’t refer to relaxed time in the sun; rather to the computer sort. No point in going on about it, though it’s next to impossible to feel sanguine as it happens. The minor good news is the discovery of how effective Disk Warrior is as a repair software - I can’t recommend it enough - but the problems go beyond that level of recovery alone and so I must devote time to sorting those out. So more of the one step forward, two steps back timeline.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. I’m able to report that both the DVD and iPhone CD are ready - and masters exist off the computer! I’ve also invested in a DVD burner and can now start preparing batches of both discs - the soundtrack CD has been ready for quite some time. Though I say it myself, these images do look good - either on the iPhone/iPod touch screen, or on a television. This might be a useful point to underscore how much of a positive improvement uprezzing DVD players add to the quality of an image. Super 8 is hardly going to be able to compete in the High Definition world, but at £70 for an uprezzing DVD player (I have the Sony DVP-NS76H model) and a television set with an HDMI connector, the improvement over standard DVD images is marked. Why spring for a BluRay player when your DVD collection can be given a new lease of life this way?

This still leaves preparing all the design and graphics for the printer - DVD covers and inserts and so on. It’s quite a job, requiring me to finish up with pdfs with no glitches or misalignments that I can simply hand to the printer. Here is where the meltdown moment gets in the way. On to the next set of software incomprehension. After that it will be necessary to set up a shop on the web site - this is not a simple task - but then, with that complete, it will FINALLY be time to offer the RetroRoadTrips short films for sale. When that day comes it will be the occasion for - a quick beer - and starting work on the full length version of Codachrome - a time of road dreams. I did read a quote from Ovid recently that seems to have some bearing on this project (all 40 years of it), ‘When death comes, let him find me at my work.’ The older I get, the more I hope that will be the case (though not anytime soon, if you don’t mind)).

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The good news is that I’ve established that Plan #73* will fit on the final DVD. This means the 13 tracks of RetroRoadTrips and Plan #73 combine to provide 77 mins of programming, and that’s with the audio in full AIFF (rather than compressed AAC) format.

* Plan #73 is 26′ long, and continues the road film diary approach used in Road Dreams, though based on driving a 3 ton van around Europe in the ’80s. I’ve been able to add a range of new fx to the soundtrack - though this has been, as always, a time consuming task.

The process has not been without the usual range of technical trials and tribulations. I had exported the tracks from Final Cut Pro in QuickTime Movie format, only to discover that 41″ of the audio was missing from the soundtrack. The usual Ho Ho. The workaround (for any of you with similar problems) was to change Current Settings to the DV PAL 48KHz setting, though this is not anything that one can discover in a manual. After this glitch was fixed I discovered that the audio goes out of synch over a 10′ encode in DVD Studio Pro 4. I’m debating whether I should change my name to Sisyphus Bristow. But I now have all the material on a DVD - it works - and, though I say it myself, looks pretty good. Perhaps all this somewhat obsessive attention to detail has been worth it. However, this is not the project completed. I need to set the Play All button on the DVD and this seemingly minor task is not one I can solve. So I must try and locate some professional help to sort it out.

While I was waiting for all these lengthy encodes to run their course this provided the opportunity to start on a major cull of the 22 hours of Road Dreams footage, with the aim of establishing a collection of stills. Some of these are incorporated in this weblog. At the rate established so far, there should be well over a thousand stills by the time I’ve culled the full 22 hours.

Depending on how soon I can get some help for the DVD details, I hope to post more news within a couple of weeks.

Thanks, as ever, for your continuing interest.

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I’m well aware that today is April Fools’ Day, though have made no apple pie beds myself. All the same, how about this for a catch phrase or sub-text to describe Road Dreams - ‘Far superior to Prozac’. It came as a third hand quote in an email. Perhaps the t shirt would be the location to place it? Nothing like claiming to have a more positive effect than one of the most widely ingested drugs known to mankind.

This last month has seen a bit of a production detour, though not an aimless one. I’ve now completed a box set of RetroRoadTrips iPod files. The impulse for this arose from having acquired my own iPod touch (after having previously borrowed my neighbour’s). The screen size has been something of a revelation where the quality of the image is concerned. There is no intention to move away from the PAL DVD production - DVD is for shared viewing and the iPod for the solo sort (and the DVD set will contain both types anyway, on separate discs) - but the iPod touch experience did set me to thinking about how I might set about trying to publicise the RetroRoadTrips project when the website shop is open. For a site that has had no deliberate publicity efforts made on its behalf it really does quite nicely, but an extra effort will have to be made to coincide with the shop opening. Putting together an NTSC DVD is just too time consuming and costly (at least until Codachrome is finished). So the partial epiphany was that an iPod disc would be a way to mail out demos, especially to America (where Road Dreams has never been seen). Here’s a couple of images of what the box looks like. (I’m well aware that I’m unlikely to develop a career as a pack shot photographer.)

The technical details of what encoding formula works best - the trade off between file size and quality - are, as usual, hardly worth recounting (other than mentioning the, by now, standard mental seizures it all engenders - plus the time taken to sort it all out!). My solution has been to provide three different file types on the one Data DVD, to address those two objectives separately. Let the viewers decide for themselves is the aim.

And thank you to those of you who leave comments from time to time - it helps to establish that these entries do get read. I also occasionally come across other strands regarding Road Dreams, and here’s one that I read recently. An appreciative nod to Nige of the Old Hangar.

I hope to post a much shorter list of ‘jobs to completion’ within a few weeks.

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I’m afraid it’s taken a while to get well - one of the drawbacks to getting older. But I’m able to report that all thirteen tracks have now been finished, at least to the point of having the four fresh music tracks installed and all thirteen now have the cleaning process complete (at least for the DVD versions). This is a time consuming job of pure tedium - each scene has to have five different - and changing - parameters set before encoding. However, I’m not in the camp that sees scratches and dirt on film stock as a sign of authenticity - Kodachrome was never designed to look that way, and I prefer to present the image as cleanly as possible. Given that the film was dragged all over America, stored in basements and attics, edited in garden sheds, well - those tribulations have made their film dirt mark. Now the image is much improved. The next stage is to construct the actual DVD.

As I don’t yet know the file size requirements for the thirteen tracks, it’s not yet possible to say if there will be spare space left on the DVD. Rather than the 1st 14′ of Codachrome (as mentioned on the site), I’m hoping that there will be room for Plan No 73 - harmless rebellions of middle age, a 26′ programme I made in 1999 that uses footage from driving around England and the Continent in a 3 ton van I owned at the time. I will post any developments later.

I’ve established that the film looks great on an iPod Touch. I was able to borrow my neighbour’s to run a test and I was most pleased with the quality of the image (much sharper than these rather crude stills would indicate). This has some bearing on the production tasks as I will be providing a separate CD (to the DVD) with the thirteen tracks already encoded for the iPod. It does require yet another set of tasks, as in the ongoing struggle to keep the image quality as good as it can be I’ve had to prepare two versions of the films. I won’t go into the endless technicalities here - but it boils down to the fact that the iPod versions are 4% larger than the DVD versions, and that 4% difference is important enough to require separate versions to be produced.

And a t shirt! What self-respecting website shop doesn’t have a t shirt on offer.

Actually, the thought behind the idea is that Road Dreams is an unusual entity in some respects, at least in the way the series disappeared from view for so many years. During the Channel 4 showings it was getting viewing figures of 500,000 an episode, with quite a few of those viewers feeling that it was something special. The vast majority of them have long given up on tracking it down - it’s a fairly new development to be able to locate me via the web. (Until fairly recently I had no idea the series had made such an impression.) So the thought is, just perhaps by wearing your Road Dreams t shirt (at least in the UK), who knows what reaction or contact you may establish? Maybe a role like the passage in On The Road where Kerouac writes ‘We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess … across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking towards us with the Word’. Or then again, you might be set upon by a baying mob. At least you would be likely to generate some response.

Now I have to improve my skills with DVD Studio Pro 4.

Elliott

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I thought I would attach an image of my study for this post. As you can see there is very little spare space, which should be viewed as a form of positive, indicating that there are many tasks in the process of completion.

Since the last post I can report that collecting the new fx is now complete - 216 new fx for later use in the full length version of Codachrome. Only £624 in the Sale (to give you an idea of how costly film production, even at this level, can be).

The design of the audio CD and DVD packaging is complete - and an initial batch of audio CDs has been produced, using LightScribe. Below are some rather basic images, to give some idea of the look.

Unfortunately, the annual, winter illness has also arrived and I need a few days to deal with that. At least lying in bed has given me the opportunity to read the story of how the Oxford English Dictionary came into being. It seems that took from 1858 to 1928, so I have a bit of leeway (just kidding - I want this stage of the task completed as much as anyone). As soon as I have arisen from my sick bed I expect to pick up the pace considerably.

Elliott

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I’m sorry to have to report that the completion date for the RetroRoadTrips DVD package is still in the ‘tantalisingly close’ category. It’s in the nature of the self-funded, one man in a room type of operation (of which my project can definitely be said to fit) that work nearly always gets sidelined by events, mainly through software and technical hurdles that appear from nowhere. I only spend about 10% of my time on what could be called creative activity - the rest is devoted to problem solving.

So, rather than suggest actual completion dates, I think from now on that it will be less frustrating if I outline the tasks I’m dealing with and then update the list regularly as I progress. I have no idea whether this is at all interesting to anyone - my hope is that at least these details will indicate that I do work on the project on a daily basis, that I am as keen to get the RetroRoadTrips DVD completed as anyone, and am not down at the pub evading my chores.

1. The (excellent) Sound Effects Library are having a sale that finishes at the end of January. I now put much store in adding fx to the soundtrack (to flesh out the mute Super 8 film), so will have to go through all six episodes of Road Dreams with a fine tooth comb to establish the range of fx I would like to acquire - then start the quite lengthy process of searching for, and auditioning, fx from their collection. The cost savings mean that I must take advantage of the Sale. This is at least a week’s work, maybe more.

2. Finish designing the graphics for the DVD and audio CD. Most of the designs are complete, though I have to establish quite how to translate these into file form for the printer. I use a software called Discus - and very effective it is in combining text, images and graphics - but there are indications that the exported files for the printer are not sized at 100%, even though a straight A4 print is correct. A problem to solve.

3. The DVD Booklet. Write the 3rd anecdote; add images to the booklet; design the layout; and provide a compatible file for the printer. I’ve been using Pages in iWorks 08 - a brand new software for me.

4. Four of the music tracks have been remixed during the last few weeks (at Dave Pick’s ffg studio near Tewksbury). These were four of RiK Loveridge’s collection. Rik has, as he always does, come up with some wonderful sounds. I consider him in the same category as the late Simon Jeffes (whose music I used in Road Dreams). It’s not that he writes Penguin Cafe Orchestra clone music - his sound is entirely his own, but they both have distinctive musical voices. François (Godefroy) is no mean talent, either. I consider myself extremely lucky to have the chance to work with both of them. There are thirteen tracks chosen for this RRT audio CD (selections can be listened to on the site’s Music page), but a total of 27 tracks have been almost finished for use in the full length ‘Codachrome - a time of road dreams’.

5. These four music tracks have to be relaid to the Final Cut Pro Timeline, and each complete film re-encoded.

6. Finish the process of ‘cleaning’ the film, using CHV software. This requires each clip to have five separate parameters set. There are still five of the DVD tracks to be tackled (eight have been completed), as well as all thirteen of the iPod tracks (these versions use a different aspect ratio frame filter to the DVD ones - I don’t think I can simply layer the one set of filters from one to the equivalent version, though that has yet to be researched).

7. Finish encoding all these tracks, ready for export to DVD Studio Pro.

8. Set up the DVD master, with layout and button interoperability. I need to get up to speed with DVD Studio Pro 4 for this.

9. Physically produce the DVDs and audio CDs myself, at least to start with. The estimates received for the sort of production runs required to justify commercial work make this a cost that can’t yet be born. As part of this, I need to become proficient at creating LightScribe designs.

10. Do the final set of changes to the website, to include a functioning shop mainly. This requires setting up a merchant payment agreement, and also a visit from Aidan O’Rourke, who has been instrumental in helping me establish the website to date.

And with that all done I shall be able to email those of you who have asked to be notified, and also to place a large sign on the Homepage saying DVD READY.

That might even justify a topping out ceremony.

Thank you all for your interest over the while.

Elliott

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Seasons Greetings and a thank you to all who have shown an interest in this site.

A brief update is that the late January completion date is looking likely - the tasks still to finish are mainly connected to physically producing the DVD (including the design, printing and packaging - still a lot of work), as well as setting up a shop on the site. In addition to the DVD, the iPod disc, and the audio CD of the soundtrack music, I’m working on a booklet that will also be included. This will feature some Road Dreams anecdotes in greater detail than the spoken narration normally allows. Hopefully these stories will entertain, and also provide a wider view of what a life on the road was like at the time.

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November 21st 2007

I’m afraid the delivery date of late November for the DVD has had to be pushed back. The type of technology tasks required for the production have a nasty habit of throwing up fresh hurdles. Currently I’m working on a process that removes much of the dirt and hair blemishes that had transferred from the original Super8 film to video during telecine. It’s quite a time consuming operation (each film clip needs five separate parameters to be set), though is well worth the effort as the images are quite a bit cleaner as a result. Viewers of the earlier Road Dreams series especially will see a marked improvement in image quality. And this is all before the actual DVD production run - with an NTSC version requiring a further set of changes again (the PAL version will be released before this).

I do apologise for the delay - and hope to have the PAL DVD ready in late January.

In the meantime, by way of a small recompense, the website will shortly - November 30th - have two more short films and a Frame Grab slideshow added.

Elliott Bristow

November 21st 2007

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