DAILY MONSTER 90 (of 100)

Good morning. How are you? Did you have a nice Valentine's Day? I hope so!
Please check out yesterday's stories of love and happiness:

Monster 90 had some technical difficulties. Some of you may have noticed the strange hiss on yesterday's monster. Well, here's the story: I filmed monsters 88 through 99 as a batch. It takes me quite a bit of time to do the animations and I still have to do a full day's worth of paying work on the side, so filming a few monsters at a time is the only thing I can do to stay ahead of the curve.

Now, the problem is that I upgraded from iMovie whateveritwas to iMovie HD on this new batch. (Because iMovie mysteriously stopped working.) The new version looks the same as before and works the same as before. Except... there are some new default settings I didn't know about. For one thing, unless you opt out, iMovie filters the audio from the camera to cancel out ambient noise. And what sounds just like ambient noise? The Daily Monster signature Sharpie noise.

I didn't realize it while it was filming, but all the good marker sounds got almost entirely muffled. I tried for hours to find the perfect EQ curve, the correct gain setting, just the right amplification setting in SoundEdit to restore the sound. You heard the result on yesterday's creature. Huge hiss. So today I actually tried to Foley the noise---recreating it on a separate track. This takes time, but I know you love that Sharpie noise and you deserve nothing less than squishy goodness.

I'll have to foley the rest of the monsters day by day. It would be much faster to just do new creatures, but hey... these are good monsters and they deserve to live and make good noises. So I'm doing what has to be done. I thought I'd tell you about the process, because sometimes work doesn't work out and we have to improvise a bit and that's life, too.

Along those lines, Charles commented on the new poster frames that now feature almost finished monsters. This is something that came from the team at Revver, who are cool guys who work hard and meant well. But I agree with Charles that it screws up the surprise of the clips, so I've asked them to change the poster frames to something at the beginning of the clip. (I can't set them myself.) They're friends of the monsters over there and I'm sure they'll fix the problem quickly. I tried using the YouTube feed, which isn't nearly as nice and crisp as the Revver feed, but YouTube selects a frame from the middle of the clip and spoils the surprise, too. So all I can say is, plase avert your eyes before you hit play. And if that doesn't work, I promise to at least keep the animations a little surprise. (I'm really sorry about all the hickups. What is with these constant tech issues right now? Why are the computer gods angry with me?)

OK. Now that I've dragged you through all my geek woes in great detail,
do please let me know what you think Monster 90 is up to.
He's certainly mysterious, isn't he? What's his secret?

I hope you'll have a great Thursday! Even with technical difficulties
you can always count on the fact that 344 LOVES YOU

P.S.: What do recreated monster sounds look like?
The foley session for Monster 90 resulted in this abstract piece of art: