MusicShake

I was contemplating purchasing some midi instruments to help create some of my own music for use in my short films and videos and a friend of mine pointed me to MusicShake.

I have to say that I was quite impressed with their software. Within 20 minutes of playing around on their site, I created this piece. This means it will take even less time to create future pieces. I was ecstatic with it. (To learn how to actually make the music go here.)

But now comes the problem with this site. After you make your music, you have to come to terms with the following:
1. This music does not belong to you
2. If you wish to use it for personal purposes, you need to pay $0.99
3. If you wish to use it for commercial purposes, you need to pay $19.99
4. If somebody else purchases your music for personal purposes you get to keep 10% of $0.99
5. If somebody else purchases you music for commercial purposes, you get to keep 30% of $19.99.

All I know is that after I made my music and wanted to download it and found out all of the above stuff, I felt quite cheated. I wonder if these people think filmmakers are stupid. There is so much free stuff around. I wonder who is paying them anything. If you are paying MusicShake for these services, let me know why. I really would like to know.

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Bong of the Dead

Thomas Newman, a filmmaker from British Columbia, Canada, made a film with $5,000, a lot of blood, sweat and tears about zombies and pot. I haven’t seen the film yet, but remember reading about it a month or two ago. The film had been accepted to Cannes. There were some rave reviews about how the film was genius, simply from a marketing point of view. It combined two genres into one and had a name that was catchy and recognizable.

I thought about it some and agreed. The real reason I actually liked the idea of the movie was that I had personally just arrived at the same conclusion, and was kicking around in my head the idea of a movie about pot smokers, zombies and terrorists. Since Newman had come to this conclusion 5 years before me (it took him 5 years to complete this project), I naturally thought he was a genius. I kept tabs on him and showed people here in Toronto his trailer whenever I got the chance.

Recently I wrote to Newman asking him about how things were going. As I suspected, things are tough. Not only has the man finished his film, now he has to make sure that he is promoting it with all his bloody might, as well as making a living and paying bills. I was wondering if I should ask him about his deal with his distributor, but I refrained from asking him and he didn’t bring it up. But here’s what he did say:

It was hard enough to make my movie with no money, now having to promote it and keep it alive is even harder! I think the reason I’ve been able to keep the hype alive for almost 4 years is because I never give up. I promote myself and my movie daily!
…
I’ve been promoting my film since 2008 and I have easily sent out over 10000 emails to anyone and everyone who could make a difference. That’s how my film went global and is now featured in 4 major film magazines! There are no real secrets, just good old hard work and dedication. I’ve now managed to have contacted every horror film website in the world! All by spending everyday emailing hundreds and promoting myself.

 
I sincerely hope that things become even better for Newman. I hope to follow what’s going on with Bong of the Dead. I just found out while reading his blog as I was writing this, that his film has now been pirated and been released over torrent sites. In fact I just checked, and it seems like it is absolutely red hot and being downloaded and seeded by everybody.

Newman was lamenting in his blog post that such a situation is unfortunate as it does not allow him to profit from his movie and forces him to labor at his day job. I completely agree. I only hope that in the event that this movie doesn’t make him money, it at least makes him famous. Maybe that will lead to the coveted phone call we all dream of: “Mr Newman?… Yeah hi… This is Hollywood. We got a script and a budget, and your name came up…”

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How to Install an Internal Hard Drive on Windows 7

If you don’t want to read my brilliant literary intro and just want to head to the solution, it’s down a couple of paragraphs.

Since I work with HD video, I need a lot of hard drive space. I’ve been accumulating terabytes of external hard drives, but they make the floors look a mess and they require USB and power chord and power outlet management by a skilled electrician.

So I bought a couple of cheap Seagate 2TB internal hard drives recently and screwed them into the removable drive bays on my desktop. I’m using windows 7 and expected them to be picked up the moment I put the drive bays back in and restarted my computer. But they weren’t recognized by my computer. I looked all over the internet and everything told me to go into the BIOS and set to “auto detect.” I followed all the instructions and still nothing.

Finally I found the solution and thought I would just post it below:

Solution:

This is for adding secondary non boot-able drives only
- First, turn off your computer and physically install hard drive
- Then go to Control Panel, click on System and Security, click on Administrative Tools, and then double click on Computer Management.

On the left, under Storage, click Disk Management.

You will now be able to see the installed disk. It will say “Disk 1″ or something similar, and I think it will say “unallocated” Right-click on the unallocated region, and then click New Simple Volume.

In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next.

Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next.

It’s best to accept the default options, including suggested drive letters, and then finish up.

That’s it. It’s that simple. Caused me two days of google headache.

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