Blade Edge

Computer software | Video production | My life in general

Blade Edge main header

More Stunts!

October 6th, 2005 · Stuntwork

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Here’s a short video of me doing some high falls, wire work and rappelling. The wire rig was constructed as part of a stunt I was doing with a friend for Fright Fest – we had a full-body harness hidden under a sweatshirt and a rope noose attached to the wire so it looked like we were being hung as we got pulled up ~35 feet into the air. The stunt was rigged to the bottom of the log flume ride, which was about 45 feet tall at that point. The shots of me going up is not the stunt we did, that’s just us playing with a waist harness. Yes, the Batman Begins reference is obvious 😛 Then we rappelled off the 45′ section of the log flume, and did high falls off the 35′ section. That was insane. It never looks high until you’re actually up there

Enjoy!

Falls ‘n Wires (1:19 – via MySpace Video)

→ No CommentsTags:··

Fright Fest Weekend

October 2nd, 2005 · Stuntwork

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So Fright Fest has opened at Six Flags Great Adventure this weekend. I’m supposed to be flying on a wire rig over at the Haunted Hollow, but something happened Thursday after I left the park to coach. It seems the test weights had fallen off the rig while they were ascending, yet both the loops on the weights and the aircraft cable that supports whatever is on the rig were intact, and the caribeaner supposedly was intact as well. This is all based on accounts of the people that were there at the time. We’re going to be testing it out again tomorrow to see what happens.

What I’m supposed to be doing is getting yanked about 30-35 feet staright up into the air. The Haunted Hallows is a trail that people travel along in groups at a time and lots of scary things pop out and are around and stuff like that. At one point an actor in the group dressed like me will get scared and run off into a stand of tall catstails. I’ll be waiting on the other side out of sight hooked into the rig. As soon as he comes through they cue lights and sfx and release the counterwieghts and I get lifted up into the air with a light above me making it look like I’ve been abducted by aliens. Then I get winched back down and wait for the next group. And up and down and up and down…. we’ll see how fast it gets boring 😛 The counterweight is 250lbs and I only weigh about 150lbs so it’ll be a nice quick ascent.

Soooo since that wasn’t up and running this weekend I was an audio technician for the fire show that was being held in the Batman Stunt Show arena. Two brothers, one of whom was a thug in this year’s Batshow, put on the fire show. They breathe fire, use a staff with both ends lit up, twirling chains with wicks lit up at the ends, juggling fire and a fire whip. The fire whip is the best – whenever it cracks the fluid the whip is soaked in comes flying off and produces a fireball.

Next week hopefully I’ll have time (if I’m in the wire rig) to make it over between their shows and have them teach me some stuff. I already know I can whirl the chains, I’ve done that before with lightsticks on the end of string – but I don’t know how to do the fire breathing. Well, I know how they do it – put the fluid in their mouth and blow really hard on the torches – but it’s obviously more complex than that. I mean first off you have to prep yourself to hold the fluid in your mouth, and then you have to know the blowing technique so that the flame doesn’t travel back along the stream of fluid and ignites your mouth. I meant to bring my camera with me to the park tonight but I forgot due to previous events in the day…. but we’ll save that for a later entry, once I get the video from my girlfriend.

Righty then – stay tuned! I’ll be playing with fire soon enough!

→ No CommentsTags:·

Crapola

September 30th, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

My hard drive got screwed up somehow, and I don’t know how. No viruses or serious spyware/adware popped up on my last weekly check this past Sunday. The comp was on for 3 days but that’s nothing unusual, although I did have eMule running constantly throughout to download stuff. Maybe the strain on the drive? Doubtful, yea.

I dunno. All I know is that when I finally decided to restart the comp to clean things up the hard drive light wouldn’t go out once I got into Windows and started up Trillian – and I couldn’t get the Task Manager up to cancel the task. So I finally ran a disk check on my C: drive, which took all night. It listed a lot of fixes, so something was definetly amiss.

Now I’m back up and running…. sorta. I lost a lot of my bookmarks in Firefox, more than half, and I can’t run any MS Office apps, I get an error saying I have to reinstall Office. That’s all I’ve discovered so far though. Still, I guess it’s time to reformat the computer *sigh*

At least I can recover data, I’m thankful for that since I’ve slacked on my back ups of late.

→ No CommentsTags:

Okay, the videos are in!

September 28th, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Last week, the gym was a madhouse, and I had neglected to bring my camera. This week I did, and of course nothing crazy went on last night. Of course.

Still, I took some videos of me playing some more Add A Trick, and I had my buddy Sash do that tramp trick with me again so I could capture that. So here we go…

Okay, this is an add a trick game that was pretty rough. One of my friends had just started throwing his front 1 and 3/4 and double porpoise so we were doing a lot of games with those tricks in them. Allow me to commentate. In this clip, I started with a front flip with an extra 3/4 rotation to my back. Next I did a double porpoise, which is two rotations off my back and landing on my back again. Then I did a single porpoise. Now – after that I was supposed to do another double porpoise… but something went wrong 😛 I rotate so fast on my double that I over-rotated my single. So when I sat up for my next double, I had no rotation. But I just pulled reeeeelly hard and managed to make it to my back. Yes, it looks like I landed on my head, but I did in fact clear it (just barely). That’s my buddy Sasha leaping into the air in terror. I do this all the time

Add a trick part 1 (via MySpace Video)

So another round went by and two tricks were added by my friends: a cradle (from back, sit up and turn to back) and another double porpoise. Yea that last one was Sash. He’s evil. So this was my best attempt:

Add a trick part 2 (via MySpace Video)

As you can see I made the double porpoise better this time and kicked to the cradle, but when I tried to double out of that it sent me off the tramp. Doh!! My other two tries didn’t pan out either.

Moving on. I tried doing the full-twisting front flip 1 and 3/4 that I did last week but didn’t commit again and landed on my side all mangled. Just wasn’t enough people around forcing me to throw big. So I tossed a few fliffuses instead, which are double front flips with a half twist:

Fliffus (via MySpace Video)

And finally the highlight of the evening, that 180 spin thing I told you about last week. Now, I dunno where the hell Sash thought he was going, but he went up, when you’re supposed to be going horizontal. I had to grab him with like both arms to bring him back down on the tramp 😛 Now you’ll see why you have to really trust the person you’re doing it with – if we didn’t catch arms he would gone into a pillar and I would have face planted on the floor. But we didn’t and it looked awesome so enjoy

180 Flat Spin (via MySpace Video)

Okay that’s all for me right now. I get my motorcycle back tomorrow and I’m going to be doing Fright Fest at the park starting this weekend, so if you’re in Jersey (or the tri-state area even) come on out for the biggest halloween party ever!

→ No CommentsTags:

I’m Konfabulated

September 25th, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I finally spent some time this weekend installing Konfabulator and browsing the entire widgets gallery in search of ones useful to me. Here’s what I ended up with:

Wallspose

This widget changes my wallpaper for me every day at midnight. That’s what I have it set for anyways. It could change my wallpaper twice a day every day too or whatever I want it but one wallpaper a day is all I need. It did mess things up a little bit tho since I have two monitors. I have a pic of my girlfriend on my 1280×1024 Samsung and a pic of my stunt show on my 1280×800 laptop screen. When I started using Wallspose, the pic of my girl on my larger screen would resize to my laptop screen, squishing the picture. So I had to switch up which screen held which image.

The Weather

I took out Forecast Fox from Firefox and replaced it with this weather widget on my desktop. Saved me some room in my Firefox status bar. Plus I like how this widget looks over the Forcast Fox graphics.

WiFi Signal

This widget tells me the strength of my wifi signal. However it’s more for the fact that sometimes when I restart my computer my Linksys wireless usb adapter sometimes doesn’t connect to my comp through my usb hub (I think the adapter’s usb plug is a bit faulty) so this will tell me right away if the adapter didn’t hook up when I start the comp.

Stay_Updated!

This widget you can’t see until there’s a new or updated widget in the Konfabulator widget gallery. It pops up in the upper-left hand corner of my screen when a the gallery updates.

Power XP

Lockdown, Hibernate, Shut Off and Restart right there on the desktop. Very convenient, saves me a few keystrokes. Yes I am extremely lazy.

Comix

I can’t remember the last time I read comics in the newspaper. It’s just not a part of my daily routine anymore. Now I can read em everyday. Yippeee!

That’s all i got for now – my SystemMetrix bar there on the right takes care of a lot of the other widgets I would otherwise have. I’m not a fan of clutter on the desktop, and this is just about as much as I can stand.

Pick up Konfabulator if you haven’t already, plenty of helpful widgets out there, and now that Yahoo bought it, it’s free!

→ No CommentsTags:

Crazy Gym Night

September 20th, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

I’m going to be kicking myself for a long time. I recall thinking about bringing my camera with me to the gym when I left tonight and deciding not to bother. But it turns out that tonight was one of those nights when shit goes all to hell.

For starters, a bunch of people from the Batshow and other Six Flags shows are there, so they’re going crazy. Like five of them at once all jumped on the large rope hanging from the ceiling and swung around – we were afraid it was going to break off the ceiling! Then they placed barrels standing up (like pillars) in a line along the floor from smallest to tallest and a bunch of other taller mats (like trapezoids) and proceeded to run up the barrels and the mats and jump into the foam pit. Only problem was barrels placed like that are extremely unstable, so there was many a crazy tumble as the barrels flew out from under their feet and they landed akimbo. Some made it though. It was great to watch. I didn’t try it myself – I prefer to hurt myself in other ways.

So while those guys are all flipping out and killing themselves, I’m over on the trampoline (where I usually am) tossing some mad tricks in Add A Trick. The highlight of the night was the game with the gainers. When you “gain” in a flip, you travel backwards while flipping forward or forwards while flipping backwards. So I start a game with a front flip gainer. Then two other people add normal front flips. So I come back in for my turn and add a back flip gainer. So now you’re all over the trampoline. Then my buddy Sasha adds a 1 and 3/4 flip to back out of the back flip gainer. However I call him on technicality – he really wasn’t gaining enough. I was traveling across the entire damn trampoline and he was gaining maybe a foot in either direction. Nuh-uh. So he conceded that game (tho he refused to admit complete defeat) and I actually beat him for the first time in my life.

So we take a little break and the Six Flags guys are now going crazy on the tramps. So Sash goes over and tells them about this trick you can do with two people on the tramp. You stand on opposite ends and face each other offset. You bounce at the same time and count to 3 (or whatever) and then leap forward past each other, only while you’re passing you hook arms at the elbow and do a flat 180 degree spin to your stomachs. I had never done that before but Sash had me demonstrate with him and it was AMAZING. Totally effortless – you just launch yourself forward, hook arms and you naturally spin out to your stomachs. It was great. Of course, you better trust the other guy to hook in with you cause otherwise you’d fly off the tramp and mangle yourself 😛

So that was a blast. Then we get back into some more add a trick and Sash ends up throwing a full twisting front 1 and 3 – which is 1 and 3/4 flips to your back with a full twist during the flip. I got called out to perform it so naturally I rose to the occasion. I half-mangled myself on my first attempt, but then I did a perfect one. Then I kinda messed up again and then I did two more (you always have to do 3 of a new trick, cause the first one is luck, the second is chance, and the third is skill). So I’ll definetly be tossing more of those to get comfortable with it. New trick!! Whooo!

Besides those highlights, we had the usual gamut of people missing tricks and landing all messy and that’s just great to watch and laugh at. And of course we finished off the night with a mad crazy Denny’s outing, as always.

Holy crap why’s it gotta be 5am? I have to wake up in 5 hours. But what a fun night. I’m bringing my camera with me to the gym every freaking night from now on, and I’m definetly reliving some of tonight’s moments next week so I can capture them on film. So stay tuned!!

→ No CommentsTags:

No Shit, Sherlock

September 18th, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So my girl and I drove into town to get some lunch – she wanted some Japanese but the place was closed – we forgot it was a Sunday. It’s open for dinner though so we may go back in a little bit. Anyways it was next door to this bus terminal and I noticed a bunch of lights and stuff set up and at first I thought they were doing a photo shoot but I figured, in a bus terminal? Then I heard the clapper go off and knew it was a movie shoot. So after grabbing some quick lunch at Subway next door I went to check it out (Heather was too shy :P). I walked up to the security guard and asked him, “So, what are they shooting today?” and he looked at me and said “a movie”. And I just stared at him for a few seconds hoping he would elaborate because, uhm… of course they were shooting a damn movie. But he didn’t so I just gave him a “you’re a moron” look and went to watch the filming for a bit. It must have been a high-budget indie movie because there were no big name actors and the equipment was definetly high-end. So it was cool. Too bad it wasn’t an action scene or something – I’da found that stunt coordinator right away and introduced myself – or tried to at least.

Dumb security guard…

→ No CommentsTags:

Not Fair

September 18th, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I’m up in Vermont right now visiting my girlfriend at her college. It takes an entire tank of gas for me to get up here (and for her to get home), so when I was in the area of her college I pulled up to the pump to fill up for… $2.99??? For 89 octane?!? Holy crap!

Now let’s pause from my story for a second and go back a week or so, when she was coming home for the weekend and complaining that gas up in Vermont was more expensive that it was at home.

My how things have changed. I filled up at home for $3.17 a gallon, and now Vermont is cheaper than us in New Jersey. What a twisted little world we live in.

Ah well, so it goes. At least I didn’t have to pay more to get home like I was afraid I would.

Oh and that new Nintendo controller. Looks really cool as far as I’m concerned. I can’t wait to see what they do with Mario Party and that controller. Hells yea

→ No CommentsTags:·

Back in training

September 14th, 2005 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Got up early to go to the DMV today, but my dad got hung up at work and I had a class to teach at 1pm so that didn’t happen. Dammit. I need to change the title on my car over to my dad so that I can go under his insurance and not have to sell my soul in order to cover the cost of full coverage on my own. At least not with my 8 insurance points 😛

But that’s okay, got to stay home and chat with my girl online. Then the mail came and I got an invitation to my dojo’s annual banquet in October. I had almost totally forgot that now that Batman is over and I’m no longer coaching late into the evenings like I do during the summer that I can get back to training martial arts. Wheeee!!

So I stopped by the dojo tonight after coaching to see what’s up. I was one of two students there with Sensei Brown, the other was Mike, who when I last saw him at the beginning of the year was a white belt, and now he’s moved up 6 ranks to a 2nd degree brown belt. Jeebus 😛 Tho he’s a black belt in another form so I can see that his movement through the ranks would be rather fast. Me? I’m still the 6th kyu yellow belt I’ve been for two years, lol.

Since it was just us three, we threw on the pads and did some kumite training, which is sparring. We worked throwing kicks and punches separately, and then worked on combining them. I squared off against Mike and beat him in a match, tho it was one for one for a while. It’s hard to take what you’ve trained and use it for real – Mike may have been a lot higher than me in rank but he hasn’t really fought against anyone much. I kept pushing him out of the ring just by advancing, it was easy to maneuver him around into a corner and then lay on the kicks and punches. He also had that tendency to drop his guard when he threw kicks, which I used to have myself – when people kick a lot of the time they lean into the kick too much and have to drop their arms a bit to counter-balance. I’ve trained myself to throw kicks without leaning back, so I can keep my arms up – tho I did still lean forward a bit sometimes and came down awkward – Sensei prob coulda swept me plenty of times if we were fighting like that 😛 I squared off against Sensei after beating Mike and gave a good showing, tho he ultimately won of course. Still, it was good to be back and kicking some ass on the first day It was humid as hell tho so I was drenched in sweat, the pads of my toes are sore from moving on the floor, and my shin is a little sore too cause Mike and I knocked legs when we both kicked at once, aggravating a bruise I got from Batman. I’ll just wear shin guards next time.

I dunno if I’ll be able to get any programming done tonight since I’m up early again tomorrow for another DMV attempt, but yesterday I got the main game screen for Galaxy Conquest up and running, tho the buttons don’t lead anywhere yet, and I have to fix the transparency layer of the exit button PNG

A little eye candy there for you. K guess that’s it for now. Later.

Bookmark of the Day

Worst Game You Ever Paid For

→ No CommentsTags:·

The Stunt Reel

September 13th, 2005 · Stuntwork

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, finally got to peice together my myriad clips of craziness into a cohesive video showcasing… myself. Yes, a bit egotistical there but that’s the purpose of these things you know. I have to sell myself to stunt casters in order to get jobs. This reel took me three days to compile, mostly working late at nite into the wee hours of the morning. My girl found me the music and it didn’t take long to come up with a general format for how I wanted to present things. I think it came out pretty good. I’m going to edit it again sometime this week after I capture some new footage at the gym on Tuesday. I want to add some more fighting, get a better tumbling pass, and shorten the Segway bit. There is some filler to get me to that point in the song for a nice fade out of the music, so I want to replace that with other stuff. Anyways, enjoy!

Stunt Reel (4:02 – via MySpace Video)

→ No CommentsTags: