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Tibetan Buddhism in Long Beach

A few selected photos of the Gaden Shartse Monks at the Long Beach Convention Center this last week.

An important initiation had been planned with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, but alas – he had fell ill in Tokyo and missed the weekends events planned for him.

Bluedot was there to film the “Journey to the Roof of The World” performance of the Gaden Monks in a world class location.

Luckily, the Gaden Monks were making an amazing sand mandala, as well as a teaching by Khen Rinpoche (The Abbot of Gaden Shartse Monastery), and a talk by Robert Thurman and Thupten Jinpa.

An excellent opportunity for a few snaps!

She’s Like Magic

A steampunk inspired music video featuring Terry Philips and Tamara Cummings. Shot in Eastern Oregon at the Sumpter Valley Railroad on Canon 7d’s by Bluedot Productions. Music by La Boheme Reverie.

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Mixing for Film

We’re in the process of editing the sound mix for a documentary that we are releasing in 2011. The concept of reference is always a big issue.

Director: “That sounds muddy”.
Composer: “It didn’t at the studio!”
Director: “Did they mix this on near-field monitors? No sub?”
Composer: “Yes”.
Producer: “Sigh…”

It’s a lot of fun mixing for a feature documentary. We have a huge range of types of venues the film will be played at, from straight televisions, to home theaters, to peforming arts centers and hopefully top rated film theaters. How does one make it sound good, everywhere?

Mysteries of the Macabre

Avant garde opera anyone?

Bluedot just recently spent a day in the rehearsal hall with Beta Collide (award winning music professors from the University of Oregon) filming a music video for their song “Mysteries of the Macabre” for their new album “Psst! Psst!”

The whole shoot was as amazingly creative as is the composition itself,  Mysteries of the Macabre, a work based on three arias from Ligeti’s absurd opera Le Grand Macabre.

Brian McWhorter: trumpet
 David Riley: piano
 Phillip Patti: percussion
 Molly Barth: scream

direction & cinematography by Bluedot
 produced by Brian McWhorter & Molly Barth
 engineered by Lance Miller
 mastered by Taylor Deupree

Suns Return

A new reel for bluedot!

Having gathered footage all summer for our latest projects, many of our friends and associates have asked us what the heck we have been up to.

Realizing we hadn’t updated our reel in (gasp) 2 years, we thought it time to cut something new and exciting! A big thank you goes out all the people that are within its frames, on camera and off.

 

iPad + TouchOSC = Amazement!

As a remixer and VJ, the importance of control surfaces have been paramount. It’s our tactile connection to our art. It’s the ability to interface with too many buttons and knobs. It’s how the creativity flows.

Over the years, we have used MIDI, and music keyboard systems. Our favorite to date has been the Novation Remote SL, as it has LCD screens that sync with our software.

A few years ago, we were taken by the Lemur. What a beautiful device! Touch screen interface. Programmable screens, knobs, etc. Unfortunately, it had a pricetag that was about the same as a new Macbook Pro!

I picked up an iPad so I could see what can be done with one of these things. They’re cheap, they’re responsive and now they have apps to control our music and visual arts software! Additionally, you can create your own wireless setup and control your set from across the dancefloor!

The first step is to get TouchOSC. From there other applications can tie directly into Ableton Live, Modul8, Logic, Etc. Don’t let the setup discourage you!

Sand Mandala Timelapse

When the Gaden Shartse Monastic Tour visited our hometown in 2008, we had the opportunity to mount an HD 1080p camera to the wall above the mandala table. We then ran the camera directly to a Macpro via firewire so it could create daily quicktimes.

The creation of a sand mandala is a sacred event that creates a vortex of intention and prayer into a tangible blessing that can be felt by anyone. The intricacy and attention to detail is unmatched, and the symbolism unparalleled.

We then compiled over 24 hours of footage and sped it up about 10,000 percent so you could enjoy it in 3 minutes instead of 3 days.

http://www.gadenshartsetour.org

Deactivate Visual Editor – WordPress

I just recently had a client that needed a sniffing javascript to serve up an iPad version of their cinematography. While this was easily added in the WYSIWYG editor within wordpress, if you hit the “visual” tab, Poof! The javascript would become broken in a strange enough way that required too much debugging. Instead of leaving a possible trap to our clients, we needed a solution: A great plugin to deactivate the visual editor when editing specific pages or posts within wordpress.

The visual editor is nice when pages and posts are simple, but when you try to add special text such as php code to a page then the visual editor oftentimes has to be deactivated to edit the page. This plug-in allows you to set which posts should not use the visual editor by setting a custom field ‘deactivate_visual_editor’ to true. This allows the visual editor to be deactivated for the given post/page, but remain active for all others.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/deactive-visual-editor/

Gaden Shartse Monastic Tour

The Bluedot team has been having a lot of fun working on some promotional films for the Gaden Shartse Monastic Tour; a fund raising and outreach program from the tibetan buddhist monastery located in the refugee area of southern India. The footage in this 7:00 introduction was collected from old archival pieces from the monastery, and when we toured with the monks to Aspen Colorado in 2008.

Enjoy!

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