The Art Neuro Weblog

More Thoughts On The Juice-On-Giambi Steroids Scandal
I never liked the Jason Giambi signing much. It was the first step towards excess in a series of knee-jerk signings that has led to the current Yankee 'decline'. If you can call winnning over 100 games, three years in a row a decline, then it's a heck of a decline to have, but in Steinbrenner-land, we know a year without a World Series Victory is a dead-loss.

Anyway, because I believed in the Yankee NJASDJDH-infield-of-the-future back in 1999 and as late as 2001, I never really thought it was a good idea to sign Jason Giambi and block Nick Johnson. Yes, Jason Giambi was great in both the 2002 & 2003 seasons, plus the 2003 ALCS with those 2 homeruns that set up that dramatic Game 7 come-from-behind-win, but in all honesty, I wanted Nick Johnson to be the man. In a way, it seemed like excess to sign Giambi when one could hand the job to the youngster who was groomed for the spot. They took away the opportunity for Nick Johnson to become the next Lou Gehrig by buying the Juiced One. More so than the A-Rod trade that sent Alfonso Soriano to Texas, the subsequent handling of prospects, rookies and young players by the organisation has been plain wanting.

And now this steroid scandal.
Call me a smartass, but all I can get out of the back fo my mind is 'Told You So'.

There's considerable noise on the BTF boards to the effect that the Yankees are doing something reprehensible by trying to get out of the contract with the Juiced-One, however I feel it is the only honorable thing to do given that they are the custodians of a magnificient, historic franchise. Baseball can take a lot of misbehaviour from its stars; it just can't take the tainting of record books - this specifically means gambling, but it also means steroid abuse.

Addendum: In the aftermath of the ALCS loss to the Bosox, it seemed to me there was no greater target for blame-throwing than Kevin Brown and Tom Gordon, but somehow Juice-on has managed to take away all of that bad karma from those guys; which is sort of unbelievable. It reminds me of that old advertisement where the girl asks, "Does this make my arse look bigger?" to which the boyfriend kindly answers "Well, at least it takes the attention away from your face."
Right now, Keving Brown might be the ugly face (and broken left hand) of the 2004 seaosn, but Jason Giambi is the inflated ass that cannot be hidden.

'Key Psycho' Update
About a week ago, we finished grading the picture. There are some little areas of the picture that need touching up, namely the bits using blue screen, but overall, the picture side of it is now locked off. Hooray.

Head redits and Tail credits have been done. I had to buy a separate programme just to do the tail credit crawl because 'LiveType' simply was too difficult. For people out there struggling with rolling credits, I do recommend they look into the programme 'Rolling Credits' as it does exactly that with minimal fuss.

'Key Psycho' is now going through the painful process known as Sound Post-production.
This is the painful process whereby every clip of sound is inspected closely, checked and matched against every other clip for sonic consistency, and then applied in the sound mix. Believe me, it's not as exciting as lots of other aspects of film-making.

There are some great bits in Sound Post-Production and that is the adding of sound effects. As with all these things, you can pile on a tonne of cool sound effects and it won't rescue a bad picture, but fortunately I think this picture is going to work out fine. :)

Schedule-wise I think we're still about 3 weeks behind schedule, (the same 3 weeks I spent working for that stupid E*** Media and doing a corporate video for IBM) but at least we now have a picture that we could send to festivals early next year.

- Art Neuro