[Laminar]

Now you have my attention.

[subego]

I’ve officially cheated on the Ukrainians. Instead of paying them I paid Google for three minutes of time on an overpriced Nvidia card.

I feel so dirty.

Renders are 10X faster.

Okay, I’m over it.

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by subego 

Getting Stable Diffusion going is really easy, BTW. Goggle “draw things”, download from the App Store, type in some disgusting furry fetishes. It won’t judge.

It crashes on me every time it gets to the second line of squares. I just want a side profile of a black and white dog in a field of sunflowers.

[subego]

[subego]

Started to work out the bottom line.

The going rate is $0.20⁵ a hour for a “high-RAM” T-4 GPU.

With my current recipe it spits out 36 frames an hour, which is three seconds of footage (our stuff is 12 frames per second).

That’s not super expensive, but I’d have to run like twenty instances for production.

[Laminar]

Ears too pointy, 6/10.

[subego]

I was going to slag it for the fake looking fur.

[subego]

[ghporter]

Still the goodest boy ever...

[subego]

IKR? The leaf bothers me though.

Ran out of RAM on the lower end GPUs, so I had to try out an A100. $1.30⁸ per hour. Renders a frame with my current recipe in 8 seconds.

[subego]

Here’s me:




Here’s how the AI sees me:



OMG! I’m beautiful!

[ghporter]

Yes indeed. Even with the extra eyes and mouth. Those fingers though…

[subego]

I count ten. I don’t see the problem.

[subego]

I’m still plugging along with my AI experiments, which is a riot, but everything else has fallen to shit. Over the last two weeks we’ve had 5 shoots planned and only one materialized. That one shoot was supposed to be edited a week ago and we haven’t even started.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[reader50]

I'm told this can happen if you introduce people to beer. Or was it crappy weather?

[subego]

We didn’t start out drinking, but are now.

Sickness slowed down last week, and this week we were forced to work a side-project.

[subego]

Finally put up the one we filmed a couple weeks ago. Has some good moments, but also a technical issue or two. It’s too long IMO.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8khoqfC/

[andi*pandi]

well, if the point of dragging it out was to make us empathize with poor bob, then it worked... but it perked up when the quik commercial started.

you could trim a whole bunch of the first part but none of the last part

[subego]

Agree 100%. Dick and Alvin should call and then show up at the door within 5 seconds.

[reader50]

Imagine if that actually happened. You make your order, hang up the phone - and your doorbell rings. Your order is here.

I'd hesitate about answering the door - creepy AF. Maybe that would do for one of your video shorts. Or a longer ep, with the main character trying to prove the local pizza place employs demons. Or time-travel delivery people, who all drive DeLoreans. Or the local subs place has hired a medium who actually can read the future.

[andi*pandi]

kid is doing a french project. Amazon fresh delivered cheese curds to our house at 11pm last night and I swear it seemed like voodoo.

[subego]

No whey!

I’ll… get my coat.


Ukrainian AI remix:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPR77mjmW/

[andi*pandi]

I love it more than the first one even.

[subego]

I like it a lot too!! Unfortunately, the quality dropped enough I’m not sure how much more we can use them.

My own exploration has come up with some cool stuff, but isn’t really consistent enough to use, except for maybe some entirely AI generated footage I’m playing with.

[subego]

This turned out cool…

[subego]

Our replacement cat, who’s excellent, and lives in freaking Madison, so bless her for making the trip out twice. Once for the shoot and then again for ADR.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRvL4rfk/

[andi*pandi]

giving alison brie feels.

[subego]

You know, while I obviously know who she is, I think the only movie I’ve seen with her is The Disaster Artist. I remember thinking she was good, but that was a small role.

I kinda want to see the Captain Marvel movies because of the rage they seem to induce.

[andi*pandi]

she was in captain marvel? no that's brie larson.

Alison brie: Community, Mad Men
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1555340/

[subego]

Woops!

[subego]

So, this is the back cover of our video assist.



It’s obviously seen some shit.

However, most of that filth is the sticky remains of some ill-advised coating they put on the plastic. It’s become so disgusting I’m willing to risk destroying the thing to get it off.

I started in with Goo Gone and a plastic razor blade before I took it apart, that’s why the right is better, but it’s still sticky. Internet says baking soda and water, which sounds legit. Gentle abrasive to scrub the coating off.



As an aside, if you’ve never seen plastic razor blades they’re razor blades made out of, get this… plastic.

The genius is they come in different grades of hardness. If you pick one softer than the surface you’re scraping it won’t cause damage. The stereotypical use is to scrape a city sticker off a windshield. A soft one won’t damage the window coating.

You can skip all that though and put your city sticker on clear vinyl. Peels right off. They sell tiny sheets for this express purpose, but much more economical to buy a 12 pack of letter size sheets. It’ll last for years.

[reader50]

You can also try rubbing alcohol. Usually safe for the labels. Mineral spirits have more bite, but may remove the label paint. Also if you try MS, I'd use alcohol afterwards to remove all residue. MS isn't supposed to leave residue, but why take the chance.

Bonus mention of hydrogen peroxide. On light-colored plastics (beige computer cases) it can help restore the original color. Not sure if it's safe on black plastic though.

Do not use acetone - it can dissolve some plastics, and makes others soft. So your scraping digs in and starts removing pieces.

[subego]

The baking soda actually did a decent job.



If I wanted to go 100%, I’d hit it with a toothbrush to get the sides of the vents, and the crevices I missed. You can see some residue in the bottom right, which has a coating of baking soda.


I’ve made the acetone mistake before.

[subego]

Holy shit! It still functions.

Extra surprising because I was dumb and didn’t take a photo of what went where.

[ghporter]

I have a few items with that "grippy" plastic that gets disgusting. One is a Dell BT travel mouse; it works great, but it got too nasty to touch.
Alcohol didn't help - it made it worse. So I went with the baking soda/toothbrush technique. After I took the thing apart, of course. It worked like a champ, though I had to redo a few spots because I hadn't been as thorough as I had thought. Important: rinse the bee gee zeus out of the part you do this to, or you will find grit for a long time.

My only question about the process is whether the baking soda actually removes some formerly grippy coating or if the plastic will eventually get nasty again. Only time will tell...

[reader50]

Yep, alcohol is not good on rubbery parts. Found that out on a mousewheel once. It makes the rubber soft, easy to destroy while cleaning. Where your fingernail can dig pieces out of the wheel. The effect does go away once the piece dries, so in theory, you could clean rubber gently with alcohol. Do not get angry while cleaning that way, avoid spammer phone calls during the work, etc.

[subego]

Our YouTube series won an award at the Baltimore Next Media Webfest in the experimental category for best ensemble cast.

They deserve it! We were extremely lucky and had a really good cast.

[Waragainstsleep]

Even a good cast will look bad without a good team of filmmakers behind them.

[subego]

Thank you!

[subego]

This was a commercial for what ended up as band 2.0’s best, biggest, and also last show.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRvfSYcm/

[andi*pandi]

I do like the nesquik commercial.

[subego]

Thank you!

That is by far our most popular video.


Edit: that’s me reading the tagline at the end.

[subego]

Actor bailed at the last minute so prep for our Christmas episode is wasted.

[reader50]

Get someone else, and proceed. As to it being ready a couple days late, pull a Comcast. Blame the delay on a licensing dispute, the fault of the other party (of course), and don't refund anyone.

Or you could rewrite the ep, into a kidnap / whodoneit / missing person caper. Everyone (or only the cats) trying to find the missing relative (actor). hint: he's getting blasted in a bar nearby. You can fill in a reason why he stopped for a drink, and couldn't stop. Maybe he received a message. Or the guilt finally got to him.

[subego]

Unfortunately, not enough time left on the clock to punt. The cats are still in school so we can only do weekends. Even if they were available next week that’s getting us close enough to Christmas there wouldn’t be enough time to put it together. It can’t be late because our “gag” is we’re playing it 100% straight and wholesome. That needs to drop on Christmas Eve. The welcome for that sort of thing is worn out by the 26th.

We learned our lesson, which is we needed to plan to shoot this two weeks ago so we had more room to maneuver.

A silver lining is next year hopefully there’s enough time for those presents to have toys in them, and the cats can tear them all open like a whirlwind.

[andi*pandi]

bummer. certain cast are constant but you have bit players right?

[reader50]

Originally Posted by subego 

The cats are still in school so we can only do weekends.

Pity. They could find him drunk and snoozing - face down of course, so a stand-in will cover the regular guy. This also means they can't find out what's wrong the direct way, and will need to (insert marginally legal skullduggery).

[subego]

Originally Posted by andi*pandi 

bummer. certain cast are constant but you have bit players right?

That’s how it usually works out, but with TikTok, the medium is so ephemeral we have the most flexibility we’ve ever had in regards to casting changes. In fact, we had one of the cats bail from this shoot 18 hours before call, but we were able to find a replacement.

The other actress bailed 14 hours before call, and that was simply not enough time. She’s the only “old woman” we have in the ensemble, and had a ton of long monologues.

[subego]

Everyone will have to take me at my word that the necessity to put “bull testicles” into an AI prompt is what caused me to try “beautiful naked woman” first.

 

8.5/10. Too much waif.

[ghporter]

Your set decorators can come set up my tree. They did a great job. Of course we don’t put up that size tree anymore. Between no kids at home and cats who LOVE to explore things, it becomes a matter of setting up the tree more than once a day…