the end is here...

this is the final post on this blog. That's the bad news.

The good news is there's already a blog I started on my site..

http://www.brettweldele.com/journal/

I'm keeping everything centralized on my site from here on in.

Thanks----brett

GrindHouse 4

This is from last fall for the great Grindhouse Film Festival in Portland.

Lady Django

A little oldie from the discard file circa 2002. A little project that was abandoned. I have yet to have a project that isn't abandoned. I'm not great on my own followthrough.

death comes a callin'

Brando punching a Nazi Zombie

I was asked to do this awhile back. I forgot I did it until I was going through some folders this week.

I'm so bad at blogging

Whew!

I'll try better.

Ableton Looper followup

Embarrassingly, I've not done much with this blog for awhile. A few people brought up some interesting points that i should address...

"viktor said...
hello. i found this post by googling. i was wondering if you could answer my question. you said that to begin recording, hit the scene launch button. whenever i do this, nothing happens. at the moment that i click, the clip record button flashes into a green square. thanks!"

I made this demo with Version 5 (tells you how old it is) and it worked fine as stated. I tried it in Version 7 and it's broken just how you said. A workaround is instead of setting the midi to the scene launch, set it to the clip itself. That seems to work.

Jim said...What do you mean by: "Set the loop length up top."

To the left of the pencil tool along the top will set where in the loop it will loop. Default is at one bar, which is a good starting point.

Ableton Live: super looper

There are no shortage of looper pedals and programs on the market. Just don't let them see what Live can do. They might get jealous.

Let's get started...

I've started with five audio tracks. All are routed to the same input( a guitar in this case) and all tracks are armed for recording. Set the loop length up top. I usually set it for 1 bar at least, so its easy to hit the loop point.

Hold down shift and select all the clip slots on screen. ctrl+click deletes the clip buttons and then put a few buttons back in using the same method. This cascading style in the example allows a loop to continuously play while only recording on the next track in line. Its also a very visual representation of the various layers of a loop.

For hands free use i use a Behringer FCB1010 foot controller. For this example I'm using all 10 of its buttons. 1-5 trigger the scenes and 6-10 control the track stop buttons.

By having the track monitor set to "auto" this will allow you to toggle rec/play with same button. For example, button 1 will trigger scene 1. without a clip present it will start recording one when activated. hitting button 1 again will switch the mode to play and loop the clip just recorded.

I've set up the other buttons to kill tracks. This is similar to the undo function on many looper pedals, but in this case you can choose what layer of looping to kill...not just the most recent. Also you can retrigger these loops at any time.

What's next?

Using Live as a simple looper is cool and all, but why limit yourself to that when you can be a looping band? This is where Live leaves most hardware loopers in the dust with its flexible routing and effects. You're only limited by the number of audio channels your soundcard has and to how many midi channels you can transmit to.

In the example we start with an Impulse kit being triggered by a Trigger Finger. Midi's a bit easier to loop than audio because you can "cheat." Double click the first slot to set up a dummy clip. Set the loop length to the desired beat count. Now its ready to loop. Make sure Overdub is on and you can continuously add to the clip as it loops. This is useful for drums where you can program a hi-hat loop the first round and then add a kick/snare to it later.

The rest is simple. I have a guitar routed to the first input of my soundcard, and a mic in the other input. Another Impulse kit being triggered by another midi channel.

The sky's the limit. Enjoy.

www.brettweldele.com

high rez Digital Inking video

here's a preview of one video with more to come...
http://www.brettweldele.com/inking_tutorial_small.mov

Photoshop : Digital Inking

by Brett Weldele

Before we begin, it should be noted that this is not a replacement for the tried and true comic book inker. It's not possible (yet!) to simulate the classic brush and crow-quill style. If you want it to look like that, you're just going to have to practice with the real thing. This tutorial is more about a different option. Something geared towards more expressive styles of drawing.

THE DRAWING

I start off every drawing with a Col-erase red pencil. This is inspired by the non-photo blue process in printing...only in red. Blue pencils would work probably just as well, but i find the red pencils easier to find in office supply stores. I then do my final rendering with a standard "number 2." I like to turn the pencil on its side to create some nice textural lines.

THE SCAN

The image shouldn't be scanned any less than 600 DPI in color. The inking process drops out some information and if the resolution is any lower the inking will turn out kinda bloopy.

BYE BYE RED

Now that we have the image opened in Photoshop, we're ready to get rid of the red pencil under-drawing. First thing is to switch from the default RGB the image was scanned in. Switch it over to CMYK under the IMAGE>MODE menu. We've now separated out a black channel to retain the pencil work. Make sure the channel palette is visible and click on the MAGENTA channel. SELECT ALL and CUT out the background. Make sure the background color is white. Click on the CMYK layer in the channels palette. You should be left with a greenish pencil drawing. Now switch the CMYK mode to GRAYSCALE.

TIME TO INK THIS PUPPY UP

Click on IMAGE>ADJUSTMENTS>THRESHOLD. Move the slider to the right under it nears the bottom of the black hill, just below "200." This will take a few tries to get it right. Too little left and a lot of information gets lost and too far right and ghosting from the red image starts to show up. There might be a little grit that shows up. There will be some cleanup involved in a later stage, but it should be minimal if the adjustments are made correctly.

There's still a dirtiness to the line-work so let's clean that up. Go over to the FILTERS menu and load up the WATERCOLOR FILTER. This is going to smooth out some of the rough edges. You can experiment but i like the settings 14, 10, 1.

FINAL STEPS

All we have left is cleanup. There will be spots where the blacks didn't come through right or bits of pencil grit are left. Just use the pencil tool to fix these small items.

Now wasn't that easy? The good news...most of this process can be batch processed with photoshop.
enjoy.

www.brettweldele.com

Ebay. here we go...

I've posted a couple listings of Southland pages on ebay if anyone's interested.

lack of updates.

yeah yeah, i know.

Southland book 3 is now done. in fact everything i was doing is done. now i have much more time to blog! ;)

Book 2 is now shipping from the publisher and should be officially in stores shortly with book 3 coming along before 2007.

Grindhouse Film Festival this weekend!

if you're in Portland and you have love for the exploitation films of a bygone era...well, its that time of the year again. above is a look at the poster i did for this year(my third).

should be a blast!

www.grindhousefilmfest.com