ricardocabellov5.5

Ok, breakpoint'06 is over.I feel like empty, I don't have more deadlines right now. I'll have to plan what to work in from now on.

My gigs
The party was great (as usual), I'll probably go there next year again. However I'll have to rethink about doing visuals for the gigs or not. I mean, it was fun, it was really fun, but at the same time, doesn't matter how much I work on that before the party, because the musicians will probably do some changes to the schedulle and will give some ideas for the visuals during the party, so I'll have to spend time working on it during the party anyway, and that means lose quite a bit of party time. In the other hand, it's a bit hard to do, mainly because 3 things:

1) They are mainly rock, that means: hard to syncronise. "Solution": FFT, which I'm not really a fan of.
2) Demobased stuff. The people will expect to see a demo or a remix of the demo as visuals. But I just don't have time to redo any of the demos,
3) So, as they expect the demos to be shown, I need videos of them, and using kkapture for this isn't the best solution, mainly because it takes ages to record the demo, and to have a proper quality of it needs a lot of space and if you would like to do "video scratching" you need a keyframe everyframe. And that will be probably 250Mb+ for demo. So, you end up just with a crappy 320x240 resolution video, so you need to add another layer on the top just to hide the poor quality.

So well, I ended up doing two gigs, one for Ultrasound (which Jeenio asked me like the last week) and another one for BASS which I had more time to work for. Anyway, I didn't have too much time and the result isn't what you can say GREAT. But I think it was much better than on their previous gigs.

xplsv demo
Regarding more scene-ish stuff. Sole released an xplsv demo using a tune i did like 3 years ago with sml and wizard for a fuzzion's 4k. They didn't used, sole liked it and then did the demo with it. Check it out.

Quality stuff
The productions do have a good level, in some categories they aren't a big deal tho (4kintro), but you should really check these ones:

deities by mfx (1st at PC Demo)
sts-02: electric kool-aid by Synesthetics (2nd at PC Demo)
lux aeterna luceat eis by Ephidrena (2nd at Amiga Demo)
meet the family by Fairlight (1st at PC 64kintro)

Scene.org Awards
Well, that has been the worst thing of the party imho. As soon as I heard that Ithaqua had to read some kind of text as a VIP guy giving the price in a suit. I was like .. what the fuck?! Do we really need to do it that "serious". Was easy to see that was going to look wanabe. The videos were great, but, I really prefered the last years prizegiving ceremony. It was more familiar and funny, steeler and melwyn knew how to keep the times so you really can't wait to hear the results. This year, the guys that were giving the results were just thinking about leaving the stage so they were not giving any time for creating any suspense. Also some of the guys forgot the lines that they had to memorize and read.

Also, they keep doing that crappy connection with the gatering in the middle of the awards which it's very dumb, mainly because there is a 2min delay and they expect to have a conversation or something. Oh.. well..

So, then it's when I think.. Do we really need all this? If I ever get nominated for some of those awards and they keep doing the ceremony like that. Don't expect me to join it. I'm sorry.

Frankfurt-main Airport sucks
During the trip we were able to confirm the legend about the trains arriving in a precise time. But at the same time we were able to see how Frankfurt-Main Artport really sucks. When we arrived on Friday, after walking throught all the airport just to get our baggage, we were stopped by the police. Everyone had to wait 10min. They didn't say why. So those 10mins were enough for us to lose our shuttle bus that was going to bring us to the partyplace. It wasn't only the police guys fault, mr. Uncle-X was also there just caring about the suomi people and not giving a shit about us, so the bus left without us, thanks dude!

But that wasn't enough. Today, when we were going back to London, we had to do something like 10 different checks before finally going inside the plane. 10 different checks that took us something like 1hour. Check the tickets, check the baggage, checking the baggage again, checking the passports, checking the tickets, checking the baggage AGAIN!, gate changed, walking back, queuing, checking the tickets to get some seats, queueing again.... Veeeery annoying. But we were able to keep relaxed (more or less) until the end, and in compensation, the guys of Lufthansa which weren't really helpful either gave us sits on the Business class (mainly because there were no others left). So atleast we were able to enjoy the service, food, and space that the Business class means.