Joshua Van Tassel

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When the view from the venue you’re playing at looks like the first picture below, you generally aren’t too worried if the show isn’t great that night, considering it’s a Monday. However, twin butte provided on all accounts. It’s a venue called the General Store, because besides being a great place to play and having great Mexican food, it’s the community general store. Awesome. The staff was super friendly, the people were great, and it was the first Monday night gig I’ve ever played where people danced on the bar.
We’re headed back into the mountains tonight to play at my favorite venue in Canada, the blackbird in coleman. Excited.

(on facebook? Go to www.joshuavt.com)
Played a great festival in northern Alberta yesterday, North Country fair. Really well put together, great bands, and a beautiful site by a river. We were treated super well an met lots of other wayfaring musician types who we’ll hopefully run into again. Saw a great band called the Roger Marin band who are from the Niagra region of all places, apparently I need to go out west to take my head out of my ass and hear good Ontario music.
On the way back to Calgary tonight for a fathers day celebration at Chateau Cockerill (they’re French so saying it that way is actually appropriate). (Happy fathers day Dad! Let the public records state that i did indeed call to wish you a happy fathers day, but you were out.)We’re drinking A&W coffee which is surprisingly passable. And the sun is out. And I slept really well. Good day.
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Had a good night in Winnipeg last night. met some really good people, ate some deep fried pickles and played some pinball at a great bar called the Standard. Also saw Andrew Neville play, a man who wears no sleeves on any shirts and can sing a mean country tune about driving a truck.
Here’s a point form news flash about what’s happening in the van right now because we’re driving to medecine hat and I’m going crazy.
- Josh C is driving and drinking a coffee from Subway. We’re debating if it’s deserves to be called coffee. It’s like calling ketchup a tomato.
- Devo is riding shotgun, not really doing anything interesting. He was just relieved of driving duty though so he deserves a rest and we’ll leave him alone.
- I’m writing on my iPhone and all the bumps make this little keyboard pretty fucking annoying. I also finished with a book and beat legend of Zelda for nintendo ds. Hence the boredom.
- we love listening to taylor swift. It’s true. We not only sing along to the lyrics, but the epic drums fills. When you’re 15 and someone tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them. Word.
- my foot is asleep. I’m sleepy.we’re listening to Bonnie Prince Billy now and it’s nice.

See, isn’t the van craaaaaazy?!? We’re definitely the wildest band on the road. For sure.

(on facebook? Go to www.joshuavt.com for the full post)

on facebook? Go to www.joshuavt.com for the full post

In thunder bay today, had a great stop for a swim at a friends parents cottage. Every summer I realize the word cottage in Ontario means something very different then it does in nova scotia. Most of the cottages here are bigger then any house I’ll probably ever own. Thunder bay itself isn’t my favorite place in Canada, but we’ll see if we can’t win some hearts and sell some 8 tracks tonight.

Hello friends. We’re back out with young Cockerill for another couple weeks, this time heading westward. As usual I’ll do my best to put something mildly interesting up here daily as we make our way. Tonight we’re in sault saint Marie and it’s Devo’s birthday! Last year on his birthday we played a gig as well, and he ended up 1) playing drums on a couple tunes 2) getting in a fist fight. Let’s hope for the best tonight shall we?

I love wired magazine, and their sweet website too. I also saw Up recently, cried within the first 5 minutes, and thought the rest of the film was great too. This month’s Wired has a super interesting article on Pixar that explains how the company is run, how movies are made, and how to go from a storyboard drawing of a pink bear to 24 academy awards. Here’s part of the online portion of the article.

Creating Toy Story 3
A step-by-step process.
Inspiration

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The first challenge: coming up with a great story. For inspiration, the creative team leaves the Pixar campus and heads to the Poet’s Loft, a cabin 50 miles north of San Francisco. They thought they already had a great start on the plot for Toy Story 3, but after 20 minutes, the whole thing is scrapped. By day two, a new idea emerges—how would the toys feel if Andy, their owner, left for college?

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Working from a series of plot points, screenwriter Michael Arndt begins drafting the script. At the same time, director Lee Unkrich and the story artists start sketching storyboards for each scene. There is no animation yet, just drawn poses like in a comic book. But the storyboards allow the filmmakers to begin imagining the look and feel of each scene.
Presentation

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So far, the characters exist only as digital illustrations. Character design has begun. Some are sculpted in clay and scanned. Others are drawn by hand. Later, visual textures—fur, fabric, hair—will be added to the form, a step known as simulation. “It’s a constant negotiation with the technical side,” says supervising animator Bobby Podesta. “Not everything we want is possible.”

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The storyboards are turned into what’s called a story reel—a series of images that can be projected for an in-house audience like an elaborate flip book. The lines are prerecorded by Pixar employees. “This is a crucial moment for the film,” says Pixar president and cofounder Ed Catmull. “Watching along with an audience allows us to see what works and what doesn’t.”
Characterization

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Actors start coming in to voice the script. Tom Hanks takes his turn at the Pixar recording studio to lay down his vocal tracks. Hanks reads every line dozens of times, varying his interpretations and emphasis. The sessions are also filmed, so animators can watch the actor’s expressions and use those as reference when they start animating the characters’ faces.

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The shaders are responsible for adding color and texture to characters’ bodies and other surfaces. One issue is the fact that Woody and Buzz are made of plastic: Some plastics are slightly translucent, and they absorb light. So the shaders used a subsurface scattering algorithm to simulate this effect and make the toys look more believable.
Animation

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The pictures are moving. Each character is defined by up to 1,000 avars—points of possible movement—that the animators can manipulate like strings on a puppet. Each morning, the team gathers to review the second or two of film from the day before. The frames are ripped apart as the team searches for ways to make the sequences more expressive.

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The technical challenges start to pile up. (Simulating a wet bear is especially complex.) Good thing Steve Jobs insisted that the building’s essential facilities be centrally located. “Walking to the bathroom or getting a cup of coffee is often the most productive part of my day,” says producer Darla Anderson. “You bump into somebody by accident and then have a conversation that leads to a fix.”

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The animators are working flat out. They stay late into the night in their highly personalized offices, which have been decorated in a variety of themes, from Polynesian tiki to ’70s-era love lounge. (“We let them do whatever they want,” Catmull says.) The animators even have their own working bars, complete with beer on tap and a collection of single-malt whiskeys.

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Rendering—using computer algorithms to generate a final frame—is well under way. The average frame (a movie has 24 frames per second) takes about seven hours to render, although some can take nearly 39 hours of computing time. The Pixar building houses two massive render farms, each of which contains hundreds of servers running 24 hours a day.
Resolution

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The movie is mostly done. The team has completed 25 of the film’s sequences and is just finishing an action scene that involves a runaway model train, smoke, dust clouds, force fields, lasers, mountainous terrain, and a massive bridge explosion. It has taken 27 technical artists four months to perfect the scene.

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With only weeks to go before the film is released, the audio mixers at Skywalker Sound combine dialog, music, and sound effects. Every nuance is adjusted and re-adjusted. After a four-year production process, it can be hard to let go of Woody, Lotso, Buzz, and the rest of the characters. “We don’t ever finish a film,” Unkrich says. “I could keep on making it better. We’re just forced to release it.”

Janelle Monae = awesome