This is one of my favourite Adrenalini episodes – partly because I got to sing El Boca’s song, but also because there’s so much going on in the story, and it all leads to a satisfying conclusion.
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At last, after almost a decade searching through the archives and painstaking digital restoration, here is the BANNED episode that was TOO HOT FOR TV!
I made this in about October 2001. Probably in the mid-afternoon.
Filed under: adrenalini, animation, directing, miscellaneous, music, oddities | Tagged: adrenalini, banned, benny, episode, hill, hospital, lost, monster, sax, yakety | 2 Comments »
I downloaded the Steam client the other day, having enjoyed buying retro games from GOG which will run on my computer. It’s about 6 years old and before a month ago didn’t have a graphics card apart from the very low-powered onboard one. Incidentally my advice is to steer well clear of Dream Pinball 3D because it is horrible.
Anyway I’ve enjoyed the stuff I got from Steam, apart from my minor discomfort about DRM and having another process running in the background. After doing some surfing looking at indie games, I decided to buy Lume, which looks gorgeous and has a nice tinkly soundtrack, and struck chords in me about bodging things together on a small scale and talented people who do many things at once.
I played it for a while, and got stuck when asked to enter a combination for a lock on a sink cupboard wherein I knew I would find useful things to help finish the game. And got frustrated, and got annoyed. And so being the I-want-it-now kind of guy I am, I found a walkthrough, and got even more annoyed at the impossible solution that I couldn’t even have dreamed was required. I mean, shame on me for doing what is essentially cheating, but how was I ever supposed to guess the following solution?
***SPOILER ALERT***
I found the following from the site Gamezebo, and reading it still curdles my brian and boils my integuments:
The object is to take the various clues you’ve found and figure out how to illuminate the 3 lights and unlock the Cabinet.Clue for the first number: When viewing (close-ups) all the Pictures hanging on the Walls, there were 1, 2 and 3 picture frames showing (only part of a third picture frame in the third set).
Clue for the second number: While standing in the Hall, you can see there are, from left to right, 2, 1 and 1 round objects on the Walls.
Clue for the third number: 1. In the Hall, there are 8 Pictures. 2. Upstairs, the shadow of Lumi’s Topknot looks like the number 8. 3. Outside, on the Lower Level, there are 3 objects with a total of 7 sides (the round Window has 1, the Door has 4 and the Ladder has 2).
On the other hand, this clue could just be Upstairs: 1. The shadow of Lumi’s Topknot looks like the number 8. 2. Her actual Topknot looks like the number 8. 3. The shadow of the lower, left side of the Drafting Table, on a diagonal, next to the Bookcase, looks like the number 7.
The clues for this lock are really obscure, so what I listed may not be accurate. They’re just what I used when I chose the numbers to enter. They worked; so, the numbers are:
1 2 3
2 1 1
8 8 7
I finished the game (disappointingly short for 4 quid) with an appreciation for the lovely colours and music and innovative cardboard-y graphics, but with a grudging feeling that this was all set-dressing for a do-this-then-do-that game with insanely arbitrary puzzles.
Bah.
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For simple spot FX in animations, I found Tomas Petterson’s Sfxr to be a simple and powerful tool. It was written, in the author’s words, for those who “need some basic sound effects, don’t really care about top quality, have no idea where to get them.” Now there is a new version Bfxr which is even more fully-featured.
It’s simple to use, produces fun old-school sounds, and serves as a great introduction to electronic sound generation. I’ve always loved making electronic noise – my favourite tool for just mucking about was the Korg DS-10 cart, and before that I spent countless hours making my Gameboy SP splutter, glitch and hiss with the spartan beauty of Oliver Wittchow’s Nanoloop, which I now learn is available for iPhone and Android.
I have a fondness for 8-bit and glitchy old-school sound, having grown up with a computer that made no sound at all, and graduating to one that produced lots. I’m a sucker for anything (except the very experimental stuff) on the website 8bitpeoples.
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I had a lot of trouble with noise removal using version 1.2 of Audacity. My good buddy Sal gave me a fantastic Samson C01U microphone for Xmas and being very sensitive it picks up all sorts of background sounds, including the birds twittering in the trees outside my window. It was very difficult purging my tracks of these beautiful but incongruous intrusions, until I tried the latest beta of Audacity 1.3, with its enhanced controls.
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I’ve just found a fantastic verse translation of the Carmina Burana which I’ve never seen before. The translator, David Parlett, has this to say about his endeavour:
“The following translation of the songs selected by Orff are not intended to be word-for-word renderings. My object was to produce a version that would both reproduce the same metres and rhyme-schemes as the originals, which necessarily entails a degree of versifier’s licence, and be singable to Orff’s eminently singable tunes, which entails the avoidance of such complications as awkward consonant clusters and closed vowels on high notes.”
I’ve only ever seen literal translations before, which lack the extra emotional charge which the rhythm gives them – especially since such a large amount of the songs, let’s be honest, are about sex and boozing!
Filed under: music | Tagged: burana, carmina, coniunctio, felix, parlett, profane, sacred, translation | Leave a Comment »
I’ve just come back from the Bloom festival in Gloucestershire, which was great fun, despite the fact that it was mostly empty, the music was absurdly quiet and got turned off at 1am, and it rained pretty much solidly the whole weekend! Luckily I managed to buy a pair of wellies (£9.99 at Homebase, the first pair I’ve owned since I worked on a farm at the age of about 18) so I was spared the extra misery of slodging around with wet feet.
I got to see Roisin Murphy who was very entertaining and managed to struggle through several technical hitches including a blown fuse and a blown speaker, watched a fake-but-sincere wedding taking place in an inflatable chapel, and took part in my first human pyramid of more than three people. I turned to the bloke next to me in the bottom line of the pyramid, introduced myself and heard him say “I’m Pickles. Nice to meet you.”
The photo above was taken in the Hall of Mirrors before my phone conked out (if you look closely you can see I’m wearing a customised Charlie and Lola T-shirt, given to all the crew before the production ended). This was the best mirror of the twelve or so, and the only one worth the £1 entry fee. The woman in the booth at the front refused my friend’s offer of £5 for a season ticket. Her loss.
The Animals of Farthing Wood. At leisure.
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I was very chuffed to be invited to BBCtv Centre in White City yesterday evening to see the studio recording of a comedy pilot show called Hey Hey We’re The Monks, written by Dan Tetsell and Danny Robbins. It was great for several reasons – the show is very funny and well written, and the cast were superb. I hope it gets commissioned for a series. Also I haven’t seen Dan and Danny for ages – I went to sixth form college with Dan Tetsell and we went to Edinburgh together in 1991 to act in an Arthur Miller play called The Creation of the World and Other Business – the play was interesting but the rehearsals were draining, fraught and emotionally charged. I had to wear a flesh-coloured catsuit with velcroed-on genitalia that I made myself (in generous proportions) out of foam rubber. One night the play, which had some laughs but was not in any sense a full-on comedy, was getting a tremendous reaction from the audience, who were falling about with laughter. It was only later that I discovered my velcroed penis had become detached from its normal perch and stuck to my back.
I am whisked back to that strange period anytime I smell goat’s milk or Olbas Oil, but I couldn’t tell you why.
A friend of mine who was at the same college told me the other day that he’d seen a picture of Dan and I, naked together, at the Media Studies Centre. I was confused, shocked even… but then remembered that Dan and I had been coerced, in a moment of right-on bravado, into being photographed for a mock-up of somebody’s Aids Poster, naked from the waist up, with our arms around each other and gazing sullenly into the middle-distance. The pictures are still hanging around somewhere. I would pay good money to own one copy and have all the others destroyed.
Dan was wondering aloud if anybody these days would get jokes about Enigma, the 1991 New Age album involving Gregorian chant. I remembered first hearing that album at a party at Dan’s house when we were teenagers. He corrected me – it wasn’t Enigma. It was an actual album of Gregorian chant he’d put on because he wanted everyone to go home.
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Two methods of surreptitious swearing:
1. Say the word “Arse’ole”, very loudly, then turn it into the beginning of the well-known song “O sole mio“. This is not strictly correct, as the words “O sole mio” aren’t sung to the actual “Just One Cornetto” part of the song. Also it works better if your accent is one which pronounces the word arse with the long a and the non-rhotic r, rather than the common North American pronunciation “asshole”.
2. Tell someone to shut the far cupboard. This works better if the person has previously opened a cupboard and neglected to shut it.
Filed under: miscellaneous, music, swearing, tips | Tagged: sneaky, surreptitious, swearing | Leave a Comment »
