Score!

Karl and Viktor paid me a visit in the first week of June, 1997. We intended to make a movie. This is all explained on the Squirrel Page. Well Karl bought himself a camera and we raced around Manhattan doing crazy-ass things and recording them as bitstreams, foolishly thinking that we'd just throw it together and burn it onto CD.

Not so fast! It seemed the software was not up to it so it took six months instead - most of the time writing software.

So here it is: "Score! - The Movie" (also known as "The Movie That Shouts Out Score!").

score.mpg - 50,079,748 bytes [by http from "insert current location"]

[Apologies from the management - this link often suffers from a
classic case of "Sys-Admin Syndrome". A symptom of this
malady is the old "I didn't know what it was so I deleted it".
This is not expected to happen again soon.]

Dedicated to the fond memory of John Mackin, who was never afraid to shout out "Score!".

Technical Details

The video footage was shot with a Hitachi MPEG-Cam, a hand-held digital cam which records SIF format MPEG-1 direct to a 260Mb PCMCIA disk drive. This holds about 20 minutes. We dumped the data from this to a laptop at two points in the shoot (once on the ferry to The Statue) so we ended up with about an hour of stuff. This was burnt onto 2 CD-roms for convenience. Additional video footage was shot with another MPEG-Cam some time in September and additional stills were shot with two Kodak DCS cameras (a 40 and a 50). The Hitachi takes stills, too, but the Kodaks are superior for this task. The Statue lens flare shots are courtesy of Eric Van Hensbergen and were taken on the Infernal Boat.

The video was processed with the freshly written Lucent Inferno MPEG suite, and about 19,000 frames became the chosen ones, being spared from the cutting-room bitbucket. The chosen clips were converted to AVI files (Indeo Raw codec) and the movie was constructed in Adobe Premiere. Cool Edit 96 was used to convert the Layer 1 audio streams to WAV files and for normalization. The stills were processed with Adobe Photoshop which was also used for the titles. The final product was encoded with the LSX-MPEG encoder.

The music ("Infernal Surf Music") was composed and realized on a Roland PMA-5 on a flight from LA to Sydney. The rest of the audio was extracted from the MPEG footage except for the Splash Mountain dude.

The computers were of Digital Alpha, Sun Sparc and Intel x86 ethnicity. Their names are brisk, risk, woollooomooloo, dante, divine, cfysparc, ultra1, ultra2, lapaws, pcnt and pcwork44. Hope I didn't leave anyone out.

[Format: MPEG-1 Constrained, V SIF 352x240 1600 kbs, A L2S 120 kbs, 3:41]

"Score!" thrived as a greeting and an exclamation at Basser in the mid 80s. Though its origin is in the drug culture its utterance was normally not drug related. Be it a simple courtesy "Score!" on passing an associate in the corridor or a no-holds-barred bellow across a crowded bar it conveyed a sense of oneness - when things were going well "we had scored". It was also a favourite answer to an annoying answering machine, something to shout at a bewildered bystander, and a simple ponderance - "Score?". Where will you "Score!" today.