two artistic projects worthy of support

Two arty/fannish projects are going that you may want to support. The first is Heather Dale’s Celtic Avalon touring show and DVD; the second is the Inspector Spacetime movie, with Travis Richey (The Inspector), Chase Masterson (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Mayim Bialik (The Big Bang Theory), and, oh my gods, Sylvester McCoy (The Seventh Doctor, The Hobbit). I can’t believe they’ve talked an actual Doctor Who into working this parody project. XD

But that’s later this week. Today, I’m going to talk about Heather Dale’s project, Celtic Avalon.

The Celtic Avalon project is a combination of a new touring stage show, a DVD, and a youth education program, all based on the King Arthur legends.

Heather has been touring and writing for years now; she’s toured across all of North America and parts of Europe; she’s played the geekmusic festival nwcMUSIC that I run at Norwescon; she’s been producing shows with her band for 15 years; and she is, in my experience, one of nicest people I have met in this whole dman business.

The show itself will be about the legends surrounding King Arthur. She has a couple of decades of material to draw on, but knowing her, there’ll probably be new works in there as well. It’ll be accompanied by a professionally-produced concert DVD, which is where the DVD part comes in. That’s all the art side.

The educational programme will apply those legends to modern life. Heather’s more of an optimistic person than I am – of course she is, I’m a supervillain, so that’s not surprising – and draws a lot of inspiration from this whole founding English mythos. She thinks others can, too.

This is the biggest project I’ve seen her attempt. If any of this sounds even vaguely interesting, go read up about it here. She has acres of data and plans available for you to wade through. Or you can just say “Sounds good to me!” and throw in your support.

Oh, and for the record: this is not my project, I’m not involved, I’m not seeing a nickel of this. I just see some people doing some ambitious work and throwing my support their way. Hopefully some of you will, too.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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a groupnoun of microphones

If there isn’t already a group noun for microphones – you know, like murder of ravens, school of fish, and all that – there should be. I propose a silly of microphones:

A Silly of Microphones

I had all those wired up at once because we were doing some test recording of Anna for flutework on Kitsune at War. Despite appearances, the two mics on the far left are quite different to each other, due to their different head capsules having dramatically different pickup patterns.

The choices coalesced really quickly, as it turned out, because Anna’s metal flute is totally clicky in the keys. Lots of clicking sound, and no way to turn it off.

Not even when dampened with a shirt. Not even two shirts.

The funny part is, back when I was trying to get these couple of Octava 012s, I really mostly just wanted the cardioid heads. And one came with that option only. But another ended up having a set of three heads: cardioid, hypercardoid, and omnidirectional. And that’s come back to serve us well now.

See, most microphones you’ve used have either been omnidirectional (pick up in all directions fairly evenly) or cardioid (pick up in front of the mic in kind of a circular-bubble area in front of the microphone). A hypercardioid mic, though? It’s like a laser beam, or at least this one is. Instead of a circular pickup area, it’s shaped more like a dirigible. And that means you can zoom in on the sound you want, and simply not record a surprising loudness of noises coming from shockingly nearby that you don’t want.

Which is why it was a damn good thing I bothered hooking up two versions of that microphone. Otherwise, we’d be looking into rental flutes. But we’re not. Go us.

eta: Over on Dreamwith, Corvi suggests "a Feedback of Microphones." I do like that! But feedback also requires speakers – or in extreme cases a turntable – so… hm…

eta2: With 29 more ideas for this from people(!), we decided to make a list and poll, here. Look and vote if you want!

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby