Willy

I've been thinking a lot about my weird relationship with color film, lately. Since I don't really shoot digital at all, my way of capturing the normal things that I see in front of me is to shoot C41 film.

This is of course, a slippery slope if you want the colors to be "correct". Objectively with C41 there's no such thing. If you've ever seen actual color negative film, it doesn't even remotely resemble a "true" negative. But the pieces are there to get it close enough. But that's also why we have so many different color films. They all respond a little bit differently to colors, and you will drive yourself completely insane trying to make the shot look like it was supposed to in your head if you don't account for that. It's something I've struggled a lot with.

So, enter some weird fucked up garbage film that expired in the 80s. The colors will never be right. You will not spend hours editing the colors. You'll let it rip through NLP, accept whatever comes out the other side, and move on. That's the fun of it. You don't know what to expect, exactly. It's almost as if the memories contained in the photo aren't even yours. It doesn't matter how you pictured it. In a way, there's a unique kind of beauty in that.

To select using a certain expired film is still an artistic choice, though. Maybe in a way not too different than AI "artists" now yeeting random words into a prompt with no idea what will come out the other side. I dunno. I can't stop myself from overthinking this, but I guess I can choose to at least overthink in different ways.

• all ceiling fan knobs have the labels printed in ascending order clockwise, while the dial must actually be turned anticlockwise to step through the speeds in ascending order, or vice versa. this has the effect of swapping "1" and "3". this is done because "2" is clearly the best number.
• all ceiling fans have three speeds: nearly off, low, and simulate hurricane
• all ceiling fans produce an annoying flicker in proximity to ceiling lights, as they often are. this led directly to the invention of the chandelier.
• all ceiling fans are designed, on their fastest setting, to behave exactly as if they are going to go flying right out of their fixtures at any moment, severely injuring whoever happens to be standing or sleeping underneath at the time. this detail is attributed to Damocles, though nobody knows what it is meant to represent.
• if you throw a pencil into a ceiling fan, it will probably break in half. if you throw it into a ceiling fan in a ceiling with multiple ceiling fans, one of the fragments might fly into the other fan and break again, which is extremely cool.
• youve probably never been injured by a ceiling fan, despite their best efforts.
• all ceiling fans emit a special low-frequency tone on their slowest setting that encourages all living beings to raise their arms above their head, jump up and down, climb on things, stand up straighter. etc. at the other settings, the tone becomes too high-pitched to be effective, though at the fastest speed it encourages throwing small objects in some beings. the purpose of this tone is to encourage constant vigilance around more bloodthirsty fans.
• a ceiling fan will only ever make the room you're in warmer.
• some say that the ceiling fan is the "devil in thermodynamics". others claim that this title belongs to the portable air conditioner.
• ceiling fans never rest and they never take breaks.
• once a ceiling fan is on its fastest speed, it becomes impossible to count or even remember how many blades it has.
• ceiling fans have no relation to helicopter blades. this is an example of convergent evolution.
• ceiling fans do not encourage note-taking in all people
• ceiling fans may make it easier or harder to fall asleep, or both.

The preceding text was written starting an hour past midnight, when I couldn't sleep, and did not know if it was because of or in spite of having a ceiling fan running at speed 3.

i did 4 years of college-level video production class in high school, worked for a public access TV station as a camera operator/editor/producer, and tried making a documentary about my friend that one time. that's basically as good as film school

the real secret is that it doesn't matter what ur credentials are. you should just make stuff because it's fun. but i still like bragging about being on tv. did you know if you get the 2am slot on a tiny irrelevant station, they kind of let you do anything? it's incredible

Rarely do model railroaders refine a layout concept from one layout to another. Almost everyone who demolishes their layout does so to build something entirely different. Some even go so far as selling off all their old equipment, changing railroads/years modeled/geographical location.

ALTA Mk.1 was half set in Oakland, California, and half near Puerto Penasco, Sonora, Mexico. The desert curve being near the later. This was the only "mostly finished" area on the layout and known as "The Photo Curve" and features prominently in a series of YT Shorts I did between 2019-2022.

The original layout, along with the entire layout room and workshop space it lived in, was cleaned, demolished and rebuilt from the ground up last summer. During that spring we designed a much more refined trackplan to support the new layout concept.

The new ALTA Mk 2 is now entirely set on the Mexican half of the railroad, centered around Guaymas & Empalme in Sonora's beautiful west coast. Much more accurate and cohesive, this new layout is built from day 1 for photography. Every scene has multiple sightlines to frame the equipment as it rolls through the scenery. It's much much more clear as a layout concept, capturing the late 1960's steam-to-diesel transition in Mexico, a decade after the last fires dropped in the US.

Here's the first of an ongoing series chronicling the building of the HO scale ALTA Railway mkII, (I'm editing episode 6 right now) This should provide all the best bits of context for the project as a whole.