The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

We Heart Superman: Production Diary I

On Thursday the 27th, well past midnight, a post appeared on Craigslist: Male Voice Talent: Ever phone in an audition? (Cambridge)

It described a podcast in the style of an oldschool radio show, for which auditioners were asked to call and read a line to voicemail. The writer/director, up-and-coming standup comic Troy Minkowsky, and the producer -- me -- were three days from recording "We Heart Superman: Crisis of the Pink Kryptonite," and did not have a Lex Luthor.

The first call of the day came at 8AM. Someone hadn't read the times closely -- but enthusiasm is enthusiasm. I fielded a couple of emails that morning and shut off the ringer for the 11AM to 9PM audition window, hoping that the wakeup call would be a good omen.

"13 MISSED CALLS"

The response was unreal.

Steno pad in hand, I slipped back into the routine of sorting through long messages followed by mumbled names and millisecond phone numbers. (Running the box office at a theatre a couple of nights a week is good practice for playing producer.) By the next evening, Minkowsky and I had whittled a remarkable set of readers down to four, run callbacks (literally) by speakerphone, and completed an amazing cast with one mysterious voice actor: Mike Devine.

Superman was ready to fly.

-Matt Rasmussen, Producer

Puerto Rico and Housekeeping

Every large project, especially in computer graphics, involves certain long, tedious, repetitive tasks that would only be noticed in the finished product if absent. On Marboxian I nicknamed this type of work "housekeeping."

In the case of the Population Map, the latest example is Puerto Rico. If given statehood, Puerto Rico would be our 27th largest state, falling between Kentucky and Oregon. It's the only United States territory with a significant population -- much less that of an average state -- which is why I've chosen to include it -- late -- in the otherwise completed map.

The tedium comes from not having a .bna file for the 78 municipios of Puerto Rico, which I could use with my standard script to determine their geographic coordinates. Instead, I've had to manually enter each into the Open Street Map and copy their URLs to a table.

Next I'll rewrite the script to break the URLs apart into decimal coordinates, but that'll be brain work, comparatively.

In the meantime, there's cookies to make.

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