The Spiral: Rob's posts [part 7]
March 19th, 2006: Tour Photos and Video
Last night's festival show in Miami (with about a hundred shitty screamo bands):
March 19th, 2006: Tour Photos and Video
More Miami:
March 22nd, 2006: "The Hole" Webcam Discussion Thread [split]
"The Hole" Webcam Discussion Thread [split]
There's a link there you might want to keep an eye on.
Edit: A fix for those having trouble playing the feed from "The Hole" (macs, linux, non IE browsers, etc.)
==================
If you are having trouble viewing the live feed:
Leave this window open.
Click here and goto "The Hole"
Log in, leave the window open ignoring or dismissing errors.
Click this link while "The Hole" is still open
**You will have to hit play to keep checking the feed if there is currently nothing active.**
March 23rd, 2006: "The Hole" Webcam Discussion Thread [Old Posts]
>Thanks Sonia :D
It won't load on my mac. :(
It should work fine on a Mac - make sure you have the latest version of Windows Media Player installed. Unfortunately it WON'T work if you're using Flip4Mac (like me), as Flip4Mac doesn't support live streams. So you'll have to disable that, OR you can dig the embedded URL out of the page source and open it up manually in Windows Media Player.
It pains me to have to use Windows Media, truly it does. But it's really our only option for streaming right now.
March 24th, 2006: "The Hole" Webcam Discussion Thread [Old Posts]
Regarding the quality of the webcam today: The Hole is spontaneous, and as such our bandwidth is unfortunately at the mercy of whatever internet connection we can get at the venue, which means that the quality is going to be kind of hit-and-miss. Today I rebroadcasted it on a different network in hopes of it playing back better, but it started getting shitty again. We'll hope for a better connection next time, and in the meantime we'll continue to tweak things on the encoding end to help it run smoother.
Oh, and I don't know why it turns green and upside down sometimes, but it's something in the player. Just refresh or restart the stream and it corrects itself.
March 29th, 2006: We are filming some shows
>Trent, widescreen...PLEASE!
16:9, true HD.
The high resolution is such a huge difference from what we've done in the past with DV cameras (ie And All That Could Have Been). Everything is so crisp and clear, it has a completely different look to it. This will definitely be unique from previous live NIN presentations.
March 29th, 2006: Tour Photos and Video
Pensacola - these were taken by our special friend Gino, who I reluctantly hand the camera to when I'm busy doing other shit during the show:
March 29th, 2006: Tour Photos and Video
More Pensacola:
March 29th, 2006: Tour Photos and Video
Little Rock (again, photos by His Eternal Manliness Gino Ascani):
March 29th, 2006: Tour Photos and Video
Corpus Christi:
March 29th, 2006: Tour Photos and Video
Austin:
March 29th, 2006: Tour Photos and Video
More Austin:
March 29th, 2006: Tour Photos and Video
Bossier City:
April 1st, 2006: "The Hole" Webcam Discussion Thread [Old Posts]
Stay tuned...
May 10th, 2006: Hey Everyone - What do you want to see on The Spiral?
Hey Everyone - What do you want to see on The Spiral?
Just stopping by to say hi. I haven't been on here recently, so I figured I'd drop in and try to weed through some of my private messages since they keep filling up. I've cleared some of them out so you can PM me again - as usual, please try to PM me only with stuff that's within my realm of control. Unfortunately I can't help you with anything to do with tickets, your Spiral account, your welcome package, technical issues with The Spiral, etc - all of that has to go through MusicToday.
So with that said... As usual, the time in between tours is pretty busy. I've been working on going through the footage that was shot in El Paso and Oklahoma, helping push things along with Closure (still no update on that, by the way - it's in Interscope's hands and they seem to be slowly moving forward, so we can all hope for the best), and helping prepare a number of other exciting things related to the upcoming tour and The Spiral.
Speaking of The Spiral, aside from some neat exclusive merch things on the horizon, I'm waiting to hear back from MusicToday regarding their long-promised "system upgrade" which will open a lot of doors for things we can do around here. With that in mind, I figured I'd open this forum to your ideas for what we should focus on with the new version of The Spiral website.
I met with MusicToday a couple months ago, when they were showing me their new system and what it could do, and it led to a discussion about the future and what kind of things we'd want them to implement. My thoughts were that building up the community aspect of the site was really important, and making it more robust is more in line with what we originally wanted to do with this site before we were somewhat restricted by MT's software. A better Spiral community would mean each member could have their own personalized profile page, where they can have galleries of their photos from the shows (or artwork, or whatever), share their NIN collection, have their own section to post reviews and blogs and concert stories and whatever else... Basically what we were trying to do with the Community section (no, I have no idea why all that stuff hasn't been posted yet - bug MT!), but extremely personalized and entirely user-controlled.
Anyway, that's just one idea. With nothing set in stone, please post your own ideas for what features you'd like to see for the website. Keep them in terms of website-specific enhancements for now - as in, don't post suggestions like "I think Trent should fly out to every Spiral member's house and have ice cream with them."
Oh, and expect website activity to pick up - both here and on nin.com - as we get closer to the tour and rehearsals begin.
May 10th, 2006: Hey Everyone - What do you want to see on The Spiral?
This Kenny Chesney stuff is news to me - are messages popping up from other message boards? MusicToday has - for no reason that makes any sense to me whatsoever - all of their fan club message boards on the same system. Kenny Chesney and Christina Aguilera are two of the other fanclubs they run. Sounds like a system glitch to me. How long has it been going on for? Please PM me about it rather than cluttering up this thread. Also, start sending e-mails to MusicToday about the glitch.
May 10th, 2006: Irvine, Ca show Cancelled?
Lots of people have been asking about this. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer, all I can tell you is that I was asked to "remove the irvine show from nin.com for now." I'll stress those last two words. That is literally all I know about the situation. I assume - please don't quote me on this, I'm just guessing - it has to do with confirming the deal with the promoter or whatever other backend concert stuff goes on, and I really wouldn't worry about it at all. If the show was cancelled, they would announce a cancellation. It's probably just a safeguard until things are fully confirmed. I'll let you know if I hear anything.
May 10th, 2006: Hey Everyone - What do you want to see on The Spiral?
Some clever hacker needs to figure out how to post messages on the Christina Aguilera message board from here. That would be kind of amazing.
Oops, I mean, don't do that.
Behave yourselves.
Really.
May 10th, 2006: Hey Everyone - What do you want to see on The Spiral?
>Higher res photos in the media section. The ones currently posted are too small. Twice that size would be nice... more in line with the size you post on nin.com, you know?
That's something I've been fighting for since the beginning, and will apparently be remedied with the upcoming MT system upgrade. It's a MT technical limitation, not a choice on our part.
May 23rd, 2006: Hey Everyone - What do you want to see on The Spiral?
>Kind of funny to have an update with pictures of TR with hair :) is anyone else's ticket status blank? Also, why is the megaupload of yesterday's hole being edited?
Those pictures are from when we very first sent material for MusicToday for The Spiral. I had suggested that the photo on the front be random, and gave them a batch of images to use. Of course, that proved far too difficult for their system, so we ended up with that same photo for months and months. Now that they've upgraded, they appear to have enacted the random photos, but using the old ones I gave them. I'll have to have them update the selection, can't have outdated Trent hair on the homepage!
May 23rd, 2006: Hey Everyone - What do you want to see on The Spiral?
But yeah, there's been an upgrade to the system, the one we've been waiting for which should give us more flexibility around here. We're going to start giving the site a bit of a visual upgrade - originally I had wanted each section of the site to be a different color with a different header image, but somehow even that wasn't possible. Hopefully we can readdress that now, among other things. Bigger photos are also (supposedly) now possible.
This is WAY off topic, but peaking of photos, we're going to be announcing - possibly later today - a new service we're taking part in, which will allow you to order prints of photos from any show of the upcoming tour. There will be a website you can go to and choose from a selection of photos taken at the previous night's show, and get an 8 x 10 or 11 x 14 print, with the option of a custom NIN matte for framing. The photos will be taken by me, so they'll be the same type of images you've seen posted here and used in the tour book. I've seen a couple sample prints and they look really nice, they're professional archival photo prints. I don't know the details on pricing and whatnot, but expect a formal announcement later today or sometime this week both here and on nin.com.
Also expect the merch items to be quite a bit different on this leg, we had a different design firm do them, it should be interesting.
May 23rd, 2006: Hey Everyone - What do you want to see on The Spiral?
Severus - Nice signature, ha ha ha.
I was holding the webcam filming the performance (at Trent's request), and someone from management came up to me and whispered in my ear, "Hey, are you going to take still photos? We really need still photos." This was after an entire day of different people asking me to do different things all at the same time, so I snapped at him, "You'll have to consult my third and fourth arms about that." He offered to take over the webcam for me - and then when I checked on him later, he hadn't been able to find the zoom on the camera, so I showed him and then made that announcement into the camera mic. I'm glad someone heard it.
May 23rd, 2006: Hey Everyone - What do you want to see on The Spiral?
>I hear ya.
Well then maybe a bit of both then. Some planned and some random.
Either way, we are damn spoiled.
There will be scheduled "webcasts" - we just didn't quite get it together on the last tour to have one, but expect to see some this tour. Announcing it ahead of time means a lot of people watching, and that we have to check ahead to make sure the internet connection at the venue is good, etc etc. But it'll happen.
The Hole will remain utterly random and spontaneous.
May 23rd, 2006: Hey Everyone - What do you want to see on The Spiral?
>^And everyone is happy. Excellent!
I could ask a million questions about the webcasts (quality, etc) but I assume that will be part of the announcement today?
No, the announcement is just about the photos. Regarding webcasts, I'm figuring out a way to get a live board feed so the audio will be better quality than just camera audio - also, ideally we'll do it somewhere with a great internet connection so we can broadcast the video at maximum quality (sometimes I send it out at a lower bitrate to avoid hiccups over the generally shitty venue internet connections).
May 25th, 2006: Lithographs for Summer Tour?
The first batch of lithographs have been posted on the performance page of nin.com. This time around, the posters have been conceptualized by well-known design firm The Designers Republic, as part of their new merch designs for the summer 2006 tour. Otherwise, it's the same drill: Different poster for every show, extremely limited edition prints.
May 25th, 2006: Lithographs for Summer Tour?
Yes, I'll still be posting pics on The Spiral for each show. Some of them might be the same ones that are available for purchase, but I'll try to keep as many of them Spiral-exclusives as I can. With this new printing service, it's turning into a LOT of quality pictures I have to produce from every show, with a fast turnaround time. Should be interesting...
May 25th, 2006: Lithographs for Summer Tour?
Answers to questions:
- I don't know what the pricing is going to be for the photo prints.
- The prints-for-sale thing isn't going to have any impact on camera policies.
- I wasn't involved in the art direction for the new lithos, it's actually the other way around: Designers Republic did the art direction for the new merch line, including a tour poster for the whole tour (not sure if this is going to be sold or not), which looks more or less like the city lithos. I was then asked to do the layouts for individual city lithos using the template DR had provided. So, I'm doing the layouts for the posters, but I'm closely following the idea/art direction/aesthetic created by DR. You'll see the typography and the general feel of these posters in a lot of the new t-shirts and such, which were all designed by DR. They've done some cool and very different stuff, it's interesting to have a new aesthetic brought in to spice up the merch line.
- To clarify, doing regional posters for the last run was a purely economic decision: In smaller cities/venues it's harder to sell specialty items like that, so they didn't think they could sell enough of them to outweight the cost of making all those unique prints. I know it was disappointing to people who collect the individual posters, but the regional idea was the best compromise we could make.
May 25th, 2006: Lithographs for Summer Tour?
"I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of unique city lithographs for the upcoming tour."
May 25th, 2006: Lithographs for Summer Tour?
>oh, heres another question for you.. that photo book from the last leg, will that be available again? it sold out very quickly every show i went to and it made me sad.
Yes, it will still be available.