Good news on all fronts... obviously you-all helped my campaign clear its funding threshold. So, while this doesn't mean the money has been immediately made accessible, it does mean I know I can count on receiving the funding. So I used the previous campaign's funds to purchase round trip tickets and access to the conference. Total price ($2,468) lines up almost exactly with this campaign's current funding ($2,654). No impact on post-production funding!

Kirk Sorensen Pre-Lunch Chroma

I've been working on TEAC4 for so long, you might have been under the impression all my footage was hastily shot with hit-and-miss audio. No! We did indeed shoot in a studio.

Media Fusion, staffed by folks keen on thorium as an energy resource, allowed us to shoot in their studio & use their gear.

About the only thing that didn't quite work out as planned was the white-board. Kirk never wrote on it. So we've got slightly tight chroma framing because we were positioning Kirk between the white board and the edge of the chroma background. (The board was too heavy to move without wasting lots of time.) But I'm pretty sure I can rotoscope any matte edges needed to expand the frame as needed.

Of course there's still some TEAC4 sequences I needed to finish up...

Rick Maltese - Support a Nuke

Our audio capture is pretty imperfect. To hear the song recorded properly, Rick's got a bandcamp page.

Rick also helped shoot some chroma-key footage...

Robert Steinhaus Chroma-Key

The wide shot was captured using a hand-held iPhone. I'm trying a new image stabilization setting, and you can see it is rebuilding the edges of wide-shot frames using data from older frames. I really don't have time to nail-down how to use this stuff properly, I'm experimenting as I process footage. By the time I'm editing TR2012 I should understand all my fix-wonky-footage options.

Eric Meyer Chroma-Key

Eric's already screened this footage and he thinks he looks awkward. Hey, Eric, there's good moments in there. And I know the audio sounds noisy... it can be cleaned up, I'll worry about that (for used portions) when editing TR2012.

John Kutsch Wraps Up TEAC4

John Kutsch Second Chroma-Key

John did step back in front of the chroma-key for a second stab at it. Good thing he did because I like his articulation about how even a frugal "first world" lifestyle requires a lot of energy.

Richard Martin & John Kutsch Discuss Superfuel

Just before Richard left TEAC4 he & John allowed me to capture their farewell. Decent audio if not slightly wonky framing. Another iPhone & Canon capture.

Michael on MSR Student Support

Michael from the University of Cincinnati Thorium Energy Alliance Student Chapter discusses student design efforts.

I hope you enjoyed that mostly well shot footage. What follows is quite the disappointment...

John, Scott, Eric, Gord & Pizza

I'm posting this for my own indexing... obviously it would be almost impossible to use footage like this (audio!), but maybe a solution will present itself. It was a good chat. The audio sucks because of me. I accidentally turned off the SanDisk Clip when I put it on John's collar. Just like that, I ruined it. Boo.

Robert Hargraves New Thorium Book

"Thorium - Energy Cheaper Than Coal" is a much thicker, meatier book than I was expecting. Am not sure why, but I assumed it was a beefed-up version of Robert's slide deck. It is not. It is a big freaking book. Oh, there's charts and pictures. But it is no slide deck... this is a serious book.

I haven't read it yet but certainly will. Thanks, Robert, for expanding our educational resources.

Robert and myself will be on AA 183 from LAX to PVG departing 2012-10-27 14:45. Anyone else heading to ThEC12 on that flight? If so, please contact us. We can shoot at LAX. We can try shoot on the plane. I'm in seat 31G, you grab a seat near us if you can.

Thank You

I really appreciate the financial support, and the word-of-mouth. It keeps me focused on TR2012. Certainly you've answered the question "Should I go to Shanghai?" without me wasting any time fretting about it. (And it was nice to buy the round-trip ticket this early... probably saved some money doing so.)

THORIUM REMIX 2011 Director's Cut DOWNLOAD

Backers can find their TR2011 download via this private post.