Shchyoopi

Here Goes!

2012-03-01T11:43:00.000-08:00

PSCHEEW.

Sending email has never felt more momentous! I've officially started shooting off professional inquiries and introductions, and I have a tiny heart-attack every time I hit the Send button. I think this would be a lot less stressful if I wasn't in the process of identifying the job that will more or less formalize my career path for the foreseeable future. I'm kind of at that point right now.

Of course, there are loads of other things I could do in addition to whatever job I end up landing, so this process will hardly cement me into one realm of activity for all remaining eternity. Sara and I have recently been tossing around the idea of starting our own production/design business.

Hm! More on that later.

Bedtime is Terrible

2012-02-21T07:26:00.000-08:00

To this day, there are certain fairly non-threatening songs that depress me immeasurably because they mean it's time for bed. When I was a wee tyke, my parents would sing those tunes to communicate a general atmosphere of somnolence, and I would get brutally depressed because they made me feel bereft rather than drowsy. Bedtime was a mournful thing because it marked the cessation of fun. What sane individual would not lament so grievous a loss?

I bring this up because I've lately been struggling with the realization that I still hate bedtime. Try as I might to develop other rhythms, I'm very much a night person and feel super alert and productive in the evenings. In fact, I usually experience a creative buzz right around 10pm and find it remarkably easy to stay up tinkering away late into the night. But Sara and I both have jobs to retain, so we find it necessary to enforce our own hibernation at a reasonable hour. I must wrestle my own demonic nature in order to accomplish this, and I end up feeling really depressed and put-upon by the time I've fully ensconced myself in the slumber-harness. Bedtime is an occasion to stop doing all the fun things and then lie still and do nothing for a long time -- right around when I'm most interested in doing stuff. It's terrible.

My bedtime difficulties have become ridiculous, and I've militantly resolved to do something about it. In what will perhaps prove to be a foolish attempt to correct my own circadian shortcomings, I've decided to become a morning person for a while. Perhaps if I spend a few months getting up at the crack of dawn and being all furiously productive before 8am, sleepytime will take on a more benevolent energy. Basically, I'm trying to make myself more weary and delirious than usual so I can later benefit from some timely exhaustion.

Green Tea Surprise

2012-02-15T10:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my valentine surprised me with this green tea cake. It was made with a hearty dollop of matcha, which is a marvelous variety of finely-ground Japanese green tea. I happen to think that green tea ice-cream, which is also made with matcha, is the single most delicious thing in the world. I had no idea a cake could be made from the same thing, so you can imagine my rip-roaring delight at finding this thing in the kitchen. It was, as it turned out, similarly unspeakably tasty! I was a little beside myself.

A New Thingy

2012-02-10T15:25:00.000-08:00

This handsome Tascam reel-to-reel recorder was being decommissioned at the TV station and they offered to let me adopt it. It's now newly installed in my Noise Lair (as pictured), and I have multitudinous uses for it in mind. It's certainly not a very practical tool for sound work when compared to my modern doodads, but it's a heck of a lot of fun and can produce some really bizarre noises -- and I'm always game for that. I have a project coming up even now, in fact, that may require its distinctive sound.

Graffiti

2012-02-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

Regarding the old insignia, pre-graffiti.

A student graffiti artist was hired to spiff up the entryway of the grungy campus bar, and I spent two days in there with him, shooting a video of his progress. He proved to be a real wizard with spraypaint, and I was astonished by the precision technique he demonstrated as he brandished his spray-cans. It was like watching a calligrapher at work. It was a complicated, multi-layered project, and he went about it with real elegance. I had a great time watching the mural take shape.

The video will be released on the college site in a week or so.

The Earliest Dream

2012-01-28T15:14:00.000-08:00

I can vividly recall a dream I had when I was probably three or four years old. It's the earliest dream memory I have, and I occasionally tell stories about it. Last night, I realized I had the ability to recreate the dream as a video, so I got to work and manufactured a pretty accurate reproduction of it. In the dreams I have nowadays, I usually have the experience of inhabiting myself and things are happening to me. I think I was young enough when I had this first dream that I lacked the corporeal experience necessary to have dreams about being me. As such, I dreamed this weird disembodied Terry Gilliam puppet show thing that I observed from a distance rather than experiencing directly. What you'll see in this video (with the exception of the dramatic-looking title at the beginning) is pretty much exactly what I witnessed in my mind's eye at the time -- crummy animation and everything.

I've put this together using present-day images of the people involved. In the original dream, we looked as we did at that time. (I pictured myself as a four-year-old, as you might imagine.) The "actors" you'll see pictured are a little older now than they were in the original broadcast, which is the biggest disparity between this recreation and the original thing. For those of you who don't know, the other two faces that appear are my parents.

Swift Judgement

2012-01-25T16:32:00.000-08:00

In working on my video showreels, I came across some terrific advice: "Present your best stuff immediately, and be sure to keep the whole reel to 60 seconds or less. Your potential employer will make up their mind about your work within in the first 20 seconds, and you shouldn't expect that they'll even watch the whole thing." I've prepared my showreels with this in mind, and I've discovered that it's a good thing I did.

I've been tasked with hiring an apprentice videographer, and we've been interviewing candidates for the position. In looking at showreels, I did, indeed, find myself developing nigh-instantaneous impressions of the applicants' skills. As predicted, I didn't need to watch entire reels to arrive at my decisions about their abilities.

I've done well, then, to be extremely to-the-point and whiz-bang with my own reels. I'm a tough audience, myself, and I have no doubt that the seasoned professionals I'll want to work with will be even tougher. I'm glad I had this flash of insight into the matter. I feel better in control of my work as a result.

The Very Noisy Spider

2012-01-24T17:34:00.000-08:00

The New Fingerpaint

2012-01-21T13:21:00.000-08:00

I've been shooting lot of long-exposure time-lapse footage for the college, and I took it upon myself to learn more about exposure control by way of nutty experimentation. The "fireflies" in my previous post are a bunch of Christmas lights being smeared around, and the shots above feature a glowing cell-phone being "painted" though the air during a 30-second exposure. We struck poses and outlined them with the phone.

A Whole Lot of Fireflies

2012-01-19T21:50:00.000-08:00

The Page Turner

2012-01-11T07:44:00.000-08:00

Warning Signs

2012-01-06T08:20:00.001-08:00

I've returned to my production work at the college, but campus is remarkably quiet; students are vacationing until the 15th, and it feels like a bit of a ghost town right now. I took a slow bike trip around campus yesterday and was struck by how silent and still it was. All the parking lots are empty, all the sidewalks are vacant, and all the lights are out. It's dead quiet.

It struck me that I need to be careful in my remaining months in WI. I'm thinking more and more about the new adventures awaiting us in May, and I'm in danger of getting really, really bored with this place I'm in right now. I've been here for nearly five years, and I'm beyond familiar with these stomping grounds. It's never felt so dead as it is right now, and it doesn't help that nearly everyone we've known since the beginning is gone. Sara and I are here [almost] alone, camping out quietly, keeping our heads down, and working our way toward the summer. The next few months have the potential to be incredibly depressing, and I need to keep my head in the right place and make sure that doesn't become a problem. It can be tough to manufacture enthusiasm where none exists, and that worries me a little.

A Holiday at Home

2012-01-02T20:45:00.001-08:00

Red socks. Yes, indeed.

Christmas on the East coast was exceedingly fine, and our luggage was 75% heavier on the way home due to all the weighty plunder (mostly books) we accrued. There was some very well-tailored gift-giving going on this year, and family members were furnishing and receiving some mighty specific and surprisingly appropriate things. It was charming all around, and it was great to see everyone again.

"Tales of the Arabian Nights"

Hilary D. sauntered up from Virginia for a few days, and it was marvelous to witness her boots planted on the very turf(s) I used to rampage as a youth. It's very fulfilling to behold college friends trotting about in personally significant places that aren't a college campus. We caught up on the happening since our last encounter (Sara's graduation in May), toured Gettysburg, picked up rad tomes from used bookstores, got fine chocolates and gourmet cupcakes, saw a motion picture, and roamed the expansive farm properties quite a lot. We played some epic board/card games with the aid of my brother, and there was occasion for much hooting. The games really stole the show, and Sam deserves many high-fives for administering them. Tales of the Arabian Nights was probably the merriest board game I've ever played. By the end of the game, my chap (Ali Baba) was mortally depressed, extremely wealthy, married to a gorgeous princess, and father to a horrendous camel-faced infant. Whole lifetimes unfolded for our characters over the course of the two days we played. Enthusiasts of the Imagination take note: this is a game to look for.

H. and S. and I took some strolls through the woods, and I introduced them to the old abandoned junkyard on the other side of the mountain. It's an eerie place.

Eric F. came up from D.C. on the 31st to join us for a pretty low-key New Year shindig, and we said our farewells to family the next morning and departed with him. He gave us a terrific whirlwind tour of D.C. that night, and we fled the coast the next day. Now we're in WI again, and it'll be quiet for a few weeks; most of our pals are on their college break and won't be back until the 15th.

I already miss my cat something fierce!

Not Even Slightly Airborne

2011-12-23T12:32:00.000-08:00

When you have a round-trip travel itinerary and you later adjust the time of the return flight, it turns out the airline sometimes changes your original departing flight to a different time as well! And they don't always tell you about it. We figured that out the hard way this morning; we were all packed up and ready to catch the bus to the airport, and I checked our flight info one more time for good measure... and discovered that our outgoing plane was inexplicably scheduled to depart five hours earlier than it had been the last time I eyeballed the data. We hadn't even left the house, and our flight was leaving in about two minutes. (It takes about three hours to get to Midway.) As you might imagine, we didn't make it to the airport in time.

Following a number of phone calls and a certain amount of red-hot schedule wrangling, we sorted the whole thing out. We'll be traveling tomorrow, instead, and we'll be keeping tabs on our brand new travel timetable with blistering intensity. Nothing will escape our notice this time, by gum!

It's Alive!

2011-12-21T10:22:00.000-08:00

Starting the Spreadsheet

2011-12-15T09:28:00.000-08:00

In an effort to keep my life organized and my prospects comprehensible, I've started assembling a spreadsheet of production houses I'd like to contact in 2012. Now that our plans to head north are effectively final and I've resolutely tuned my brain to Future Employment Mode, I'm tracking down establishments that claim to need people like me. To my astonishment, there are dozens of them, and every single one is in Minneapolis. (Not sure why St. Paul comes up so comparatively dry.) My spreadsheet's filling up fast.

Although lift-off isn't scheduled for another five months, I'm already fizzing with nervous energy and preemptively polishing up my showcase materials. I have great confidence in my resume, demos, and references, but I get jittery when I remember that studios hire when they need people -- not when some newcomer happens to tout rad skills. I'm confident in my rad skills, certainly, but it's that element of chance that's got me buzzing; regardless of the punch packed by my background and resume, will these places actually need a new shipmate? Given the number of studios I'm finding, I'm hoping at least one of them will look favorably upon my inquiries. And, hey: maybe I'll get lucky and find that rad skills alone are what you need to advance in this business. Production is an artistic field, after all, and it's all about what you can make -- and I can make pretty good stuff.

Oooh, the suspense!

The Transcontinental Portal in our Closet

2011-12-11T10:37:00.001-08:00

In a superbly devious turn of events, Ben P. and Zoe R. (friends of ours who graduated recently and have lately been living in Dallas) showed up at our apartment yesterday -- having previously told no one in Beloit (except for Sara and myself, who knew of it in advance) that they were visiting town. Their presence was entirely secret, and they capitalized on this by showing up without warning at various campus haunts and blowing the minds of their old friends.

Since Sara and I live securely off campus, Ben and Zoe came by our place first to figure out how they wanted to proceed. I had upcoming plans to work on a project with Max, a mutual friend, and we decided to surprise Max first. I called Max, and he agreed to stop by our apartment. Ben and Zoe hid themselves in the utility closet and Sara and I played host to Max when he arrived later, unawares. I took him into the kitchen to get him some treats and tea, and he was evidently very astonished when somebody knocked on the nearby utility closet door.

"Hello?", I said, opening the door to reveal Ben and Zoe. Sara told me later that Max, at this moment, should really have had his picture taken; his expression was evidently extraordinary.

"Hey, do you guys have a can-opener we cold borrow?" Ben P. asked, leaning out of the closet.

"Sure," I said, getting him a can-opener. "Just bring it back next week sometime. We should talk later on Skype, or something. As you can see, we've got Max over and it's not really the best time to visit."

"Oh, sure! Hey, Max," Ben said, waving. "You know, we'd have you guys over for dinner, but we're obviously in Dallas right now, so...!"

"No problem," I said. "You guys take care." I shut the door and casually resumed making tea. Max utterly busted up.

It was glorious.

Becoming Dumb

2011-12-06T07:36:00.001-08:00

When you're seven years old and you go out to play outside, the yard is full of evil robots and this tree is a spaceship (which will go faster if you run clockwise around it) and the driveway is made of lava and this stick is a laser gun and this leaf is your oxygen mask and it's up to you to save the day. This is serious business. Your yard is absolutely epic.

When you're over 20, you don't play in the yard. You occasionally wonder why you're not as imaginative as you used to be, and you feel this nagging sense that your creative wattage has diminished with age. You suspect that childhood was the only time when your mind was truly free, and you lament the death of innocence.

It's been said (quite rightly, I think) that much of our creativity is lost because of conditioning rather than some sort of inexorable neuronal decay. I believe "dumbness" is another inhibitor; certain ideas (like tree-ships and lava driveways) seem "dumb" to you when you get older. Many fantasies start to seem foolish to you, and you're no longer willing to entertain them.

"I'm not going to play in your lava driveway. That's dumb."

I wonder if lava driveways and stick-guns naturally mature into dumbness, or if we learn from our friends that certain things just aren't cool after a while -- and we start becoming self-conscious and unwilling to embarrass ourselves in front of our peers. I feel it must be the latter. By the time we're young adults, 50% of all creative endeavor is "dumb", and we become overridingly concerned with subjective quantities like quality and originality. We harshly judge each others' creative endeavors and we slam books and movies for being "derivative" -- because it is treason to invent something that has been invented before. Creativity becomes a competition, and a vast spectrum of creative endeavor is suddenly dumb or bad. We reject massive quantities of material because it isn't good enough anymore.

We have trouble creating because we won't let ourselves create; we frantically second-guess, judge, and compare our every idea -- and we therefore get nowhere and then bemoan our creative ineptitude.

When you're seven, you don't care if your yard is quality, original entertainment. You play in your lava driveway because your lava driveway is awesome, and you don't know or care that everybody has a lava driveway. Your spaceship-tree isn't dumb because you haven't decided it's dumb.

I'm not saying that people should create things they find dumb. Rather, I'm wishing that creative people could free themselves from their insecurities and just make things -- released from this debilitating concern for what others will think. A lot of magical ideas would suddenly be set free.

Through Our Eyes

2011-12-05T07:24:00.001-08:00

"Through Our Eyes" is now online via the college's YouTube channel. I'm nervous about this media roll-out; this has been my biggest production for the school so far, and it's nerve-wracking to submit something so personal for public consumption. I really hope it makes the right kind of splash.

Color Correction

2011-12-02T10:11:00.001-08:00

"No artist sees things as they really are.

If he did, he would cease to be an artist."

-- Oscar Wilde

I found this quote a few weeks ago and was really struck by it. I shoot a lot of photos and video in my line of work, and I'm often dismayed by how matter-of-factly my camera captures things. Images on the camera never seem as impressive or gorgeous as the original scene looked to my eyes, and I often retouch and color-grade photos and video to better represent the impact of the original scene. I often wonder if the camera just can't capture things the way the eye does, or if the camera is actually 100% accurate and I just have a skewed perception of reality. I want to think it's the former, since the human eye can take in a much broader dynamic range of light and color than a camera can. In any case, captured images never look right to me, and I spend a lot of time trying to tweak them so they feel aesthetically accurate and convey the correct emotion.

Left is original. Right is corrected

When submitting work to my supervisors, I'll often provide several different versions with different levels of color correction. More often than not, they'll say, "I really like this version; it looks the most pretty and lifelike to me. You've done a nice job on these colors." -- and, to my astonishment, it's usually the untouched original. Un-corrected work seem dull and lifeless to me, and I'm amazed that anybody would be drawn to it.

I guess I'm dissatisfied with reality and don't much care for it unless it's been stylized in some way. That, therefore, is why I'm an artist -- according to Mr. Wilde up there. The camera does show the world the way it is, and I'm just not happy with it. Perhaps that's my curse: to be forever disappointed with the way things really are!

The Next Course

2011-11-27T19:21:00.001-08:00

The Thanksgiving and its foodstuffs went over very well, and our respective digestive apparatuses were in good spirits for quite some time.

We've been discussing our plans to seize a multi-bedroom abode with M. Roen in 2012 (a most feasible venture with our powers combined), and we've hit upon some revolutionary notions as well as some better-defined plans. After much due rationalizing and heady research, we concluded that the twin cities posed an essentially ideal future locale for us to inhabit, and we resolved to install ourselves up there in May. All three of us have been to the twins before, and they've struck chords in us more than once. The cities are brimming with opportunities for young creatives like us, which is a major bonus; even in my most casual and preliminary research, I've found a dozen production and audio studios up there that I might easily get in touch with.

Where else can you go, really, where you've got two vibrant cities in one place that are both known for hopping art scenes, high quality of living, excellent chill weather, and a kindly attitude toward young people? We have numerous friends in the area already, and it's reasonably near to Matt's home base, too. The twin cities sound ideal, and we're sold. We're going to make it happen. It's nice to have decided the next steps.

Pre-Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T13:29:00.001-08:00

They spoke of matters too great for mortal comprehension.

The inimitable M. G. Roen has popped round for a visit, and we're hosting him here until later next week. We've been making merry foods, doing merry things, and discussing our plans to become housemates in May. Tomorrow, with our powers combined, we're going to make our first at-home Thanksgiving dinner and attempt to manufacture the sundry morsels with much excellent success.

Red Velvet cupcakes

Preparing for Winter

2011-11-16T12:23:00.001-08:00

A mob of people assembled outside Middle College today to participate in the shoot for our holiday card, which doesn't come out for another few weeks. It was a frigid afternoon, and the hours I spent outside left me feeling like my lungs had partially collapsed; I've been a bit tight in the chest since getting back indoors.

I finished and submitted my "Elephant" recently, and it was received with much positive fanfare. The buzz among the administration suggests that this production could be a very big deal, and that it could garner the college much attention. I'm trying not to get my hopes up, but making a surprise blockbuster will help me out a lot when I start preparing to move to a new job next year. That's the logistical truth of the matter.

Sara and I have been feeling rather festive of late, and we're looking forward to the winter. We feel oh-so-merry when it's bitter outside, and we can hole up with blankets and tea and get cozy in our abode. Our shelf of nice things, pictured above, is starting to take shape for the season, and I've been making a lot of muffins recently. Some of them have been rather unconventional.

Birds in Detail

2011-11-08T08:51:00.000-08:00

Our deck, in case you haven't heard, it totally the most Hip and In location this side of wherever all the rest of the birds are going at this time of year. It's getting semi-wintry outside, but our well-stocked bird-feeder has kept a sizable population of gibbering avians in our area. I'd been meaning, for some time, to take a few artsy photos of them, and I got around to it yesterday.

We adore this nuthatch! (Above.) It's charming and rambunctious, and we really get a kick out of its peppy demeanor. We'd noticed it moving about with an inept (almost skidding) gait, and my photography revealed that it has a deformed foot. It looks like a birth defect in other shots; the nuthatch has no front claws on its left foot, and its rear "toe" sports a useless second digit. How curious.

Sculpting The Elephant

2011-11-04T15:33:00.000-07:00

I've been editing for five days and the huge video I've been working on since the beginning of the semester is 95% complete. It's been an incredible challenge to trim my 2+ hours of footage down to a 3-minute video. I have this picture in my mind of what I want the finished product to look like, and it's really hard to take a ton of material that came from a bunch of goofy students wearing cameras on their heads and mold it into this majestic thing.

The joke about sculpting an elephant is perfectly apropos: "Get a giant block of marble and then get rid of everything that doesn't look like an elephant." That's pretty much exactly what I'm doing right now: taking a mountain of material and cutting out all the junk until I'm looking at the video I had in mind from the beginning. I'm almost there!

A Week in Pictures

2011-10-31T10:55:00.000-07:00

Collecting footage at a dance class.

Max carving his pumpkin.

Left: Max & Schyler's. Right: Sara's.

Hosting a Halloween party.

Day one in the studio.

Day two: finishing the mix.

Lobsters in my Brain

2011-10-27T03:39:00.000-07:00

Well, that picture's actually kind of terrifying. I set out to make it oddly humorous (since, you know, it's oddly humorous when schematics of lobsters are coming out of a guy's head), but now it's just scary. Given the Halloween-y subject matter I'm about to present, however, I suppose it's almost appropriate.

Right now, I'm reflecting on the fact that I had a bad dream. (Not actually remotely related to lobsters. Sorry.) A very bad dream. A really whiz-bang nightmare. I'm being kind of flippant about it, but it was actually the most terrifying nightmare I've ever had in my life, and I judge this by the fact that I awoke nearly screaming at 3 a.m. and was in a visceral panic for almost an hour afterward.

Nightmares have a frustrating way of seeming really brutal when you're having them, and then turning out to be remarkably stupid when considered after waking. That's been my usual experience, but this one breaks the rules; the nightmare I had was legitimately terrifying even by my wide-awake standards. Writing about it after the fact, I started becoming so paranoid and uneasy that I had to put the journal away and make some sweet tea in the middle of the night.

It really disturbs me that my subconscious can do things like this, and it's worrisome, furthermore, that my theory from June 2010 seems to be absolutely correct. My dream-time tendency towards nightmares has lately been on the low end. But yesterday was a frenzy of creative endeavor; I spent much of the afternoon concentratedly fabricating materials for a personal project, and pow -- I was visited that very night by a truly killer nightmare that was totally unrelated to what I was working on. I really like doing imaginative work, and it bugs me that horrible dreams seems to be an unavoidable side-effect.

A Bit of Proof

2011-10-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

One of the crew came on stage during Tobin's final bow and snapped this photo, which recently went up on his official photo-blog. Sara and I are clearly visible in there, though Mike W. is mysteriously undetectable even though he was next to us the whole time. (If you'd care to play Where's Waldo, Sara's wearing a white beret. I'm right beside her, furiously contemplating the interesting noises I'd just heard.) I've started to suspect that the whole experience was some kind of weird dream, so it's cool to have this official evidence of our presence there.

Preparing a Time-Lapse

2011-10-24T17:45:00.000-07:00

Back from Space

2011-10-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

I feel slightly separate from reality today. We drove to Chicago last night, went into a massive old theater, and witnessed an incredibly mind-bending show. On stage, inside a massive jumble of holographic cubes, was a wizard. Amon Tobin's manipulates sound in brilliant, ingenious ways, and I admire him for his ability to bend audio to his will and create things that people have never heard before. The new album he was touring for, called ISAM (Invented Sounds Applied to Music), really shows off his talent in this department; it blurs the boundary between sound effects and music. It's strange, entrancing stuff.

It was an inspiring night! The tunes and visuals were certainly groovy and awesome and all that, but I was mostly excited just to see him with my own eyes and have his existence confirmed. He was hidden inside his glowing contraption for most of the night, but lights would occasionally come on inside his control booth (the big cube in the center of the assembly) and reveal him, and he strolled out several times between sets to stand downstage and say hi. It was wonderful to see him there, smoking a cigarette, squinting in the stage lights, and see that he was human. He's up on a pedestal in my mind -- a creative icon to my way of thinking -- and witnessing him in the flesh made me realize that he's just a man, and that I, too, may one day work that kind of magic.

Our Ugly Campus

2011-10-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

Walking hither and thither on campus these days, one is likely to overhear cheerful commentary on how gorgeous everything is. "My, my!" someone will proclaim. "See, now, how the boughs are bedecked with the finery of autumn! Upon beholding so splendid and varied a spectrum of color, one nearly swoons." And they're hardly wrong about that; things are looking mighty pretty around the college. So pretty are things, in fact, that I've felt compelled to produce a very attractive video that showcases how damnably pleasing everything's gotten. That'll be next week's video feature.

But cameras have a way of recording the world exactly as it is, and you therefore start to become aware of things that most people normally tune out. You realize very quickly that our campus, in a certain way, is remarkably hideous. Really horrible, in fact. It's kind of upsetting.

The imagery is ideal: colorful trees, leaves floating in the cool wind, scarf-wearing students trotting merrily o'er the grounds, fluffy clouds, shafts of dusky light shimmering through the canopy -- the whole shebang. It's magical. Lovely. And here's what that scene sounds like:

That's the average campus ambience as recorded from the center of the college. Distant lawnmowers, traffic, huge trucks backing up, and construction noise combined with the strange, oppressive wah-wah-wah drone of the hydroelectric plant across the river. You'd think that so pretty a space should sound meadow-like: the whispers of trees, the babble of students, the quiet chirruping of birds. Nope! It sounds this way every day. I often have to throw out all my original production audio, go back to campus in the middle of the night, and re-record when there's no traffic, construction, or loud hydroelectric nonsense going on. I do this for almost every outdoor shoot I do.

It's funny how it takes a recording device to be aware of this. When I draw people's attention to the ugly campus ambience, they freak out because they notice it for the first time and can't believe it evaded their awareness for years. Also, as an aside, you realize when shooting videos indoors that everyone is coughing all the time. You don't notice it when you're there in person, but it's relentlessly present when you listen to your recordings later.

Radio Mystery

2011-10-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

Making this video spot brought back great memories. The radio theatre troupes I participated in did some fun live shows in this studio, and I daresay we were a bit more raucous than these folks in our productions. Ne'er shall I forget a Christmas show in which I played three characters who unexpectedly ended up in the same room together and had a three-way conversation for about five minutes. A lot of weird voice-changing was involved.

Making Cookies at All Costs

2011-10-11T09:22:00.000-07:00

Last night, around 10pm, a tasty aroma in the kitchen forcibly reminded me of a certain variety of Christmas cookies (approximated example of somebody else's cookies pictured below) that I used to make with my aunt when I was little. Overcome with nostalgia, I did some research, rediscovered the recipe, and immediately resolved to make those cookies, and make them now. I rushed into the kitchen, prepared the ingredients, and abruptly realized we were out of eggs. My roars of anguish were long and loud. My disappointment could not be expressed in mortal terms.

By thunder, I was going to make those cookies! Fueled by mania, I went bicycling off into the inky night and sped across town to a little late-night grocery store. I got those eggs, and I made that cookie dough when I returned home. But I opted to refrigerate the dough overnight to make it more manageable, so I have yet to actually bake and eat the things and the time of this writing. It was a tough decision.

Sara found my impulsiveness very interesting, and she pointed out to me that I often do this kind of thing. It's true: when I remember something or get excited about an idea, I feel an almost violent urge to act on it immediately. I go completely crazy if I don't. If, for example, I see an actor in a movie whose face I remember but can't quite place, I must stop the movie and look them up. If I don't do it immediately, I can't focus on the film and all action following my initial discovery of the mystery individual goes in one ear and out the other. Similarly, if I have a cool idea for something I want to research, design, film, photograph, etc., I must do it at once. I got stir-crazy if I can't. I feel a crushing urge to capture that experience, reclaim that memory, or make that thing.

I think it's more than just impatience. It's less a thing of restlessness and more like a compulsive call to action that I can't ignore when a nifty plan strikes my fancy. It's kind of a strange desire, but the feeling of frenzied empowerment that sweeps over me when I'm in its clutches is a lot of fun. I feel unstoppable and inspired! Nothing will stand between me and conceptual victory!

The Back Door

2011-10-03T17:21:00.000-07:00

Some of the trees hereabouts are starting to get conspicuously psychedelic. Last year, all the vegetation went straight from green to dead with no vibrant intermediate stage to speak of, and it was a terrible thing. I was oh-so glum.

I was invited to "guest lecture" in a video art class, and I spent a few hours talking with the students about their projects. Besides answering a lot technical how-do-I-do-this-and-that questions about editing, I talked with them about what they wanted to do with their videos and how they planned to accomplish it. I was really struck by how all of them were more-or-less making music videos; to accompany the footage they'd shot, they all planned to stick in some sort of pop or rock music to set the mood.

Dumping some band's tunes into a video and calling the project complete strikes me as careless and lazy, and it's been a big pet-peeve of mine for quite a while. I kept suggesting that the students should consider ditching the music and creating their own audio (musical or otherwise) to accompany their work, and they were dumbstruck. The thought had never occurred to them, and many were quite excited about trying it. Just goes to show once more how hand-crafting the audio side of a media experience just doesn't register with people. As long as there's some random music blaring over the visuals, most people are happy with the artistic product. It seems appropriately whole to them.

Sound designer Walter Murch said, "The eyes are the front door to the imagination. The ears are the back door." I think it's really true, and I do think that the treatment given to sound really determines the dividing line between generic music videos and powerful art pieces.

A Week in Missouri

2011-09-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

Our adventure down south was splendid. The Bicycle Haven is a uniquely charming place -- a cozy nest of books, bicycles, dogs, and family -- and it fills me with robust gladness to see Sara so utterly at home and in her element. The train rides to and from Missouri were quite nice, to boot; we read and napped a lot, and we went to dinner in the dining car and sat with a delightful elderly couple from Hawaii. It's a great way to travel.

We took an overnight trip to the Ozarks to visit Sara's grandmother, who lives on a farm far out in the country. Walking in the woods at night is an almost spiritual experience. (No light pollution, pitch blackness, bright stars. No cars roaring by). It happened to be a very foggy night, and our flashlights threw dramatic beams through the trees.

We also spent a day at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival and were thoroughly enchanted by it. Wandering the medieval streets, browsing the wares in wattle-and-daub shops, chit-chatting with costumed royals -- it was a transporting and other-worldly experience. Sara was on cloud nine the moment she passed through the front gates.

Migrating South

2011-09-18T16:55:00.000-07:00

Snapped this shot of the college president's house while shooting footage around campus the other day. (The turtle gnome in the foreground is atop a pedestal at the front of the walk.) I find a white colonial house with a red door to be a very handsome thing. I thoroughly enjoy the sight every time I walk by.

Sara and I are catching a train in Chicago tomorrow and heading down to Missouri to spend a week with the Pace family. We didn't take a single day off this summer, so we're jumping on this opportunity to escape from Beloit for a bit.

I've spent quite a bit of time doing media work at the college's football stadium this past week. (Funnily enough, I never once set foot in the place until I graduated and started going down there for work!) A multimillion-dollar renovation on the field was just completed, and yesterday marked the grand re-opening of the field as well as the year's first football game. There was a huge VIP shindig for donors, and I was brought in to shoot photography and video for the event. The party for the donors was a lot of fun, but the ensuing game bored me to death. I have a vague, conceptual understanding of why people enjoy football, but I absolutely cannot manufacture any personal enthusiasm for it. Still, lots of fun photo ops down there.

Hm.

2011-09-15T11:15:00.000-07:00

I've been experiencing an odd creative slump this past week-or-so. I've been working on videos as usual, but it's all felt rather automatic. I guess I'm kind of passively unexcited about my current projects. Maybe once I get these out of the way, I'll whip up some really funky stuff that I can have a lot of fun with. The zanier the project is, the more I can really get into it. Making videos of people sitting in classrooms just doesn't do it for me right now.

Distance

2011-09-07T19:30:00.000-07:00

Just for mirth and gladness (and because I find maps kind of fascinating), I did some geography research and plotted the as-the-bird-flies distances to points of personal significance around the country. Seattle is still conceptually important to me, my parents are in Gettysburg, Sara's family is in and around Independence, and MGR (Minnesotan Gorilla Rehabilitation) is in Bemidji. It's nice to be able to see how things are laid out.

Stadium

2011-09-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

The Conclusion of Summer Work

2011-08-29T10:01:00.000-07:00

My summer tenure at A/V has come to a close, and I've got a week to devote exclusively to freelance projects before I resume my position with Comm. & Marketing. Now that I've renewed my stint as college videographer, I'll be busy with production work until May 2012. After that, the world's our bivalve. My boss mentioned that he shared some of my work with a production company in Denver that he's connected with, and they're apparently interested in talking with me. If I want to work for an agency that does ad production for major corporations (not least of which is Burger King, apparently) he can put me in touch with the right people. But could I live with myself if I went to work every day to create big-budget hamburger commercials? I don't think that's what I want to do with my life.

I put a stop to my internship with the Janesville TV outfit. They paired me up with a new anchor a few months back and gradually increased our workload until we were going out on shoots almost daily. It started to seriously interfere with my "real" jobs, and it became apparent that the station was taking us for all we were worth -- which was great for them, considering that we were doing great work and they weren't paying either of us. My partner's been working for the station for free in hopes of being hired for real, but it's become clear that they have no plans to pay him. The whole situation's become rather unfortunate.

My production laboratory is fully assembled, and I'm looking forward to spending less time in the bowels of the library this year. Fond though I've become of that moody space, my new setup's much better for the kind of work I do. Also, I won't have to stay on campus until 9pm anymore, and being able to work while simultaneously making crisp pumpernickel in the kitchen's going to be a real plus.

Just Out of the Oven

2011-08-22T16:52:00.001-07:00

Tablet MIDI

2011-08-19T17:54:00.000-07:00

The Bookstore

2011-08-17T14:07:00.001-07:00

Sunday Afternoon Picnic

2011-08-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

Standing Waves

2011-08-12T17:30:00.000-07:00

I took advantage of some furniture giveaways on campus this week and acquired two desks! Sitting on the floor was really starting to get on my nerves (and irk my spine), so this is a real upgrade. I arranged a little nook with a bookshelf nearby to contain my library of audio-related tomes and notebooks, so it's the beginnings of a tiny studio space. Sara, too, is mighty pleased; her jury-rigged workstation has been replaced by a handsome blue table. She can spread out with her tablet and illustrate in comfort

I was compelled to research acoustics with some thoroughness when I realized that our apartment traps certain bass frequencies. My speakers sounded weirdly muddy while I was editing a vocal recording at that-there desk, and I slowly realized that my room (rather than the speakers themselves) was the troublemaker. I moved the desk to several different locations and heard differing degrees of muddiness at all of them. Since I'm unable to eliminate standing waves in my apartment by tearing down walls and putting them in different places, I've temporarily addressed the issue by jamming a load of blankets and pillows behind my desk. As you can see, it looks stupid as hell.

I've decided make the leap and seize a new computer capable of handling the system-intensive media work I do these days. My old laptop, though trusty, barely survives the simplest of editing tasks. I work almost exclusively with HD video, so new tools of the trade have become an undeniable necessity. Some new contract work I've secured will finance the operation satisfactorily.

A Man Who Makes Noises

2011-08-06T19:58:00.000-07:00

Amon Tobin was the very first musical artist whose work I cared about. Prior to college, I'd been exposed to pretty much nothing but classical music and piano and had grown very bored with it all. When I stumbled across Tobin's work in 2007, I was absolutely dumbstruck by it because it was weird, inventive, and utterly unlike anything I'd ever heard in my life. The man was like an alchemist; he recorded things that weren't music (squeaky chairs, insects, machines, leaky sinks) and turned them into madcap melodic constructions. He's made a name for himself as a person who records weird stuff and does cool work with the noises he finds -- which is pretty much my overarching objective in life at present. For that reason, I admire him quite a bit. He's a damned interesting fellow.

With all this in mind, I hope you'll understand the context of my blistering excitement as I mention that I now have tickets to see him live in Chicago this October.

192,000 Hertz

2011-08-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

Many would agree that high-speed photography is a wonderful thing, and that high-speed video's an almost exquisite entertainment. (Ah, the fun of watching a water balloon gracefully distending over a person's face and then slowly peeling asunder into a weightless veil of fluid.)

I've lately been dabbling with high-speed audio, which most people don't even know exists. Just as visual slow-mo allows viewers to see with great clarity all the tiny, detailed things that happen in a brief event, slow-mo audio allows listeners to hear all the details that are normally undetectable in a sound. In visual slow-mo, a sneeze becomes a stately mist. In audio slow-mo, the sound of a sneeze transforms from a brief hiss to a seismic disturbance -- full of deep rumble, high-pitched gravelly noises, and fearsome vibration. You realize what's in a sneeze. (A lot, as it turns out.)

Just as super-high-speed video requires a special camera that shoots 1000+ frames per second, super-high-speed audio requires a recorder that captures 192,000 (or more) samples per second (as compared to the 44,000 samples per second captured in standard audio recording). The clarity of high-speed audio is astonishing. Slowing down recordings to make them sound weird is nothing new, but slowing down sounds originally recorded at insanely high sample rates is rather new. Allow me to illustrate the differences:

In my early tests, a weird monster noise I made produced some of the coolest results when super-slowed. In the following sample, you'll hear three things: the original sound I recorded, the original slowed 3x at a normal sample rate, and a duplicate of the original slowed 3x at a super-speed sample rate.

The slowed normal-rate recording sounds dull and muddy when compared to the slowed high-speed recording, which is full of strange trills, guttural detail, and what some have described as "the rending and creaking of huge trees". It's fascinating to me that everyday sounds are full of incredibly alien detail that can be made audible by way of this technique.

Before and After

2011-07-25T13:45:00.000-07:00

I've recently been making posters for various A/V-related events and locations, and today I produced one for the public "I.T. HELP" bulletin board on the ISR floor. Here's the original photo I shot (yes, we actually did plunge a javelin through an old laptop) -- followed by the final poster image. I'm deeply amused by it.

The Furious Turkey

2011-07-23T14:16:00.000-07:00

I went on a bike ride this afternoon that took me far out into the rural backwater of Beloit. When I stopped at one point to snap the above photo of a field of Queen Anne's Lace, I was abruptly accosted by a wild turkey. It burst out of a nearby shrub and made quite a show of being offended by my presence. I took its picture and left it alone. A place where hopping mad turkeys rush about in the underbrush is not a place I want to be.

I've gone on several 20-mile rides in the past couple of weeks. The quiet farm roads outside of the city are very nice for such trips, and the scenery is great for the sort of minimalist landscape photography I like to get up to.

I've been videographing like a maniac for the past week; in addition to working on numerous video editing projects at A/V, I've been shooting and editing multitudinous spots with my LVTV partner. I'm also in the process of starting production on several pieces for the tourism office, and I'm nearly finished with the promo video I'm making for the nature center. Madness!

Raspberries

2011-07-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

Plumbing

2011-07-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

The Workbench

2011-07-12T14:37:00.001-07:00

On (and Under) The Ground

2011-07-12T11:08:00.000-07:00

The A/V crew accompanied the college's network engineer into the old subterranean steam tunnels today to help him repair some broken ethernet cables. I hadn't been down there since we shot that documentary on the tunnels some years ago. They're as creepy as ever!

LVTV (the internet TV station in Janesville I collaborate with occasionally) recently partnered me with an anchorperson! He makes the arrangements to cover stories in the area, and I go with him to shoot the spots, edit them, and get them online. He does all the talking on camera, so I get to focus exclusively on the behind-the-scenes stuff. Having a partner is new to me; I've never worked on video projects where I haven't had to do everything (in front of and behind the camera) entirely by myself, so this is proving to be a very relaxing and effective approach to production.

He's quite ambitious and wants to shoot lots of stories... and I'm already working full-time for the college on top of making progressively more and more videos for the Beloit tourism office. LVTV currently engages me for free as an intern (which is what I've been thus far), but I can't sustain doing all this free work with my new partner for much longer. If they're going to send me on many more assignments with him and they continue to cut into my "real" job, I'll have to start charging them or suggest that they find somebody else. I'll be having that conversation with them soon.

The Carnival

2011-07-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

Just for fun, I shot this video last night when Sara and I wandered down to the Riverfest carnival. I went back over there today to shoot a news spot for local TV with a broadcasting fellow I met recently, and we had to jump through all kinds of hoops with festival security and board members to gain permission to bring recording equipment into the carnival grounds. I guess I just got lucky last night when I was gathering footage for the above piece. As it was, I had no idea at the time that shooting video was extremely against the rules.

Hey, this is the first time I've embedded video on here! I didn't even know I could do that.

Voyaging Far

2011-07-07T20:39:00.000-07:00

Biked 20+ miles this morning to shoot video of an event taking place west of Beloit. It was a nice ride through very pretty farm country that reminded me a lot of the rural scenery around Gettysburg. I snapped some handsome photos on the way home. (First one's of a boardwalk where I went to shoot video.)

Watering the Tomatoes

2011-07-06T17:37:00.000-07:00

A/V

2011-07-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

The Reverberant Silo

2011-07-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

I read that there's a fellow in Montreal who owns an empty grain silo. He installed a set of speakers inside it, hung a microphone from the roof, and created a website. When people use his site to upload audio files, the speakers in the silo play the file aloud and the hanging mic re-records the file plus all the endless echoes it produces inside the cavernous space. The reverberant new recording is then sent back to the uploader of the original file. The silo is an echo chamber! It tickles my funnybone to no end to know that there's a silo out there somewhere that's booming with weird noises night and day. People must inevitably upload "Ohgod ohgod, please let me out of here!" recordings or audio of people having really raucous intimate relations. I wonder if the silo's neighbors ever get suspicious.

I've been playing with the A/V reel-to-reel deck a lot lately. It's not at noisy and strange as the older set that's now in storage, but I'm still getting quite a bit of fun material from it. There are lots of devices in this office that provide loads of noises for me to record. This morning, I took a malfunctioning miniDV camera into the basement and got some excellent recordings of it grinding foolishly away. As always, I'll find a use for this stuff somewhere.

My first radio ads are presumably on the air between now and July 10th. Once those have concluded their run, I'll send up the next few. They'd like at least three more spots from me before the end of the summer, I believe.

In Pursuit of Justice

2011-06-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

On Friday afternoon, some cops walked into A/V and asked if we could help them clean up and improve a lo-fi recording somebody had sent in of a verbal abuse incident. My co-workers referred them to me. Not sure how or why the Beloit PD found their way to us, but I asked no questions and sat down with the officers to to try my hand at the cleanup process. While I was able to isolate the garbled dialog the cops were trying to hear better, the dialog was still incomprehensible.

Anyhow, that was a surprise. It's not every day the police recruit you to help them tidy up their crime evidence.

I spent Friday morning collecting footage at a nature preserve in Rockford. I'm putting together a promotional video for them, and I had a great time recording video and sound on the trails out there. It was a lovely day.

The Truth

2011-06-21T18:50:00.000-07:00

The aftermath of the storm.

I've been working on a 5-second I.D. video for the college -- just a pretty little thing to say Beloit College and appear briefly before the "feature presentation" begins. I've been tasked by Comm. & Mktg. to establish guidelines for creating a consistent style and aesthetic for future videos, and this is one of the ways in which I plan to do that. The visuals are mostly complete, and now I'm moving on to mixing together appropriate sound. Hand-making audio is a wonderful process.

...which leads me to a confession I've been needing to make for some time: I'm a true and consummate sound nerd. Seriously. Screechy feedback fascinates me. I often collect pieces of music -- not because I like the music itself -- but because I like one particularly interesting note in it. I ask people not to throw away their malfunctioning computers until I can first record the weird fizzing noise they makes. I spend days re-building dot-matrix printers because I want to record the noise they make. I string tape decks together because they make weird noises when looped.

I collect sounds because I like to make things with them. Some people tinker with cars, obsess over home-improvement, or make model trains. I, on the other hand, make noises. And I often use them for things; the two ridiculous sci-fi movies I've made have each featured a significant chunk of the libraries I've put together -- and quite a few of my more complex college videos (squirrels included) have included audio I've custom-made. So I don't just collect noises because I'm a sonic hoarder; I collect because I use this stuff, and I've learned to record anything that catches my interest because I always find an application for it somewhere. Sound design makes me giddy. I'm really incurable. If you find weird noises or stumble across cool audio stuff, send it my way. I'll be much obliged.

If I can ever find my way into a line of work where I can put my audio obsession to good use (in film post-production, sound effects recording, foley artistry, or something like that), I'll be set forever. My professional life will be utterly complete.

When I'm not making noises, I'm making bread. I've started making hand-made loaves. It's fun and delicious and it makes me wonder why I ever needed a bread machine. (Probably so I could record the noises it makes -- which I've done.)

ADDENDUM

As I was finishing this post, I noticed that the storm we had this afternoon (shown during its conclusion in the above photo) decided to wrap up with a truly magnificent sunset. I ran out with my camera to capture these shots:

A Change of Plans

2011-06-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

Went down to the river yesterday for another sunset shoot.

Earlier this week, when we sat down with our landlady to finalize Sara's incorporation into my lease, we were informed that the modification would require the original one-year lease to be renewed and reset to expire in May 2012. This came as a bit of a shock, as you might imagine, because we'd fully expected to vacate Beloit in November and venture forth to new pastures. The news was more of a surprise than a disappointment, since our vision of the future was honestly quite nebulous -- and living in our comfortable place in Beloit while holding down good, fulfilling jobs for an extra six months certainly isn't a bad thing. All it does is slow down our eventual migration to a groovier city.

I've been putting together videos and radio spots for Visit Beloit. I'm particularly excited about the latter media, you see, since I've never made real radio spots before. (Which is to say that I've never before made spots people have paid me to create.) I do love working with audio, so this is a great experience for me.

Salmon and asparagus for dinner tonight. Almond poppyseed bread for dessert. Ooh.

Onstage

2011-06-13T17:58:00.000-07:00

Returned last night from five days in Akron, Ohio, where I performed in my Aunt's music festival for the fifth year in a row. In conjunction with the usual acting engagement, I was also in a ballet. I played The King whose beloved queen more or less dances herself to death, which prompts the king to forbid his six daughters from ever dancing again. He eventually regains his compassion and allows happiness and dance to return to the kingdom, but not before going mad with grief and seriously upsetting his children. The girls in the ballet were a real blast to work with, and we had a mighty fine time acting and dancing and being all grim and melodramatic together. Best part of the ballet: falling to my knees before the queen's still corpse, having a meltdown, and then lifting her into my arms and slowly carrying her limp form off the stage as the lights fade to black and the music concludes with a freaky minor chord. Fun stuff.

Got back to Beloit yesterday and picked up where I left off with work. My A/V schedule has increased to 30 hours per week, so I'll have plenty to keep myself busy between that, producing motion pictures for Visit Beloit, and doing other contract work. The real world just keeps on rolling along.

Saw the new movie Super 8 in theaters while in Akron. So much fun. I haven't enjoyed a movie so much in quite some time.

Riverfront Sunset

2011-06-05T19:01:00.000-07:00

Picture and Sound

2011-06-03T14:07:00.000-07:00

It's official: I'm now in cahoots with Visit Beloit as their videographer. I'll start production on their first pieces tomorrow, and my schedule for future work with them already looks quite busy. On top of doing A/V work at the college (and then transitioning back to Communications & Marketing in the Fall), I'll certainly have my plate full. It's going to be a little nuts, actually.

I sat in on a sales meeting wherein the Visit Beloit people met with some radio execs from Janesville, and Visit Beloit bought some ad slots on the airwaves -- and my new employers turned to me and asked me if I would be willing to be voice of Visit Beloit on the radio. HECK YES, quoth I, and the deal was made. So now I'm going to be on the radio on top of doing videos, which is approximately 100% cool and exciting. It sounds like they're just going for tiny 30-second promo spots for the time being, but that's still something.

I cycled uptown this afternoon to visit a music store and aimlessly inspect their electric guitars. My interest in weird noises is such that I've lately been considering going electric and toying with effects -- but an hour of playing guitars in their store changed my mind and extinguished the temptation I was feeling. That was really the only reason electric guitars appealed to me: their experimental sound capabilities. I've no desire to rock out or be a loud, annoying neighbor to anybody -- and I'm not even a serious guitar player. For now, I'm happy to tune my acoustic guitar in horrible ways and summon unearthly sounds from it the old-fashioned way.

On Tuesday: I fly to Akron, Ohio to commence rehearsals for a ballet/ music festival I'll be performing in. Sara will be alone for five days. :(

Bird-Feeding

2011-05-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

I hid the GoPro camera in various places around the deck this morning and got some cool close-ups of avian visitors enjoying their seed medley breakfast.

The Amber of Evening

2011-05-29T22:08:00.001-07:00

Comedy Ice

2011-05-29T12:14:00.000-07:00

It's been a quiet week. My work with A/V will be rather limited until June 12th, so I've busied myself with freelance projects in the meantime. I've been scripting and planning and working from home, which is kind of delightful. It's a funny thing to be on the job while sitting in the living room with a cup of tea. It doesn't feel quite real.

Sara's secured a part-time job with the bookstore downtown and will begin her hours with them this coming week. With that small nugget of job security now in place, she's planning to venture forth and find additional things to do. (There are actually a few art/illustration opportunities she's planning to spring on that could result in some interesting further work if things pan out.)

My ridiculous pet project for the last two days has been the creation of something I've dubbed "comedy ice". As you can see from this photo, comedy ice consists of towers of fused ice cubes sprouting from a cube tray. A week or so ago, I accidentally re-froze two ice cubes together in a little stack... and subsequently wondered if I could gradually re-freeze more and more ice cubes together until the stack was too tall to fit in the freezer. It's pretty easy, as it turns out -- and I was able to fuse 21 cubes together before running out of freezer headroom.

Another Job

2011-05-21T19:53:00.000-07:00

Maybe I should commit to being eternally optimistic. I should just trust that things will always work out.

I got a surprise email from A/V a few days ago in which they offered me a [nearly] full-time summer job with them. Turns out they're in serious need of a video editor and none of their other video people are available this summer. I was sure the college wouldn't allow me to take the position (what with me not being a student and all that), but the HR office has miraculously cleared me and I'm able to start work with A/V this coming Monday. I'm happy to take paying gigs that come my way, so I've agreed to take the job. Incidentally, I know it's work that I'll enjoy and be good at; I worked for A/V over the summer two years ago and had a great time. In many ways, my experiences in that office resulted in the best technical education of my college career. I'm looking forward to being back there for a time.

Funny how these things happen! Within the span of a single day, a job came out of the blue and guaranteed my regular employment for the next four months. My intent to work with Visit Beloit still stands, but I'd never expected that the gig with them would provide particularly regular or reliable income. With the A/V position in place, things are looking much better. I'm going to be a busy little filmmaker this summer.

We made rainbow cake tonight! The other photo above is just a pretty shot I took in town a few weeks ago.

The New Normal

2011-05-18T18:15:00.000-07:00

Well, that's that: Sara has graduated from college, joined the apartment lease, and entered into the real world. All things considered, she's feeling pretty good about everything and has plans to seek Righteous Employment in the coming days. She's got a few options lined up.

I'm a little adrift, myself; my job with the college has more-or-less entered its summer hiatus phase, so I'm effectively between jobs at the moment. I'll be more actively commencing work with the downtown tourist center in the coming weeks, so I'll be making a transition of my own.

Commencement was lovely and seeing family (both Sara's and my own) was very nice. I'm happy to report that I actually got to sit with the Hartzell/Pace posse during the proceedings. I only ran around a very little bit to stick a camera on a grad's head and tend to a time-lapse video I was making of the event. Now that that's over and done with, we've said our tragic goodbyes and settled down to tend to our new lives. It feels pretty weird to be so alone for the time being, but we're confident that our old concept of normalcy will reset itself soon. And some of the people we said Bye to will return next semester. Some of them.

Real life seems much realer when we're both in it together.

On the Down-Swing

2011-05-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

Trois debuted yesterday and was well-received by friends, family, and co-workers. Now that it's finished and online, I feel vaguely ill-at-ease and very ready to start work on something new. I do already have plans for a few other short films and multimedia things I'd like to make, so it's only a matter of time until I'm full-swing into something else. I've always made these things just for the fun of making them, but maybe I should start considering doing something that could potentially result in an influx of gold and silver. I've never tried that before. Selling my crazy short films? What a notion! Probably not worth the trouble and expense, but maybe not an impossibility.

Sara's family members arrive tomorrow evening and mine will get into town on Saturday. It's going to be a busy weekend, and we have reason to believe that Sara's going to receive some very special honors during commencement. She always was a good little academic.

Took that photo of Middle College on a bright but blustery day last week. (Same day, actually, as the "Pretty Geometry" photo in the post below.) The exposure settings on the camera really brought out the evil-looking clouds and I couldn't resist color-correcting the shot to complete the ominous look. It's remarkably easy to take really scary photos of that building.

Pretty Geometry

2011-05-09T15:15:00.001-07:00

Finished with College

2011-05-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

Mere minutes after turning in last essay ever.

TROIS is coming

2011-05-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

TROISMOVIE.BLOGSPOT.COM

Now Amassing: many good things

2011-05-04T14:42:00.001-07:00

My parents and Sara's family will be materializing in Beloit quite soon to watch Sara's graduation and spend a little time with us before and after. Leading up to that, Sara and our other senior-year friends will get to enjoy a week of vacation between the end of finals and commencement on the 15th. (I'll still be working, of course, and won't get to join the revelry -- but it'll be fun to see the people I know freaking out as the end of college rushes towards them. It's a really emotional, slightly terrifying, kind of spectacular week.) This will be the graduation that really means something to me, since it will really mark the end of college for just about everyone in my Beloit friend-group. At my own ceremony last year, my friends and comrades in my own class vanished into the sunset while I stayed behind to complete my last semester. This year, it's really final; everyone else I know (but for one or two underclassmen friends) will escape Beloit, and then college will really be finished -- this time for Sara, too. The vast majority of our friend-group will disperse. It'll be the turning point. Sara and I will both be grownups together. Later this year, we'll rendezvous with Matt Roen, our probable housemate-to-be, and commence figuring out where we want to move to next. Maybe Chicago. Maybe Milwaukee. Maybe SPACE. (Yes!)

I've gone into overdrive with TROIS and will be releasing the completed film on May 10 (God willing). I'm finally starting to grow numb to it, which is a sign to me that I need to wrap it up before I get so completely desensitized and overexposed that I can no longer do good work. It's fortuitous that I have so much fun doing sound; if the race to the end consisted entirely of doing tedious frame-by-frame visual effects, I could have gotten incredibly sick of the whole movie by this point. Instead, I get to have a blast creating weird noises as I finalize the film. This is a very good thing, but I'm still getting worn out. This movie needs to be done.

The tourist office in town has received some new videos and graphics I made for them, and they're requesting my services in the future as a regular producer of videos and multimedia content. Looks like I'll be working with them fairly frequently for the remainder of 2011. Fingers crossed.

Visiting

2011-05-01T22:34:00.001-07:00

Starship Library

2011-04-28T19:18:00.000-07:00

Being in the basement of the library at 9 o'clock at night is a little weird. It's pitch black outside and the windows become mirrors. It's totally quiet (what with this being a library and all) except for the deep rumble of the ventilators. The computer screens glow. I feel like I'm on a spaceship and earth is a million miles away.

Okay, it's actually kind of cool.

In the Library on a Rainy Day

2011-04-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

The Feeling of Forgetting Everything

2011-04-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

A conceptual quandary that troubles me from time to time: If I grow old and lose all memory of the first 70 years of my life, what happens to me in the present? If I contract some sort of amnesia in the future and all my earlier experiences vanish into the void, why am I having the current experience of sitting on this couch with my laptop? Why am I not suddenly 70 years old right now, and why am I not at this very moment wondering what I did for the past seven decades? If I suffer complete memory failure in the future, would not my experience of life be translated into a seamless flash-forward to my forgetful 70s? Wouldn't I be there right now? What, then, can be my experience of the present if the present functionally ceases to exist decades down the road?

I bring up this question because I was able to [sort of] answer it last night. At 3am, I woke up in bed and stared at the ceiling and suddenly thought to myself, "This is the answer to that question I keep coming back to: I'm awake right now during a midnight moment that I won't remember when I get up in the morning. What I'm doing right now will cease to exist and my experience of life will consist retrospectively of a seamless jump from yesterday's bedtime to tomorrow morning. This is what it will feel like to live through a loss of experience."

And I was right.

An hour ago, after discovering the post-it note memo that I'd politely left for myself during those voided 3am moments, I realized with horror that a real-life moment I'd lived through was retrospectively nonexistent. Only the post-it note remained as evidence that I'd actually experienced that period of time. If I lose my memory when I'm 70, the present will vanish, none of this will ever have happened, and I will always have been an old man with no idea of how I became one. That's pretty much how it will feel.

Small Picture, Big Sound

2011-04-21T16:21:00.000-07:00

Visual effects work on TROIS has concluded and I'm now moving into post-production sound! This is far and away my favorite part of the process. (It's also the last part of the process.) Foley will be one of the first things I tackle, and I've started out by exporting the video to Sara's iPod. By doing this, I can enjoy the outrageous convenience of being able to carry the footage around and record Foley in sync with it in all manner of locations -- indoors and out. I have fond memories of doing a similar thing when recording Foley for my time-travel movie Negative One: referring to the movie on an iPod while bellowing and crashing around the room in sync with the picture to record additional audio for a fight scene. It was more fun than I knew what to do with.

I watched some of TROIS on the iPod just to make sure it had transferred properly, and I was struck by how much the quality of the sound influenced my general perception of the quality of the video itself. I was listening through headphones, and although the visuals were pixelated and smaller than a business card, the high quality of the sound through the headphones made me not care in the slightest about how much the visuals sucked. I could have watched the whole movie that way with no complaints.

It's just funny to me that people get so intent on HD video and higher and higher image resolutions, and yet people are apparently watching more and more videos on smaller and smaller screens. As long as the sound is clear and strong and intact, visuals don't matter as much. And yet if you sit somebody down to watch a blockbuster movie with eye-popping visual and special effects on an giant screen -- but make them listen to it over a cell phone speaker... they won't be able to bear it.

Fascinating, too, that you can play somebody a video with the sound out of sync by a fraction of a second and it'll drive them completely bonkers.

Two Kinds of Pretty

2011-04-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

Library

2011-04-16T10:42:00.001-07:00

BlanketCam

2011-04-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

People already look askance at me when I carry a camera around campus. Today, they looked at me with greatly deepened horror as I carried a camera and a rather childish-looking technicolor quilt to and fro. Some people asked me what the quilt was for, and I explained that I needed it for the complex emotional support it provided. A few people looked very uncomfortable (and one professor actually tried to not-so-subtly escape my presence) until I clarified that I was using it as a makeshift dolly to slide the tripod around.

Angles

2011-04-12T22:18:00.001-07:00

Digital Naivete

2011-04-11T16:40:00.000-07:00

Eight hours of dealing with malfunctioning computers and video format incompatibility errors makes me look like this:

There was a time when I generally thought computers where supposed to be useful tools, and that it was their purpose to facilitate greater efficiency, productivity, and organization in many arenas of human work and activity. What funny ideas I had!

Don't worry: I take these photos when everyone else in the office has gone home for the night.

Oakwood

2011-04-10T17:31:00.000-07:00

Tapes and Tapes and Tapes

2011-04-08T15:27:00.000-07:00

I've had a strange workweek and have been getting rather bored and depressed. And it's a funny thing, you see, because I've been doing a lot of work that involves doing absolutely nothing. I've accumulated over 15 hours of video on tape or DVD from various projects that must all be imported into the computer. It involves an absurd amount of waiting; for days, I've been on the job doing nothing but watch tapes play into the computer and then take hours and hours to render -- and every time I finally complete processing on one tape, more tapes crop up and must be prepped in a similarly boring, time-consuming way. It doesn't help that many of the media items I've been importing have been delivered to me in weird formats that require me to waste many additional hours searching for obscure conversion techniques to make them manageable. (For example, three hours of video are delivered to me on HD tapes, and the video on them was captured at 1080p resolution -- which is a level of quality so ridiculously vast that it makes many modern computer chug. And if an hour of footage at standard resolution takes three hours to export, an hour of 1080p video takes three times as long. It's dreadful.) So I've technically gotten a lot of work done (and various people are actually paying me to do it), but I've done it all while literally sitting around in a basement office with a notebook open in front of me while progress bars on the computer screen tell me four or five hours remain until processing is complete on whichever DVD or tape happens to be running into the system at that time. Unfortunately I can't do any other production work while this is going on; importing and rendering requires all the computer's attention. I've gotten a lot of writing done. I've read some Jules Verne. I've been bored as hell.

Triumph and Furniture

2011-04-05T19:02:00.000-07:00

I was informed on Friday that I'd won a college photo contest I'd completely forgotten about submitting work to. (The B&W photo there, which I've posted here before, was the winner.) A pleasant surprise, certainly, and it came with prizes: an oversized Beloit hoodie, a Beloit water bottle, an engraved Beloit car license plate frame, a Beloit frisbee, and a leather Beloit notebook. Weird stuff. I was actually excited about the notebook; I go through notebooks pretty fast and can always use another one.

About a week ago, Sara and I decided we'd had enough of this sitting on the floor nonsense and we went down to the thrift store to see what they had in the way of furniture. To our astonishment, a relatively handsome, surprisingly cheap, generally acceptable couch was sitting right there in the entry when we walked in. We snagged it and then carried it a mile home, which was deeply unpleasant because it turned out to be extremely heavy. Our friend Michael helped us toward the end when our arms were completely giving out. (He took that photo there with his elite new smartphone.) Now that the couch is home, the apartment looks like a legit abode; the furniture does something to make the place look thoroughly civilized. We can sit on it, and that's very nice.

The superpower video that came out on April 1st was big hit; in the four days it's been online, it's gotten close to half as many views as the popular squirrel video's gotten in five months. People have been high-fiving me on the sidewalks. It's been fun. I've lately been making more serious inter-departmental videos for the college that won't be publicly available, but I really want to do at least one more big, distinctly wacky video for the college at large before my contract expires -- something calculated to win Beloit oodles of attention.

And yeah, I think my contract's going to expire without renewal. The possibility of my continued employment comes down to the college budget, which I think has already been decided for the coming year. I don't think there'll be room to pay me, but I might be surprised. I haven't asked yet because I've been sure I already know what they'll tell me. We'll just have to see. Thankfully I've got several other job options lined up -- just in case!

The Problem with Physical Media

2011-03-31T11:31:00.000-07:00

From time to time, I get all spooked and disgruntled when I consider the fact that I spend so much time making things that don't exist outside hard-drives. It really unnerves me that my work is not physically tangible. There's something rewarding about toiling away and having a "real" thing result from it, and it's been quite some time since I had that experience. I do, of course, get to show off the work I do on various video screens or over headphones, but that's not my point. It's hard to explain.

Funnily enough, however, it's a pain in the neck when people do ask me to work with physical media in the digital realm. I'm a digital editor. Like everybody else these days, I do my work on computers. I've developed my own unique style and work-flow, and that work-flow involves doing things digitally. I prefer to shoot video that records to digital file format because I can slot the files directly into my projects on the computer. (By comparison, recording to tape adds many extra steps and several extra hours to the production process. After I record to tape, I then have to play the tape back into the computer in order to convert the magnetic tape image into a format the computer can edit. The computer, after all, edits digital files -- not magnetic tape.) Similarly, I prefer to deliver my final productions to people as digital files on a flash drive. In this digital form, the recipient can do anything they desire with that video: put it online, email it to friends, burn it to disc, etc. If they ask for the final product on DVD, that's all they get: a DVD. And you can't put a DVD on YouTube, can't email a DVD to your colleagues, and can't share the DVD with others unless you burn copies of the DVD -- which requires you to have specialized software, professional help, or access to the original digital files that went onto the DVD in the first place. If you want to take the digital file off the DVD, good luck. You can't. (More about that in a second.) You're stuck.

Yesterday, a professor approached me about editing some video he'd shot. He needed help, and somebody told him I could provide it. To my horror, he handed me a DVD with two hours of raw video on it and said he wanted to edit it. I anticipated that the process would be a nightmare. Guess what?

I was right.

You can't edit a DVD (unless you're feeling sarcastic and you cut it into tiny pieces and rearrange them, in which case it's broken). DVDs are designed to have files put on them -- not taken off of them once they're on. They're not like flash drives; you can't move things to and fro inside them. You burn them, and that's that: the data is permanently and irretreviably tattooed in the flesh of the disc. (There are special DVD-RWs out there which are a different species of DVD altogether; you can both add and extract data from them easily. The professor in question sadly did not provide me with such.) When I work in the digital realm and manipulate digital files in raw form, it's as easy as dropping the digital footage I need into the editing suite and cutting away. Piece of cake. By comparison, here's what I had to do to prep the footage that was on the DVD for editing treatment:

Rip the raw data off the disc with an insanely convoluted program A/V had to teach me how to use. This resulted in a raw binary heap of video data that no computer could read. This ripping process took two hours.
Re-process the binary data into uncompressed video. This took two more hours.
Re-encode the uncompressed video into a popular codec that earthly editing software would be able to process. This took two more hours.
Import the re-encoded video into my editing software and render it for editing. This took four more hours.

Ten hours later, the DVD footage was ready for editing -- though we have yet to actually edit it. The professor, of course, cannot be expected to understand all the above or comprehend exactly why his request was nuts. It's my job to deal with it -- not his. The problem will really present itself when we sit down to edit tonight and he says, "By the way, here's another DVD with some more footage I'd like to include. Can you pop this in?" I'll have to tell him to return in several days' time when it's ready to edit, and he won't understand why. And it'll be hard to explain. If he'd handed me two hours of video on a flash drive, this would all be easy.

So that's my analysis of all this: I feel weird about creating only digital work, but I get deeply irritated when people ask me to work with physical media in the digital realm.

Now in Words: Everything

2011-03-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

Sunset after work.

Hi. It's been a while, and I've been doing many things. Let me jump into the thick of it.

I've been working on a lot of April Fools stuff for the College. Video promos hinting at what's to come are appearing on the college Terrarium website, but they're pretty low-key and hard to find unless you know what you're looking for. They give subtle hints at what we'll actually be doing on Friday: something much bigger. National media may get involved. We're planning something fairly significant.

I've been making a stop-motion explainer video for a small startup business run by my good friend Eric. It's an adorable little motion picture. I've had fun shooting it.

I've sat in on some business meetings at VisitBeloit, which is the tourist office here in town. They've been trying to re-brand Beloit, basically, and make it seem way hip and colorful. It's not a particularly hip city at the moment, but I've learned that you can't have a hip city until you start pretending like you have a hip city, and VisitBeloit is doing a pretty good job of getting the new image out there. Incidentally, they sort of hired me as their in-house video guy of the blue over coffee with them one afternoon. Following one more business lunch later this week, I may suddenly have a second real job. I'm pretty intent on getting serious about this one and turning it into much more than just a once-in-a-while video gig. They seem fully amenable to that.

A nature center in Rockford saw my talking squirrel video and dropped me a line to ask if I'd produce some ads for them. I agreed with gusto. And LocalVision TV (the outfit I intern with in Janesville) has started signing me up to produce ads for local businesses in Beloit, and they've spoken of paying me a bit for the work.

People keep popping out of the woodwork to offer me paid jobs, which is extremely cool. I've had to do almost no job hunting of my own, and I'm super thankful for how weirdly easy this has been. When I eventually move away from Beloit and don't have this great base of people who know I make videos and can refer me around, things will get tricker. I'll not be able to surf on the after-effects of positive rumor anymore.

---------------------------------

Here he is addressing 200+ people in the Science Center.

I covered eight campus presentations by an activist and human rights speaker from Darfur. I was his one-man camera crew for three days. He was an incredibly inspiring speaker, and his stories of the injustice and horror in Africa made me reconsider many things about my life. I learned that he's spent 20 years traveling the globe to seek aid for his people. He hasn't slept for more than 5 hours a night in a decade. Certain people want him dead. He never has a day off. He has devoted his life to doing what he believes is right, and it was only recently that he gained access to computers and modern technology. Not so long ago, he was campaigning on foot and walking for weeks through the desert with his fellows to seek people who would help him. His family was murdered before his eyes, and he seeks political change rather than revenge. And who am I to complain about anything ever again? I live in an apartment with clean running water. I make weird videos for a living. He speaks of bombs landing on his neighbors for no reason. He talked about his grandparents being burned alive because some soldiers were bored and thought it would be fun to kill a few elderly people in a village they were passing through. He tirelessly seeks to make things better. He is the most dedicated, selfless man I've ever met. He lives for his cause. He is secondary to it. I'm in awe, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to speak to him as much as I did.

------------------------------------

So, what's TROIS?

Well, it's a ridiculous short film. We shot it over Spring Break when Matt Roen and Zach Burke came whizzing back into our immediate vicinity after a very long absence. Having them here was the greatest of fun. Having them back in Portland, like they are right now, is crummy by comparison. They really need to just be here all the time. We like them a lot.

TROIS is a little like Spores (another crazy short film we made some time ago with almost the same cast) in that we shot it with very little planning. TROIS is very coherent compared to Spores, however; TROIS was shot over two days and had some planning to back it up, and Spores was shot in a few hours with absolutely no planning, writing, or pre-production of any kind. Off the cuff though it was, Spores turned out pretty well. The dialog was hard to hear because we shot it with a lousy camera with a lousy internal microphone, but the movie was otherwise fairly cool. TROIS, on the other hand, is turning out amazing in nearly every respect. (If this is what we can do with some planning, I have to wonder what we could do if we sat down and spent weeks preparing a script.)

I'm doing all the post-production myself and have recently finished cutting together the footage (with no visual effects or sound work at all -- except for music), and it's already incredibly great even in this bare-bones state. Like Spores, it's a goofy, over-the-top, pulp fiction action mayhem comic-book romp extravaganza -- but it's more dark and grungy and preposterously bad-ass. Much less sci-fi / glam than Spores. I'm hoping it'll be released for viewing at the end of next month. I still have a lot of work to do on it.

--------------------------

Now that the weather is getting prettier, my bike has come out of storage. This has proven to be both a blessing and a curse; I can travel quickly and easily, but now I have to carry all my production equipment with me everywhere I go because I can. (Previously, I wasn't able to. So I didn't. Now that I can, however, I do.) Picture me: backback on my back, second backpack on my front, tripod case over my neck, giant panniers bulging on either side of the bike. I must look like a lunatic as I pedal around campus. It's been getting ridiculous. What most people need a car to carry, I manage to carry with great effort and danger on my person while cycling. It's deeply unpleasant, but I have to do it. Film-making would be a lot easier if it didn't require me to lug so much damn technology around with me wherever I go.

The Cast

2011-03-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

Coming Soon

2011-03-12T23:56:00.000-08:00

We're Up to Something

2011-03-09T15:06:00.001-08:00

Orchestra Room

2011-03-04T12:47:00.001-08:00

On the Cusp of Spring Break

2011-03-03T08:50:00.000-08:00

Some very cool productions coming up over break (which starts tomorrow). One involves some college administrators levitating. One involves alien creatures roving the Beloit campus. One is stop-motion and involves fruit. One involves rearranging gravity and watching people behave strangely as a result.

Matt Roen and Zach Burke will be here tomorrow to commence their stay with us over Break. You know how some dogs wag their tails so enthusiastically that their whole bodies flop back and forth? That's kind of like us right now. It's been over a year since we've seen either of these guys.

The TV station I'm interning with has a new sales representative in Beloit, so I've teamed up with her and will be producing ads, promo spots, and other media for businesses in town that sign on for an account with the station. Few businesses in this area have video ads of their own already prepared, so I get to be the guy who makes them. That'll be fun, and Visit Beloit -- the tourist center in town -- might actually hire me For Real as their in-house production person since they have a list of about three billion videos they wish somebody could help them make. There are some meetings coming up next week that I'll be going to about that.

Buried may have recently topped my mental list as one of the best movies I've ever seen, but Fantastic Mr. Fox just became one of my favorite. Sara and I saw it recently and unanimously bellowed HOLY COW, THIS IS AMAZING about ten minutes into it. It's utterly fantastic and whimsically delightful in every possible way.

We had a pretty orange sunset come in through the living room a few days ago. Couldn't resist taking these pictures.

Sara Returns from the SEA

2011-02-26T15:43:00.000-08:00

Sara had a grand time at the SEA conference Friday-Saturday. She tells me there were lots of great seminars, and she had long talks with an established artist who currently makes a great living as an illustrator. He loved her work and encouraged her to really go forward with her dreams to be an illustrator, herself.

The piece she submitted to the juried art show won a juror's award! She received prize money and a nice certificate. And now that she's home with the art piece, we've finally put it up on the wall where it belongs. I'm very happy to have it displayed so prominently. (We stuck the certificate up next to it just for fun.)

Sara really could do this for a living, and it's funny that she's the only person I know who doesn't fully believe it. I'm hoping SEA has allowed her to realize her potential a bit more fully.

Angry, Self-Conscious Students

2011-02-23T15:29:00.000-08:00

Filmmaking can really make a guy feel rotten. I spent hours wandering campus today to get general shots of students strolling hither and yon and/or sitting in communal spaces -- and I think I got approximately 200 incredibly dirty looks during that period of time and I'm still feeling a little unnerved about it. People really hate having cameras pointed at them and there's apparently no good way to do my job. When I approach people and explain that I'm making a video, they always tell me they don't want to be in it and ask me to take my camera elsewhere. When I don't ask questions and just point my camera around, people glare at me something fierce. This sort of behavior is the primary reason why the first video I ever made for C&M featured squirrels instead of people.

I just hope I don't get a reputation for being "that creepy stalker guy who's always pointing cameras at people for no apparent reason." If I had a giant sign that said I AM POINTING A CAMERA AT YOU RIGHT NOW BECAUSE I AM THE COLLEGE VIDEOGRAPHER AND I AM ON THE JOB, things might be easier.

That's actually not a bad idea...

Completed Mural!

2011-02-22T17:04:00.000-08:00

Keeping the Fridge Warm

2011-02-21T12:22:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a lot of voice-over recording recently, which means I have to turn off our noisy refrigerator every time I want to record. Of course, I always forget to turn it back on again, so I've had to plaster the poor thing with post-it notes to remind me to take proper care of it. There were a couple of close calls when I was wondering why the milk was getting so weird.

C&M's fancy camera was checked out to a student photographer all last week, so I've been a bit immobilized at work. I'm ready to get rolling on several productions, but I've been stuck without a way to shoot them. So I came up with some really weird ideas for a couple of promos and shot test footage on a crummy flip-cam. (Idle hands are the devil's playground or whatever.) It's all bizarre stuff, but I suspect it'll be a hit with my supervisor. He likes nutty stuff. One of the big promos I'm working on right now is very quirky.

I've been shooting short little pieces for the college's Terrarium site. A spot featuring a giant hollow snow turtle as well as a recent piece showing off Milkshake Monday were up there for viewing.

My internship with LVTV in Janesville is offering some promising opportunities. They recently hired a salesperson to bring Beloit businesses on board with the TV station, and it's very likely that I'll become the ad producer for these businesses. (Companies that sign up with LVTV get broadcast space as well as the opportunity to have in-house ad videos made for them.) So I think I'll get to start making legit advertisements for Beloit businesses. Also, I might be hooked up with "Visit Beloit", the tourist center in town that's all into producing fancy media to show off Beloit's splendor. They may engage me to produce promo pieces and other short spots to display Beloit in all its glory. Time will tell.

Pink & Purple

2011-02-18T22:39:00.000-08:00

"Buried"

2011-02-16T19:35:00.000-08:00

Don't know why, but I'm fascinated by stories, films, plays, etc. that take place in a single confined location. They're hard to come by. (I can think of a couple of plays, but that's about the extent of it.) However, it's a trend I've found in a lot of my own performance pieces for Olio and such. My short time-travel movie, Negative One, for example, took place completely in a basement. 20 minutes in one room. This way of putting a situation into a single space and having it exist there exclusively really appeals to me. I've written a number of short stories that take place entirely in an elevator, in a cinderblock room, or inside a car. Claustrophobia interests me. Confinement of space is fascinating to me in terms of how it affects narrative. It closes things down -- makes them intriguingly minimalist. Puts the focus on the performance and the character. It becomes almost like theatre.

A while ago, I heard that this big movie called Buried was coming out. It was billed as a feature-length thriller set entirely inside a coffin underground. The movie's about a guy who's been buried alive in Iraq. It showcases his attempts to survive and escape.

A full-length film reputedly set entirely inside a coffin? I was profoundly interested. And now I've just watched it on DVD and I'm pretty certain it's the best movie I've ever seen.

I still think Primer is my favorite film , but Buried is probably the most excellent. It's absolutely amazing. It's masterfully performed by a guy I could have sworn wasn't known for being a dramatic actor, it's incredibly emotional, it's scary as hell, it has a magnificent ending, and it literally is entirely set inside a coffin for an hour and a half. It's pretty much perfect. It could have been a disaster, but instead it was a masterpiece. I'm stunned. I've never seen anything that so perfectly embraced this minimalist one-location idea I've loved for so long, and which did it so well.

I'm ecstatic right now!