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My week started on Sunday where I was the gaffer on a student film called The lottery ticket. It was awesome to work on a very cut and dry shoot. It was one shooting day with two actors and a small crew. I really appreciate working as a crew member when so much of the time that I spend working on films is wrapped up in trying to force a story or vision out of myself. It’s very gratifying to aid someone else’s creative process. Crewing is relatively simple you just go, listen to the director of photography, do what is asked of you, and off you go. It was also awesome to see a good friend of mine, Ms. Sarah Ricci directing her first short. She did do a good job and I was proud of her.
For the past year Morgan and I have been guest lecturers for a communications class at Seattle Central Community college. He knows a professor, she invites us each quarter and it is a really awesome thing to be able to talk about your process to a class full of students. The last time we did it I was pretty displeased with the reception and discussion that came from us showing the rough cut of The Hot Dog Cycle. Our sound was rough, the color correction had not been done and it came across pretty bad. So this time I took it upon myself to do a series of blog posts for The Last Quest’s blog. These blog posts detail how the very first scene of the movie was made. It is a full breakdown from idea to final mix. They are up right now and I am really pleased with how well they turned out. I didn’t know I would get so much pleasure from writing them. I have gotten a lot of feedback on them and everyone has only good things to say about the posts. Oh and the students were much more engaged this time as we went through the blog posts with them in class.  One of the videos you might be interest in is this one:

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That clip is the first minute and forty seconds of The Hot Dog Cycle, a thirty minute shot film that will be playing film festivals all over the country this summer.

Here is a clip of me interviewing Morgan about that the making of that scene:

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So today I am preparing to start the frantic frenzy that is the five day documentary film challenge. We get our subject and theme at 8am tomorrow morning and have to send out our finished film on Monday. We did it last year and it was awesome. I will be updating you either during or after the competition as it is an interesting process to try to pump out a quality product in such a short amount of time.

I also really wanted to acknowledge all the new web traffic on my site:

Thanks everybody for stopping by and I hope you check back often as I try at least once or twice a week to post something new. Also feel free to leave comments for me, as I do read them. But do me a favor and don’t post any links to websites trying to sell me something that makes my penis larger… I’m good on that front for right now at least.

For the last year I have been struggling to get a good video put together for The Stevedore. They are a local band that includes some very good friends of mine. I wanted to make a video for them because I think they are a really fantastic band and deserve for people to hear/see them. Over the last year I have recorded them many times to varying effect but this show is when it all finally came together. The Skylark is a great venue that accommodated us all very well. These videos could not have been made at any other venue that the Steves have played.

For this show I did the background video, recorded it with multiple cameras and cut it all together. I have to thank Charlie at The Skylark for letting me pull sound from the board. Katie Gregg shot the closeups. We shot this with a DVX-100a as the master angle and my HV20 as the roaming camera. As for audio I pulled the sound with my ancient (but awesome!) Iriver H-120 audio recorder.

Here is the song “Together.”

Here is my favorite “Kill Me Here.”

Here is the song “Hydrogen.”

Here is a bonus track exclusively on my blog the song “Blackcat Contraban.”

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Alright well more posts to come.

Also check out thelastquest blog as it is going to get some pretty heavy updates over the next week.

Right now I am capturing footage I took while we were shooting The Hot Dog Cycle. It is a trip to see all of these people who helped us do something very important to us at one time. Making films is something I love so much because it brings people together who have often completely disparate lives and puts all their collective energy towards a common goal that sometimes seems unattainable. Making movies is really about momentum and collective inertia. I love all of these faces looking awkwardly at the camera as I ask them stilted questions about how it’s going or how they are feeling. The Hot Dog Cycle was an amazing experience and has turned into a pretty good film at the end of all our 9 months worth of work. I hope a lot of people see it. Our SIFF and STIFF entries are in so lets hope one of those festivals gives us an opening here in Seattle.

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So the show went great on friday. The Skylark Cafe is a great place to see a band… and also a good one to do vjing work at. Charlie the sound guy who works there is on top of his shit. He was super helpful and gave me a little cramped spot right next to the soundboard to setup my gear.

So yeah the show went really really good. This is the first time I felt in the least bit prepared for. I had 4 days to prep and primp and boy did it come in handy because The Stevedores threw me a curve ball right before the show and changing the set list.

I was also able to get a soundboard recording of the show and a two channel video feed of the show so video will be popping up around the net.

Here is some video from The Stevedore’s New Years performance at the Skylark. The song they are playing is called Blackcat Contraban.

Another one of south/west seattles neatest bands Bend was there. They are pretty amazing live. I have seen them play with the Stevedore before. They were great tonight. They talked to me about doing some vjing for them so who knows!

So yeah good show good people… nice time all around. I will be edting the video from the performance over the next few days and I’ll post some of it down the road.

So I have been asked who what where and how of what I’m doing for these performances and I wil be detailing that soon if anyone on here is interested.

So I have no love for css or html. If those two file types where to just magically disappear I would not shed a tear. They are so beyond annoying… but enough stock and trade standard fair web hate.

I got thelastquest.org revamped. It was a pain but I did it. I am now in the process of re-encoding videos for individual pages on the site. I also decided that having a Hot Dog Cycle blog is not nearly as good of an idea as having one for the Last Quest. So yeah boring blog post today… Well here is some video to substitute for this blog suckage.

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Where you’re from does not always reflect who you are… hopefully?

So CSX Intermodal other then being a trucking company is also a weird side project performance thing that Morgan Dusatko and myself started in an attempt to get back to our experimental filmmaker/music making roots. It started as a lark that led to us playing a show at The Mix Gallery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle. It was a fantastic experience that made me remember what I loved so much about performance and theater- it is the fact that no matter what happens during the performance it is part of the magic of it. People in the crowd during a performance are experiencing something completely individual. Even though they are looking at a screen with moving pictures on it everyone in the crowd knows that you are in the same room assembling what they are seeing. It makes it less obligatory for them to be engrossed in an immersive thing like cinema. So while we performed I recorded it on my very awesome HV20.

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So finally the big day came and The Stevedore (south Seattle’s best country space punk band!) played The Mix gallery/bar in the Georgetown, Seattle. And I did visuals for them… And it turns out that Russian propaganda cartoons and footage of giesers in yellowstone make crowds lose their shit! It was a blast. I’ll be posting video in the near future… This really makes me want to do more performance. It seems like I will be doing just that for The Stevedore and my other vj dj project csx intermodal… So yes more to come on both fronts.

… and the movie Harold and maude is really amazing. If you haven’t seen it do and if you have seen it watch it again. I have never seen a movie that spends so much time dealing with death that made me so happy to be alive.

So yeah It is done… The DVD has been encoded and handed to my favorite person in the world right now… An amazing woman who is helping us through all the pain of submitting this movie to festivals. All I have to do is finish the withoutabox press kit and I am done with it all.
Now onto the next project… Morgan and I have entered the Georgetown super8 festival so that is up first. Next?

So just got The Hot Dog Cycle site up… it is janky but functional. Have a bit more work to do before I call it good. Stooopid HTML CSS making me crazy. Just put that there!!! Oh well.

Had to give Jed a lifeline phone call on web crap ala Who wants to be a millionare? He informed me of awesome things that I have yet to explore involving a video embedding implementation of a free flash plug-in that plays just about every file that I work with.

Also put up The Hot Dog Cycle trailer up on Youtube… I am super dissatisfied in the quality. Probably going to upload again in the next few day.

So the trailer is up on the site.

You can see it by clicking the play button in the “Video I have worked on.”

The movie is almost done… completely… for reals.

I am in the process of finishing up thehotdogcycle.com so that will be up soon and I also have to write a thing called “Production Notes” for our Withoutabox submissionto the Seattle International Film Festival. Withoutabox is amazing. It takes a lot of the pain in the ass out of submitting to festivals. Withoutabox has a special deal with just about every festival out there for an extra special withoutabox only exteneded extended deadline.  This extended deadline is the only way we are able to submit the film at all as this tuesday is the final mix session at Bad Animals. That process has been pretty amazing… but I’ll save that up for an upcoming post.