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A good friend of mine has started doing reviews of some of cinema’s more sleazy digressions. Check it out!

Here is the project that myself and the rest of The Last Quest have been working on for the last three months. We all love doing it and the results have been pretty awesome. Check out all the awesome local Seattle music we use for the soundtracks!

I have been a longtime fan of The Onion and of the wing of their website called the AV Club. They have great thoughtful reviews and give you the strenghts of blog writing (speaking from the 1st peron) with a healthy dose of the more traditional way to review contemperary works.

They started the TV Blog and I was very excited as I am an unrepentant TV junkie. I have watched and am currently watching a mirade of shows. If it tells serialized narratives without relying too directly on the soap opera plotlines there is a good change I am watching it attentively.  There has been a lot said about the fact that we are living through the Renessance of Television. I agree I remember that there have been older examples of serialized narrative but really HBO starting back with shows like OZ has hit on something amazing.

So tonight, well morning now, I was reading a review of two Deadwood episode. This show was cancelled long ago but the AV Club has a writer who is reviewing the shows as if they were playing weekly. The reviewer said something I thought did an amazing job of connecting the broader themes of some of the best television ever made:

Deadwood is about the birth of both that civilization and that war, while The Sopranos is about the long decline and The Wire, finally, is about the ultimate consequences of those actions. (In this way, The Wire almost serves as a funhouse mirror version of Deadwood, even though both series had completely separate creative personnel.)

So yeah… this is not really a fully formed blog post. It is sort of a blog fragment. I was just really excited that someone is writing about TV that transends it’s humble format. If you haven’t seen these shows watch them and know that as much as they are trying to just make good TV… there is the potential for something bigger and better going on underneath its skin.

So SIFF and STIFF both have our films up on their respective websites. “It’s in the P-I” and “The Hot Dog Cycle” are both such different movies that fit so well for the festivals they are in. It is crazy that something we made has this life outside of us. It is now something to be marketed and watched by people who may not necessarily have any relationship to us. I am dually excited and scared by the prospect of some random person watching these things we all thought was a good idea to make months ago.

A screen grab of the webpage for our short "It's in the P-I."

A screen grab of the webpage for our short "The Hot Dog Cycle."

You can and should to both of these screenings as both these movies worth seeing on a large screen with other people around and we’ll be there!

Found this on a friend’s site. He is a really awesome animator who apparently also program’s flash games and or puzzles. It is really cool you should check it out.

Here is a film by David O’Reilly. It is the 2009 winner of the Golden Bear award for best short film. It blows my mind… truly.

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.

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 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 I upgraded my wordpress and this site did not die… Obviously. So I am typing this into my iPhone using the free wordpress app. Hope it works cause one of the big reasons I have neglected this site is lack of instant everywhere access unlike my facebook. So yes I am exited… Posts to come involving video of a movies and projects I have been doing lately.