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

Be prepared for gory-tree-revenge!

“Treevenge” played at SIFF and was my favorite film from the “Nightmare Factory” program.

Thanks to twitchfilm.net

This Sunday the Seattle Times did an article on STIFF, the festival The Hot Dog Cycle is playing in. They used a picture from the film. Strange seeing myself in a newspaper wearing a hot dog suit.

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.

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.

Apple has my Macbook Pro. They haven’t computer-napped it or anything… I had to send it in for Applecare. This is the computer I bought with college loans two and a half years ago to insure that I could make media for the next couple of years. It is a extremely over used computer… I do everything with it. I have the PC server box that my house uses as the media network share and that is where this post is being written, but I have gotten really accustom to using my laptop to do basically everything having to do with media and the web.

My mac has been a fantastic machine it has been beaten and abused… I mean I don’t smack it around or anything but it has been known to spend entire nights (notice the plural) crunching MPEG2s so be I can give a client or friends a DVD the next day.

My mac has had a lot of problems. It is the first generation Macbook Pro. The main chip in my mac is an Intel core duo not a core 2 duo like all their current machines. I have few complaints with my computer other then the immense amount of heat that it creates. This has specifically to do with this chip in the guts of my machine. All of my problems can be traced back to this one heat problem. The dvd drive stopped working a month after I got it. I sent it into Applecare and got it fixed. Then it happened again and they fixed it again. This time the keys “A-L” on the keyboard would stop working whenever it got hot. So that is why it is in for more Applecare.

Apple is known for releasing very chic top of the line computers (albeit extremely expensive), but god help us all when they do major revisions to their product lines as they often end up making some less than stellar computers during the transition. This latest major transition from the old G4 chips to the Intel chip has been a revolution… and really it a contributing factor to why I bought this computer was its ability to boot Windows and OSX. But I just have to say that buying Applecare was one of the best decisions I ever made. I bought this mac from Apple’s online store in the refurbished section. I recommend doing this for anyone as it saves you money and the computer gets treated the same as if it was brand new. As I was getting the box sent to my house so it could be sent to Apple’s repair warehouse I have talked to a product specialist who has told me that if this last repair does not fix all of my issues they will send me a new computer branding my old computer a lemon (see below.) All of this would not be possible without Applecare. Lesson for today: if you are going to drop the money to buy a mac… buy Applecare too.

I am sour...

So yeah this is probably the most boring post on this blog right now (which is saying something) but I wanted to let you all know why I have not been posting for the last few days. As soon as my mac gets back into my greedy little hands I will be posting some videos of the vjing I did for the Stevedore last Friday which are pretty awesome.

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 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.