I may get to go to Japan this summer. I’ve been invited to participate as an instructor in a Japanese Film Boot Camp type event. An all expenses paid trip to Japan…. Yeah, I might be interested in that. My book has made waves with the English speaking film-peeps in Japan. How cool will that be if we can get the deal ironed out? Let’s say I’m not going to be too picky in my salary demands.
Well, we’re working on the footage now for the documentary for My Sexy Fiancé Veronica ™ and the footage looks amazing thanks to Gil . Time to geek out on ya’ll and let’s say that choosing to shoot on the portable hard drive recorder paid off in spades. No lengthy real time digitizing of footage. I bought a firewire card for my laptop and transferred everything over to a portable USB drive and we then kept it on that drive for back up as I moved it to my main editing machine at home. Then I did the converting to the Cineform Aspect HD codec with their little stand alone program. It uprezzed the footage from 1280x720 to 1920x1080 and removed the 3:2 pulldown automatically as it conformed it to the new AVI format from M2T. The process took about 8 hours, but it was a batch process and we didn’t have to baby-sit it (except when “V” pressed the space bar to get attention).
Now we’re into the “Logging” portion of the edit. That is we went very non-linear in the storytelling and questions with out subject. We jumped around a lot and even asked clarification questions on the 2nd day from the 1st day’s shoot. Now we’re organizing every frame of footage of the interview into bins and naming the sub-clips appropriately. My Sexy Fiancé Veronica ™ has been dutifully accommodating and she’s doing the first few passes of the edits from Assembly to Fine Cut. We may consider making an hour long version of this for PBS, both regionally and possibly nationally. We’ll have a full 1080P final version by the end, so it’s possible to get it done.
One more Uncle Pete short to complete. I’ve had the backgrounds for this one since we did episode 1, but I still don’t have the free time I once had to dedicate to personal projects. Making money and giving so much of my time and skills can kill the inspirado. I just feel like the economy crashing has not bottomed out and we don’t have any idea how long this might last. The film/video business gets cut first on most company’s budgets. We have few projects on the horizon and that’s both good and bad. I can finally get back to what I WANT to do, but at the cost of financial stability. There are some big pay days coming in soon from recent gigs and I intend on paying the bills ahead. I think I’ll pay the condo fees for most of the rest of the year in one shot. I have been over paying on all the utilities lately, but I will still try to do that because it just feels like we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I got the video from my appearance on INDIEFLIX , a TV show on Cox Cable in Cleveland. It was a fun show to do and the interviewers were good. I don’t really promote anything in particular, but it was cool to plug the books and the DVD’s. For anyone looking to promote their filmmaking, this show makes a nice promo piece for yourself... if you’re into that sort of thing… like getting press and your work seen by more people. Not everyone is into that, but hey who am I to judge (aside from having common sense). When I see this, I can’t focus on a single word being said because I fixate on the burly man beard I sport therein. What a dork!
Last weekend we went to the big premiere of JOHNNY WU’s THE RAPTURE at the Ohio Independent Film Festival and the reception afterwards. I had a blast as I know more people in Cleveland than I remember. Johnny throws a classy soirée and we crashed at a Motel 6 on the way home since we closed out the party at 3:30AM.
Not much else of relevance going on. The cats are doing their own thing. “V” seems to be handling our weekends away much better. Maybe he’s maturing, or maybe not. The other night he let me hold him for over 20 minutes, which is maybe an all time record. Ever since we had him snipped, he hasn’t let anyone hold him consistently for more than 2-3 minutes. Not since the young days when he would pass out on my shoulder has be been so docile and loving towards anything. He’s my pal even though he scratches the hell out of everything including our skin.
I’ve got three edit sessions tomorrow with paid clients. Very unlikely I’ll get to Uncle Pete #8. Maybe next week. So far I have very little work to do next week, but then again I didn’t have anything scheduled this week either. Is it selfish of me to hope for a temporary crash of the economy so I can get caught up on watching movies and writing scripts? I dunno…
As always,
Your faithful narrator
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Origami and the Evils of Saki
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Vermont and the Turpitude of Others
Vermont and the Turpitude of Others
Well we went to Vermont last weekend and did the shoot. A 12+ hour drive in an oversized SUV that guzzles over $75 of gas in a tank will make John Mayer songs more strangely appealing as the cabin goes crazy.
I have never been to Vermont. It’s beautiful, but not that different than Ohio especially in the Hocking Hills area. One tidbit learned on the trip was that Vermont supposedly is not that well off. They have a lower gas tax so people from the neighboring states like to fill up on their side of the border.
We setup and shot on Friday morning. Gil Whitney was my shooter and he lit the show too. Meredith gripped then got started on a scanning of photos that are over 60 years old. The subject matter was not “up”. We were dealing with the Holocaust and being a Jew in Germany and Poland under the Nazi’s with one of the precious few survivors, and one of the very few ones with us today.
I helped mostly as a “producer”, or as that job’s capacity more commonly gets done. Brandy AKA My Sexy Fiancé Veronica ™ directed. We stayed in a motel only a couple miles away from the shoot. Shockingly, at the end of the first days shooting, we had a lot more footage than I had anticipated. We wrapped at about 5:30PM and decided to see IRON MAN. Brandy was none too pleased, but everyone else was jazzed about seeing IRON MAN. We had a nice dinner out in Hanover New Hampshire on the campus of Dartmouth. It was only 6 minutes away from the motel. I loved IRON MAN. Jon Favreau rocks as does Robert Downey Jr.
Saturday equally went smooth. We started at 10:00AM and went on until about 5:30PM again. We pretty much had everything I thought we needed and Brandy agreed. We tore down lights and duvetyn that was blocking out natural light from the windows. We covered all the war years of this German Jew’s life and her years hiding in Poland. Somehow, I find the story uplifting in many ways. All I can say is that hope exists in the human spirit.
That night, we saw a Woody Allen film from 2007 I had never even heard of called Cassandra’s Dream with Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell. It reminded me of Match Point in many ways, but Woody is in his UK phase where he’s making movies set in and shot in England. It’s revitalized his creativity in many ways. The movie was average for a Woody Allen film, but his average represents better than most people’s best movies.
We set off home a whole day early which was nice. Saved money and had bonus time, except immediately upon arrival I was bombarded with edit work. My freelance work has not subsided, but increased.
After buying a new car recently, I spent more on it than I had intended and it has drained my savings. Now the economy appears to be crashing hard. As burned out as I am right now, I need to take as much paid work as I can because I see some hard times for everyone on the horizon.
In between gigs, I found the time to finish Uncle Pete #7. I like these. I think they are funny, but as I mentioned before, they still have not found their audience. In many ways I think some conservative folks really don’t like the pot shots. Go figure, but still, it’s just a joke and everyone needs to lighten up. What’s even stranger is when people watch it & think I have these ultra conservative values, and then they react poorly to the shorts… Now that is surreal.
The organization of the 9+ hours of footage for the documentary is being sorted through. We’ve got months of work to go on this. Brandy has a project that means something to her, so it carries weight with me and I have a lot of that to spare still.
Your faithful narrator,
Peter John Ross
Well we went to Vermont last weekend and did the shoot. A 12+ hour drive in an oversized SUV that guzzles over $75 of gas in a tank will make John Mayer songs more strangely appealing as the cabin goes crazy.
I have never been to Vermont. It’s beautiful, but not that different than Ohio especially in the Hocking Hills area. One tidbit learned on the trip was that Vermont supposedly is not that well off. They have a lower gas tax so people from the neighboring states like to fill up on their side of the border.
We setup and shot on Friday morning. Gil Whitney was my shooter and he lit the show too. Meredith gripped then got started on a scanning of photos that are over 60 years old. The subject matter was not “up”. We were dealing with the Holocaust and being a Jew in Germany and Poland under the Nazi’s with one of the precious few survivors, and one of the very few ones with us today.
I helped mostly as a “producer”, or as that job’s capacity more commonly gets done. Brandy AKA My Sexy Fiancé Veronica ™ directed. We stayed in a motel only a couple miles away from the shoot. Shockingly, at the end of the first days shooting, we had a lot more footage than I had anticipated. We wrapped at about 5:30PM and decided to see IRON MAN. Brandy was none too pleased, but everyone else was jazzed about seeing IRON MAN. We had a nice dinner out in Hanover New Hampshire on the campus of Dartmouth. It was only 6 minutes away from the motel. I loved IRON MAN. Jon Favreau rocks as does Robert Downey Jr.
Saturday equally went smooth. We started at 10:00AM and went on until about 5:30PM again. We pretty much had everything I thought we needed and Brandy agreed. We tore down lights and duvetyn that was blocking out natural light from the windows. We covered all the war years of this German Jew’s life and her years hiding in Poland. Somehow, I find the story uplifting in many ways. All I can say is that hope exists in the human spirit.
That night, we saw a Woody Allen film from 2007 I had never even heard of called Cassandra’s Dream with Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell. It reminded me of Match Point in many ways, but Woody is in his UK phase where he’s making movies set in and shot in England. It’s revitalized his creativity in many ways. The movie was average for a Woody Allen film, but his average represents better than most people’s best movies.
We set off home a whole day early which was nice. Saved money and had bonus time, except immediately upon arrival I was bombarded with edit work. My freelance work has not subsided, but increased.
After buying a new car recently, I spent more on it than I had intended and it has drained my savings. Now the economy appears to be crashing hard. As burned out as I am right now, I need to take as much paid work as I can because I see some hard times for everyone on the horizon.
In between gigs, I found the time to finish Uncle Pete #7. I like these. I think they are funny, but as I mentioned before, they still have not found their audience. In many ways I think some conservative folks really don’t like the pot shots. Go figure, but still, it’s just a joke and everyone needs to lighten up. What’s even stranger is when people watch it & think I have these ultra conservative values, and then they react poorly to the shorts… Now that is surreal.
The organization of the 9+ hours of footage for the documentary is being sorted through. We’ve got months of work to go on this. Brandy has a project that means something to her, so it carries weight with me and I have a lot of that to spare still.
Your faithful narrator,
Peter John Ross
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