Operation: Procrastination Obliteration

Sometimes a plan works. In my last blog I described a technique to force myself to get things done by setting a self imposed embargo on the fun narrative work until the various day job and TV work is completed. So far, so good. I’m now 75% done with another episode of FRAMELINES, caught up on outstanding day job work, and well on my way to getting to the personal project.

In other ways I’m trying to force myself out of bad habits. I sometimes surf the web and read pointless articles with research instead of reading the many many books on my shelf from another addiction, which is Half Price Books ™. Unfortunately, I have no interest in curing that bad habit as I love my books; tactile and solid, books are not mean to be read on some device. I’m now leaving the computer and sites like Facebook earlier and reading in my bed, cats purring on my lap as I turn pages.



I’ve re-arranged my living space. When you want to change habitual behavior, sometimes it is as simple as moving your environment around to change your perspective literally. Tomorrow I inherit a new recliner from my father, and another one from my brother-in-law. I am forgoing the mighty futon we watch movies on in favor of two easy chairs from which we can battle for control of the remote in between us!

Next week I start to panic as I am way behind on marketing a screening. Me, the marketing whore, has failed to capitalize on the timings to get attention at the maximum potential. Please check the Weather Channel, as it might be snowing in hell. I have less interest in attention than I used to. The scepter has clearly passed on to others in the Columbus Filmmaking scene, and that sits very well with me. I just want to make my movies and shows. I have lost all interest in the players and their games. I am so entrenched in my work that I cannot spare the time or energy at pettiness, even for some of those I have helped that do not return the favor. Others do, and I do not do what I do for credit or return favors. I do it because I feel I must.

By Monday I’ll have another episode of FRAMELINES done, and I can start work on the new web series….maybe getting these two complete will inspire me to get the rest going too….

So now, I must return to my reading. I’m on my 4th book in 5 days. Of course that sounds more impressive than it is because the books are “The Art of ________” or photographic journals on Behind the Scenes, so they aren’t very word heavy. The book on BABEL by Inarritu was amazing. The Art of IRON MAN provided insight into pre-production too.

Après Moi

Editing on my own personal projects resembles a treat or a dessert. Because I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I cannot allow myself to start work on editing one of my “art” projects until the day job work is done. That means I have to finish editing all the commercial work, then the PBS show FRAMELINES for at least one more episode before I can startp work on the new shorts.

This is my way of defeating procrastination.



So far it works fairly well with some minor infractions. With BITTER OLD MAN, I was driven. Now I am somewhat driven because I have the final shot I waited 7 months to get for this other one. There is a challenging effect I am really exciting to try out. I have reference photos and all kinds of concepts to try. These are the things that excite me on little projects; finding something that I’ve never done before and seeing if I can do it convincingly, at least to me.

I am delving a bit more into drama and adult themes in the writing and subject matter. I am not really “maturing” per se, although many of my interests of late have come into different realms of thought. Is that what maturing is? I still feel like sitting at the kiddie table!

Time to trudge through some more editing on FRAMELINES. Not the worst thing by far, but it burns me out pretty quickly. Once I get the groove on, it speeds up a lot, but getting there can be a bear.

Gesticulating, and not in a rude way…

About 7 months ago I started a project, a new web series of short short movies. We shot the majority of one of them, but always intended to shoot the last shot on the next one. Life intervenes and here we are more than half a year later and finally getting that shot and doing another short for the series.

This isn’t a series as in one continues storyline or anything; merely a series of vignettes with a similar concept. I don’t want to make a big deal of these because they are simple ideas with elementary execution.

Today we shot with the new Panasonic AF100 as an experiment. We used my Glidecam Crane to get a cool shot, but after being so nice and loaning it out for free to several people it’s now barely functional and several key pieces are missing. Generosity has its downsides.

The AF100 is meant to be the DSLR buster. In low to no budget indie films, the DSLR still cameras have video functions and make pretty images for filmmakers with shallow depth of field. Cameras like the Canon 5D, 7D, and T2i (now T3i) make some great digital films. We used the 5D on the first one of this series, but they are not ergonomic for film work, so you have to trick your camera out with a rig to make it video-friendly. The new AF100 is a video camera based on the same technology. The biggest difference is in the video CODEC (Compressor/Decompressor) software which is vastly better on the Panasonic AF100.

I’ve already started to conform all the video and audio. Even though one of the appeals of these cameras is “tapeless” using SD cards or CF (Compact Flash) media drives, for me to edit with the footage, I prefer to conform them to our Matrox codec for editing and effects. So I save no time removing the “digitizing from tape” benefit of tapeless workflows, but I am happier to have files that work in 1080P in real time with effects and color correction, so I save time on the back end.

I promised myself that I’d get back to this series once I got further along on FRAMELINES and then the re-do of BITTER OLD MAN got in the way. Speaking of which, I submitted the revised BITTER OLD MAN short to a film festival that has rejected my 1 submission a year for a solid decade now. This is my 10th entry that I have no hope of getting into. Every year I also promise myself I won’t submit, but because it has no fee, I always send something anyway.

Call me Sisyphus.

Oscillating the Scintillating Conversation

Got a great message last night about the Sonnyboo.com
site of mine. I am always proud of what my little site has done in terms of helping filmmakers with paperwork, free music, and now video and sound effects for free.



So here’s what I was sent:

I was on a panel of producers for "Eat, Drink, and Be Indie" an event sponsored monthly by the Atlanta Film Festival. We had a decent crowd about 100 folks out to listen to myself and two other producers share our thoughts and experiences about producing features.

Well, the question was what sites would be helpful and before my turn one of the other producers on the panel Terrisha Kearse ("10-20") mentioned "Sonnyboo.com" as a great site for beginning filmmakers to check out and use as a resource.

So, congratulations on the great site (and yes, I've been there before and found it very helpful myself over the years) and getting some Atlanta love.

Pretty damn cool. My secret plan to destroy all the real artists and trick people into enjoying mediocre films is coming to fruition! The evil Sonnyboo plot to take over all and abolish artsy fartsy nonsense can now begin! ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Supercilious Superstitions

How things change on a dime! We have our air date in Columbus for FRAMELINES. It will premiere here on April 24th at 2:30AM in full HD on Channel 34.1 with repeats to follow (on better time slots I assume) on 34.3 the “Create” extra digital channel. To help promote the show, I wanted to do a live presentation sneak preview with more of a Super Show at a theater. That’s now officially booked at Studio 35 on April 16th, Saturday at 3:00PM. The biggest difference there will be that we’ll show entire short films before the segments about those films or filmmakers.

The screening should be a fun time, as I’m still ironing out the details, which segments of the show to present, etc. So far, I have most of my picks. This event might also make our local sponsors happy, as it’s yet another chance to see their logos in front of the niche audience. We aren’t going to charge to go to the screening, but we will be asking for donations to support the production. The cool thing is that donations will be tax deductible thanks to our fiscal agent being a 501C3 non-profit.

In the last few days, the stars lined up and I’m doing a short film shoot next week. It’s another in my series of shorts that I started last year, but have not completed. I wanted to work with another editor to make them a different style than what I normally do, but it looks like I’m on my own. As I have said recently, it feels like I’m waking up from a groggy state and wanting to be fully creative, at least my own definition thereof, again.

One of my biggest stumbling blocks remains the writing part. It doesn’t come as easy as it used to; in fact I rather procrastinate quite a bit when it comes to writing. Not this time. I knew what I wanted, and it nearly wrote itself inside of 20 minutes. I had the luck of relying on a semi-true story which made it substantially easier than most.

Just putting the final touches on the cast on this bad boy will shoot before the end of the week. Then my series will have more than 1 short!

Extenuating Webstats

I like to see how well a marketing push does. It determines if my ideas are hitting with the intended audience. That helps me shape goals and informs me as to a realistic expectation of how my work is received. It’s my mini non-studio version of test marketing and thanks to a few tools, it’s completely free. Like all demographic information, the results are subjective and all you really have are hypothesis and conjecture, but in some things the numbers do not lie.

For over 12 years I’ve been doing stuff online as “Sonnyboo”, the name that means little. The one thing I have learned with absolute certainty is that in most people’s minds, the Internet means “free”. The most popular things online are when people get something for nothing. Knowing that, I have used things to my advantage in that way.

First and foremost, I started as a musician. I wrote songs and did multitrack recordings from the time I was 16 years old playing multiple instruments. I wanted to pursue that as a career, but I did not have the skills. I know that and accept that without regret. I wrote well over 200 songs and I’ve put some of the “best” of them online for free for anyone to use in any way they want ('Best' being incredibly subjective since they are beneath the quality in every way from music I would use today).

Along with contracts and paperwork that makes filmmaking easier, I made a section of Sonnyboo.com exclusively as a free site that anyone can use to do whatever with the things and tools I have acquired over the years.

Now my webstats flourish because there is free material. As you can see what a single day can do to the unique viewers on my site. That’s a lot. It’s overwhelming. Probably 90% or more just get the downloads and leave, but the other 10% or so look around. I can track it and see. They look at the movies, read on the blog, etc. That is effective marketing to me.

Other tools like TUBEMOGUL paint a great picture as to what people like to watch and what sites offer the most viewers, find things via referral, create niche marketing plans, etc. I can upload once to TUBEMOGUL, then track everything from one site. I can see how a single video does on multiple sites or I can see how all of my videos on a site are doing in comparison to the other sites.

Without a doubt, YouTube is still the king. With little to no effort, most of my views in the last 10 years are on YouTube. It’s just the site Du Jour for random people finding and watching things. Vimeo may have the best looking video, but it’s got a fraction of the viewers.
Right now, Sonnyboo videos get more and more views online. Combined between all the sites, I have well over 2 million views for all my videos. I have not yet gone “viral” as it were, as in no single clip has exceeded much more than 100,000 views, although I did on a site that no longer carries the videos.

I don’t make the kind of movies that will go viral per se. If I wanted to, I could try to do something with “V” my cat just to see if one of my :30 second clips might go that route, but that is not my goal. My eyes are set on something a little different…

AIDAN 5, sci fi web series

I believe in karma. There is too much evidence of it in the positive and negative for me to deny its existence. So in that vein, I am going to promote a project with as much passion and energy as I would my own, although I had nothing to do with said project.

AIDAN 5 is a bold and amazing web series. They have been in production and post production for 2 years trying to bring to life the ambition and style that it promises.

Now, they are releasing the episodes one every two weeks. Episode 2 is now online. Part Blade Runner, Part Sin City, AIDAN 5 comes from John Jackson the director, Ben Bays the producer, Tim Baldwin a writer and editor, and Vidas Barzdukas (that is spelled correctly, as I had to check with the Lithuanian embassy). Starring Bryan Michael Block and Maya Sayre, against an almost entirely greenscreen world that was then put in by artistist like Ben Brown.

Here are the first two episodes and a trailer for the entire 15 episode first “season”.

sneak preview II : Lost in New Albany

As work continues on FRAMELINES, our PBS filmmaking show, it tests my limits of NOT being able to show the vast majority of our work until it airs on TV. Now we have our air dates. April 26th, 2011 FRAMELINES will begin to air in the Columbus market on WOSU the local PBS station. It will premiere earlier in the month on PBS in North East Ohio from Cleveland to Canton to Kent to Youngstown.
Here is a sneak peek at the ROUNDTABLE segment I host, this one on screenwriting:



I am mired in my own bile at the moment. For the past several months I have been living in a self imposed exile. My attitudes have not been conducive to human contact. I have a great deal of cynicism towards people. Strangely, my overall attitude towards “filmmaking” and even our local scene has never been more positive. What an odd contradiction that I have lost faith in many people, but not what they can achieve!

As the weather melts the frost, as does my darker thoughts. Of late, my endeavors seem to be achieving their marks; my own motivation increases on various projects. As I begin to work out my obsessions on outstanding projects like BITTER OLD MAN and finish more and more of the episodes of FRAMELINES; I find it curtails my cynicism and erodes the cobwebs of negativity.

Perhaps this spring might see even more positivity increase? Mayhap, more ambitious projects may come to fruition?