Imperceptible Impressions

I am a big fat geek. I know it. I don’t mind it. I know this because I get excited by techie things that no one outside a small tiny circle of people could possibly care about, nonetheless comprehend. That doesn’t make me exceptional or anything, as much as weird and dorky. Matrox released a Codec to the public that used to be proprietary to their hardware, which is what we edit with at work. I haven’t been editing at home for close to 4 years now. This means I can do some basic editing at home, an “offline” edit then take it back to work to master it.

What this really means is that when my inspiration (read – OCD) hits at 3:22AM (just when an episode of Framelines will have ended on WOSU), I can edit or make changes on projects brought home on portable drives.

I have been without the ability to edit outside of work for some time. It made me more relaxed and less stressed on one hand, but a lot less prolific on the other. I want to get back to doing more projects, especially more artistic ones that have been started and left unfinished.



Already today, away from work, instead of surfing the web, meandering on meaningless sites or research on episodes of Dallas circa 1982, I was cutting on a long dormant short and even started to re-edit another 11 year old short, from the master tapes in a higher resolution than ever before, thanks to the newly released codec from Matrox.

This makes me feel more whole, more complete. Next week is lightening up, so I can get on some web work I have to do too. I’m still going to put in a long day tomorrow finishing another episode of FRAMELINES before I accomplish much more of anything. At least my Obsessive-Compulsive side still adheres to a high degree of responsibility.

I hate being torn between multiple projects. I like them all, but there always tends to be one that WANTS to supersede the others. It makes the work harder, longer but not insurmountable. My brain lights up at one project while I have to focus on another, or two or three. What I hate is that there are weeks and weeks where I don’t have that electricity and cavalcade of ideas. Then when the muse visits, I’m buried under a heap of existing projects. It can be frustrating.

At the same time, I LOVE when the creative energy flows like a river.

An Ostentatious Occasion

This past Saturday, I was a guest speaker at the Alliance for Community Media conference in Columbus. I have a passion for Public Access television. It’s something we have gone without for 9 years. In Columbus, we lost our Public Access. We still have the E and G channels from the PEG, meaning Education Access and the Government Access channels, but nothing for the masses. I was at the conference to speak to some issues for indie filmmaking, especially in terms of distribution.
And here I thought I was going to be the bearer of bad tidings.



It seems others share my view that within 10-15 years, cable TV and the Internet will merge into one entity. With that, things like Public Access might wither away, much to my chagrin. At least in the current form, people are far more likely to find content on public access television. Online, your voice will be drowned out by the tens of millions of meaningless YouTube videos… and if Net Neutrality is abolished, then you can expect even fewer people to hear your voice as it won’t be profitable for those paying for advertising to your internet provider.

These are dark times indeed, although the light has always found a way to puncture through. My crystal ball cannot see what else the future holds. All I know I put forth into the time that is given to me.

Framelines starts airing in more markets this week, including North East Ohio and Cleveland. By the end of June, we’ll be on pretty much every PBS in the state. Now, with these new fresh connections, the show may even start making it out of state as well…

Feel free and check out the FRAMELINES website, www.framelines.tv

Or check out the YouTube channel for Framelines

The Grandiloquent Guy

I have to tell you, folks. I am having one really really bizarre week. Doing this show FRAMELINES affects me in ways I could not anticipate. In the same day, because of this show, I reconciled two relationships that I had soured in the past.

I interviewed one person for the show that once came to my house to kick my ass. Then for a roundtable shoot for the show, I had two former partners on the panel, neither of which I thought would want to sit that close to me. I put any petty differences aside because I believe in this show. What I may have thought personally seems so distant and unimportant these days. It’s like someone has put Novocain in my soul, but at the same time what I care most about now is doing something bigger than myself. This show is meant to help grow the film community state-wide. It is bigger than me and my ego.

I had no idea what motivated me other than what I thought would make for a good show. I had genuinely good conversations with everyone off camera as well. I don’t see my social coma coming to an end aside from these excursions for the show; alas I am still not fit for long term friendships. I’m still rough around the edges. Baby steps, they say.

Now I’m wrapping up post production on episode 5 and immediately going into 6-8. I added an outline of show 9 to the board.

Ah, yes the experiment. Well, in 4 days I have over 1,100 views of my viral video of Vladimir Jack Bauer. This is what I made…



As you can see with the editing, the close ups, wrack focus, music, and title sequence – I could not make a “straight” pet video like the other ones that get 1,000,000 views. I HAD to do some editing and filmmaking. The edit is intentionally rough, and actually doing that bad was probably the hardest part. Not obsessing over it was not easy. I spent 11 minutes shooting it (6 minutes of raw footage), 22 minutes to edit, including titles and music, et al.

Will it get 100,000 views, which is my goal? I don’t know. It’s a combination of key words, spreading the video, and some mystical game of chance. Maybe in a month or two, someone influential on the pet video circuit will post it and repost it and it might spread to cat fanatics. Who knows? Maybe it will languish as one of the undiscovered movies, or maybe people just don’t find it funny.

We’ll see.

Cat vs Blu Ray Player

Empirical Experimentation

Tomorrow I intend to try something, something new. I want to make with total intention, a “viral video”. This one will not be narrative, as that has eluded me thus far. No, I will exploit that which is closest to my heart. My deepest apologies to My Sexy Girlfriend Veronica ™, but I am taking about Vladimir Jack Bauer. Tonight I brought home the trusty Canon T2i DSLR to see if I could make something with my little man.

I will admit, I love a good pet video. Whether it’s :20 seconds or 4-5 minutes, I’ll watch this hilarious romps of animals being animals online. I love them. At the same time, the analytical side of me made some notations.

First, the concept and title are simple. Nothing fancy, just the absolute most obvious aspect of the video is the name you use, like “Cat tries to figure out treadmill” or “Kittens beg for food”. From there, keep it short. Very short. In some ways, the shorter the video is, it almost guarantees views.

In my video, there will be some editing. Minor, but still it won’t just be raw footage as I so often see. I’m also going to add some music, licensed proper music, but music nonetheless. Shooting with the T2i means I used shallow depth of field too. I do some focus pulls and tried to get a decent exposure (but alas, I am NOT a D.P. and have not the greatest of skills with the camera itself).



I just cannot help but apply some filmmaking skills to anything I do. It’s something I cannot let go of.These are risks as they break the formula that has been tried and true. If this doesn’t work, then I’ll probably attempt to just upload raw footage later.

The experiment will take 3 months to allow the search engines to take in the video, process the key words/metatags, and also for the snowball to head down the mountainside. I cannot guarantee this will work. I am more curious if I can get the coveted hundred thousand views on something I spend little to no time on and quite frankly pander to the masses.

Tomorrow, be prepared to see my cat, Vladimir Jack Bauer make his Internet Video Debut…

The Fissility of Felicitations

Boy, this really is a fallow time for your faithful narrator. I almost missed a screening this past Thursday, and yet again this week I failed to even mention on the blogosphere that the 2nd episode of Framelines is playing in a measly two hours time and I haven’t promoted it yet. Is something wrong with me? Why do I not care more?



One thing is certain. I will make ACCIDENTAL ART this summer. Come hell or high water… although I never thought of Hell as a particularly watery venue or a place where the humidity was high. I’ve made a decision to attract an Ohio actress who is a bit of famous her own self. I have some connection to this actress indirectly and in the past 9 years I never ever dreamed of using that, but this is it. It’s go time. I’m calling the favors on this one, and I’m going ALL IN.

We have $X.XX amount in the bank now and with my last few commitments; we have enough to make the movie. Time to put the band back together again. I’m only going to use the bare minimum crew on this. I’m not out to impress anybody or pretend my production is something big or special. My sole concern is making a movie and telling the story. The more time I spend away from a film “community”, the more I know I don’t care about petty nonsense.

Thanks to this blog, I did make a connection to a local school that is going to provide us with some interns for FRAMELINES and other projects. It will be nice to get some new hands to help…. And possibly initiate.

Preposterous Aspersions

Want to know how messed up my whole thought process is these days? I completely forgot that my own TV show was premiering until less than 12 hours before hand. No promotion, no hoopla leading up to it, I just plain forgot. Some marketing guru I am turning out to be.



I stayed up to watch it. I’ve been trying to recalibrate my body and go to bed earlier, so a 2:30AM start time of my show has now derailed those plans as I sit here in sleepy misery. I have seen this pilot episode so many times. We finished it last July.

Still, it is very different seeing it on the television live. I put on the closed captions just to read them and because I’ve never seen them on the show. I hope we can break through to general audiences with this. We’re trying to focus on the human interest stories of filmmakers and what motivates them to make movies.

If anyone is going to see FRAMELINES in Columbus, it will be with the DVR/Tivo. The show aims at the key 18-34 demo that PBS doesn’t attract often. There is also a chance those are the types that are awake at that hour watching TV. In all the other markets in Ohio, we’re getting much better time slots. In our home town, we’re getting the shaft with a 2:30AM time slot. I think it’s only a matter of time before they will change us to a better time. Once I get to the point of finishing a few more episodes, I can then turn on the marketing machine full blast.

an intransigent individualist

Already feeling a bit better. I’ve done some creative work. I had to create an effect where an actor appears outside a large front window of a bar and have a camera travel inside this bar through the window. It’s a pretty common effect these days, but one I have never done. The problem was the actors were shot 7 months apart and with the first actor was shot in a way that was not necessarily conducive to this effect, as it would need to be static on a tripod and we shot mostly (almost entirely) hand held. Also, the “bar” was just a small bar inside a movie theater and did not have a “window”, so I created one in After Effects.

So via much computer generated trickery, I have manufactured the shot I wanted in a way that surpasses much of my original intent. VideoCopilot.net and Andrew Kramer’s tutorials make things like this a lot easier. It opens up the possibilities of what you can do with a simple, non-science fiction project.



That FX shot is the last one in this short. I also editing the opening several bits already, so progress has been made. I feel a bit relieved and relaxed. I’m still behind on the day job work and even FRAMELINES, but feeding this emaciated part of my soul felt good.

I want to get these two shorts done in the next 2-3 weeks. Self imposed deadlines help but usually there has to be an end game in mind. I don’t have one. There is no plan for another screening or a film festival or anything like that.

Regardless, my Obsessive-Compulsive side kicks in and I have to work on it and finish them. I can’t stand unfinished projects.

An Indelible Depression

I am depressed. There are no two ways about it. I have sunk into a mild depression and it affects everything. As I wrote recently, I was uninspired to promote my screening and attendance was lower than anything I have ever done before. Granted, there were still more than I estimated there would be, but it still was below par. Sadly, this did not cause my depression, but represents a symptom of it.

Creatively, this funk prevents me from concentrating on or enjoying the process. I believe this is in part because my day job work is also editing and graphics. It sucks the life out of you sometimes from delving into the long hours and deep focus of creating a movie. I have two short films I have directed sitting in a queue unedited because I am working long days and at the end, I just can’t sit and edit anymore. I have a hard enough time getting through the regular work because of the routine that has sucked me down.



This too shall pass. It’s not as dire as it might seem. Maybe I need a vacation. Perhaps I need something to inspire me. I know not what can accelerate the process, but these phases are never permanent or debilitating for more than a short time.

I’m stuck at an impasse. Whilst we wait to hear about the Openfilm.com GET IT MADE 2 COMPETITION, we’re not progressing on Accidental Art as a feature film. I don’t want to get too far along the path of a lower budget version only to stop and find out we have the opportunity to make it for more money…. Even though I don’t believe we’ll win. Of the Top Ten, at least 8 of them are just as good as or better than my short film.

This source of frustration only compounds as time goes on. I want to make my next feature. I am ready. It will be in some ways a “last hurrah” as I cannot stomach the heartache and pain of raising money and the rat race therein.

The Machinations of a Madman

Damn! Work is beating my upside the head. But that’s a good thing. Keeping busy and making money is not a bad thing, especially given how this economy has been hammering at video production. The downside is that I have failed to promote my upcoming screening as well as I would have liked. The attendance will correspond to the hype, meaning low numbers.



I have tried to maintain the things I need to do to beat my bad habits. There was some success and also some failure this week. I did not work on my new web series every day for 30 minutes a day; however I did some days and not others. I did keep my walking and physical activity increasing daily. It’s not much, but there is a lot to overcome there.

Part of “working on” an edit is thinking. The more I tinker or even look at the footage, the clearer the edit becomes in my head. The sad part is that these are each under 3 minutes in run time. I need to be in the right headspace for an edit. I like things to be how they should be. Sometimes this requires being in the right place at the right time.

There are several screenings coming up that my short films will be a part of; at least 4 in Columbus in the next two weeks. I’m still in a seriously anti-social state though. I don’t want to be out and about. I have little to say and what I do want to say pretty much winds up here in a blog. I have no interest in the rumors or speculation of other filmmakers. It has no affect on my movies or what I am doing. My head is turned downwards into my own trenches. So far, the view is much better with the blinders on when it comes to other people’s nonsense.

A Didactic Disposition

Framelines, our PBS show on filmmaking in Ohio is like a freight train that’s going down a hill. I’m faced with deadlines and a workload that dwarves the small trio that is working on something of this magnitude. The struggle is to maintain quality and not have the time to do so. I endeavor to keep my bar higher on this show. I want this to help bring the filmmaking movement into the view of the public.

I hate doing the multicam editing for the roundtables, but don't mind doing the cutdowns for broadcast, so Scott has to direct the multicam in post for those. I step in at that point and pick the best moments of the usually 1 hour taping to create a 3-7 minute segment that has some level of coherence, plus clips and B-Roll when needed.



We found a nice rhythm of Alex the intern doing the A-Roll cut (interviews), then me and Scott on B-Roll, then I master the show with graphics and music, etc. All of the A-Roll is cut for the first 6 episodes, so it's on me and Scott to get them done. Alex hasn’t fully grasped B-Roll cutting, at least not in the way I want for the show, but he's really really good with A-Roll interviews.

Play to our strengths and work as a team. That’s been the most amazing part of the post production process on this show for me – creating and maintaining a workflow.

Continuing the Cotillion of Conquest

So far this week I have improved on defeating my bad habits. One of the things about recognizing my obsessive-compulsive behavior results in trying to out maneuver them. Tricking one’s self can be tricky, but possible. Retraining your mind to erase decades of reinforcement is never easy.

The worst thing for defeating my productivity is the OCD need to want to have enough time to complete an entire job, when it is and has never been a job that could be done in a single day anyways. It’s a mindset, and a destructive one. I have the hardest time getting started on big projects because you are facing the mountain before you make any progress and it’s easier to just say…..”Tomorrow…. tomorrow…. Tomorrow…..”



Specifically, I am look at 2 edits for short films. Knowing I have close to 4 hours of raw footage to go through, which will take at least 6 hours to do, my sub conscious mind says I need and entire day to just slug the takes I like and jettison the rest. If I have even 45 minutes of paid work in between, then getting back into that mindset is broken and I can justify procrastination.

So what I am doing to defeat this is to just set aside two 30 minute time periods to start slogging through the work. If I just get rid of a bunch of the gunk, and make the raw footage a more manageable amount, then I can just work towards getting to the edit.

This seems so obvious, but I have years and negative reinforcement to work against.

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?