Archive for 2010

What I have

In the last month I took a rather boring concert and added a couple hundred cuts, manually synced countless shots, watched and re-watched each song over and over, and then waited three days for my boss to get around to picking up the DVD I burned him.
It’s been a busy month, but I’m happy with how the concert DVD is turning out.
We talked about our next project last week, so it really does look like this year long fiasco is going to be done in the near future.

So, as the end of my contract as grown closer my mind has begun to wonder. When people ask me about how I got to the valley, or about what work I’ll do when this DVD is done, I almost always volunteer the information that I don’t like this city and that I want to get back to the Northwest. It’s true that I don’t really like Phoenix, it’s bland and backwards. The city has no character, the people no communal identity and it’s really fucking hot in the summer. Seriously, even as I get use to the winters, the summers are still awful at times.
I’ve looked at work elsewhere, I’ve priced places to live and done the math on how I’d get out of my lease. A month or so ago I saw a very interesting opportunity from Sojourners for an internship program they have in DC. It would be the change I was looking for and I’d be doing work that I believe in.
However, the more I thought about it the more I realized that just because I craved change, it didn’t mean that it was what was best.

I’m blessed to be where I am. I’m blessed with good friends, steady work and a great church.

Always telling people that I don’t like Phoenix is just an excuse to look past all that I have. It’s just an excuse to put all of the things I don’t like about my life and explain it away as something that this city or this situation or this job has done to me. If I can’t be happy with what God has given me in Phoenix then I can’t be happy with being blessed in Portland or in Vancouver or in Boise.
So, I’m no longer telling people that I don’t like Phoenix. It doesn’t matter. I’ll choose to focus on the good things I have here and when it’s time to leave it will be because there is another opportunity elsewhere, not just because I want out.

This might not sound like a big deal because only four people knew about the Sojo internship. It might not sound like a big deal because I’m sure I’ll continue to complain about tons of stuff anyway. This is however an end to my “I’m only in Phoenix for film school” attitude, and that’s a big change for me.

Finally

After waiting about a year I finally recieved the audio I need to finish my concert DVD project. There is still a lot of work to be done, but at least the end is now in sight. It looks like the next few weeks will consist of me going through the thousands of cuts in the concert one by one to make sure the audio is synced correctly. Solos and certain parts of the vocals needed to be fixed so sometimes things don’t line up quite right. This is the tedious part of editorial work. The DVD itself is almost done, I spent a week animating menus and writing scripts to author the disc. Thankfully it’s a pretty straightforward DVD, nothing extraordinary or complicated. Using DVD Studio Pro again really makes me want to learn Scenarist, Apple’s effort into authoring just seems more half hearted than ever.

I have started and trashed half a dozen blog entries since my last. I can’t seem to write these days… so I’ll stop trying.
Things are well, I hope everything is well with you.

Trust me, I’m a scientist.

Tuesday night my friend Silas brought over his cut of the latest project for Praxis Church. We talked about some changes, how I would have done this different, how we could improve upon that, or add in something else. The data was transferred to Tome, my cheap but trusted external hard drive. This drive got me through most of film school and was where I kept almost all of my current work. I moved the drive from my Macbook Pro over to my PC so I could open a Premiere Pro project (I hate Premiere with every cell in my body, just FYI) and then decided not to open that Premiere project. I could explain this, but I promise the story would just get even more nerdy (boring) so I’ll skip that.
I use software called Mac Drive to read/write my Mac (HFS+) hard drive in Windows. This software no doubt employs some sort of dark magic gained by a deal with the devil and any decent professional only trusts it so far. But what the heck, it sorta works and I’m smarter than all those other pros. Right? No, I’m dumb. I pushed my luck, and when Windows was taking forever to shut down, I just pulled the plug. Yeah, we’re all told this is bad, but in reality there is only a small chance of getting hosed by it. And in this instance I did in fact get completely screwed over.

I kid you not, I feel like data loss is the worst thing than can happen in my profession. Yes, getting cheated by a client is bad, simply being without work is terrible. However, there is really nothing that devastates me like a drive that won’t mount, won’t repair and won’t rebuild.

I tried all the tricks I’ve got and then when I still couldn’t get it to mount I went into full freakout mode for a couple hours. I have a backup and archival system in place but, with the amount of data I’ve accumulated for Praxis projects in the last year, I hadn’t kept up. Nothing was in danger of being completely lost, thankfully I’m more responsible than that. I pride myself on keeping everything pertinent to a project, I love having the freedom to change a shot for my reel, or resurrect a cut for a client. You have to have some decent luck to keep that up though. My luck ran out and I lost 6 projects. I still have the master renders, I still have much of the capture scratch, but the project files, images, effects and color grading is all lost.

Meh, I let this sort of thing bother me way too much. Overall this year has been sorta lame. Other than BSU’s win I can’t say a lot of good has happened.
Which is bull shit, I shouldn’t have such a bad attitude. My life is rather kick ass, by even first world standards.
lol, that’s a terrible way of quantifying happiness.

I now live in a world temporarily without Jay Leno. So, I guess it can’t get much better.

Here is the video that was first mentioned in this post. Silas did all the real post production work, even without my drive crashing I quickly realized how terrible it was of me to want to change things. I won’t even say what I wanted to change, because it’s immaterial. Silas had finally gotten the chance to edit a video and he did a great job. It’s his edit with some normal changes from the rest of the team and it’s fantastic.

Identifying your Apocalypse – Survivor’s Guide to the Apocalypse. from Praxis Church on Vimeo.

The new sermon series is about the end of the world and thankfully it’s not some silly study of a movie including Kirk Cameron. It’s just an overview of the different theories with an emphasis on what really matters, not scary, imaginative theology. The videos however, are informational and made with the highest attention to biblical, historical and cinematic accuracy. :)

If you can figure out the source of the video’s music without looking at the description you’re my new favorite person.