Archive for 2010

Tetris

The DVD project continues to end. I continue to sit around most days waiting for an email here, a phone call there.

I’ll be in LA for a day next week to oversee the color correction. It’s such a great feeling to have that scheduled and the assets out of my office. The documentary had its audio mixed earlier this week and it came back great. My boss and I had gone back and forth about how the surround sound mix should be put together and my viewpoint was so completely backed by Technicolor. That felt amazing.

I finally got my Tetris arcade machine working. It’s a lot of fun, and a great if I’ve got some time to kill or an afternoon to waste. It’s been sitting in my living room since last November, so when someone asks about it, it’s much more fun to go play than explain that I can’t get it working. The sound still doesn’t work, which is a bit of a blessing. When I first got the cabinet it was very loud, there’s no volume nob and Lord knows I wasn’t going to try and add one.

The band, who’s management I work for, is going on tour this fall. Dates have been booked, all though most not announced. There is still a good chance I’ll go out on the road for a bit, so that could be interesting. If nothing else, I’ll have steady work though the end of the year.

I promise to write about interesting things again, someday.

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.

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