FHTA invades San Francisco - Screenings and DIY DAYS

Lance and I have put together another DIY DAYS event taking place in San Francisco on August 17th. The LA DIY DAYS event was a huge success and all of the videos of each presentation are up on the our From Here to Awesome Blip.TV account. Check out this video invitation that Current TV created.

Also we are doing this cool thing where people get to decide what gets screened in the theater using their cell phones.

I was one of the 20 people asked by the 20×2 organizers to answer the question “What’s the difference” in 2 minutes. They said I could do a film, speak, play music, what ever I felt like and since I had recently had fun making music, I decided to write this song. It was a cool event and but it happened at the same time as the From Here to Awesome party so I could only stay to see one other performance which I really liked. Special thanks to Mike Hedge for filming.

Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

Tech Notes:
Mike Hedge filmed on his VX-2100 on mini-DV tapes. He rolled on about 10 tapes or so at SXSW 2008 and then gave me the tapes at the end of the event. I took them home and brought each tape in it’s entirety into Final Cut Pro onto a new blank hard Lacie Hard Drive. I did this by hitting “Apple 8″ to open the log and capture window. Then I rewound the tape to the beginning, pressed play and hit the “now” button. This is the easiest way to bring in tapes. Some say it’s better to sit around and label each 1 minute of footage but that would be 60 cilps if I did that and thats way too much work. But one key capturing footage this way is that you have to set a couple preferences first. In final cut pro hit “option Q” to pull up the system preferences window. Then make sure the “abort ETT/PTV on dropped frames” is unchecked. Then also uncheck “Abort capture on dropped frames” and in the “on time code break” drop down menu choose “make new clip.” With these settings you’ll be able to hit “now” and walk away from your camera and computer if you want while all your footage gets brought in to Final Cut Pro. If all this sounds like a pain, iMovie is another good way to bring footage in. Then you can take your iMovie files to Final Cut Pro and edit them there.


After the footage was all brought in I did nothing for 3 months. Then suddenly I found this material and edited it together and quickly posted it. But after posting the performance I watched more of the pre-performance anxiety and realized that if I don’t add that material in then there isn’t enough context around the performance. So I edited a second version. As described in previous Tech Notes, I use TubeMogul to post videos to over a dozen video sharing sites. On draw back to this is when I change an edit as I just did. So to deal with that I just double post and leave the early one up too. No sense in logging into myspace, youtube, blip and all the others and deleting the last version. Some day I hope that I’ll be hosting my master file of a video and if I enhance my edit then all the other sites will be “ping” each other and will then re-cache their copy of my video. Until then, this system seems to work.

Also there is some basic color correction going on and during the black and white parts I just dragged the saturation all the way down. With color correction my general rule is always to lower the blacks, raise the mids and adjust the whites so nothing is too bright.

I went to this event last year to shoot video with my friend Isis Masoud who produced the ‘Art for Life’ portion of the conference. Sara Mayti shot photos of the whole event as well. We had a complete blast hanging out and it was my introduction to Macrobiotics. Eating food prepared this way made me feel completely different after the week so I’ve kept it up.

Roger Ingraham just finished taking the footage I shot last year to make a promo for this years 2008 Summer Conference. Also the footage will be utilized in an up coming short documentary about food. As I’m posting I’m currently on a farm that Roger’s Sister Sarah Ingraham runs getting more footage for that short doc. If anyone needs any of the raw footage for their own projects, feel free to get in touch since it’s so far all under creative commons 3.0 meaning anyone is free to utilize for their own documentaries.

Tech Notes:
Shot on HVX mostly in DV mode. Edited in final cut pro. Graphics all done in final cut pro. When I shot I’d shoot the entire presentation with good audio piped out of the PA. Then isis watched all of the footage and pulled out some clips and transcribed some portions. Then Roger sat down and just started pulling all the clips he liked into this promo. Then Isis, me and myself sat down and came up with good lines for the voice over recording into the audio recorder. Then roger edited those into the piece. Then he added reverb. Then we encoded in the iPod codec using compresser and uploaded to a youtube account we made for the Kushi Institute.

Mark Kostobi doesn’t just make paintings. He also has a public access TV Game show dedicated to naming them called Title This.

Watching at home I had now idea what to name these pantings, but once I was on the show getting 20 dollars per tittle I was 100 percent focused on the task.

Game shows are fun. Give a points system to something and people get more engaged. A miniature version of real life. So weird.

A giant cash register blows money all over the studio audience at the end. I admit, the second time this happened I couldn’t help but leap up and grab for the money. But it felt really wrong and I started using the paddles to swat at the dollar bills in the air.

I’m in chicago right now and starting today the new Four Eyed Monsters DVD that comes with a free CD and the new episodes is in Borders nationwide.

Please support our filmmaking and come out and get this jam packed DVD/CD set!!!!!

Also I’ll be doing an appearance at at Borders in Chicago. The plan is to project episodes 9 to 13 but the borders location doesn’t have a projector so i’ll be making some calls tomorrow to line one up (any leads welcome). Also Ben and Bruno will be attending and performing a few songs. They are an amazing band that did the music in Episode 13.

Time: 6:30 pm

Location:

Borders Book Store
595 Central Avenue
Highland Park, IL 60035

After this event I’ll be going with Ben and Bruno over to their show which is taking place at a bar called Quenchers. It’s on the corner of Western and Fullerton. That show is at 9:30 pm.

Come to both these, should be a lot of fun!

Here is their flyer for the 9:30 show:

If you have a film you are self distributing you should strongly consider coming to the workshop that susan and i have been asked to put on at Boston University in the last week of May and first week of June.

Details and registration here.

Come to one of these talks, they should be fun and educational and I’ll be giving away Four Eyed Monsters DVDs!

April 21st, 1:00pm
Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design: Drexel University
University Crossings Room 028
N. 32nd St. and Market St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

April 23rd, 1:00pm
University of Miami School of Communications
Studio A
5100 Brunson Dr.
Coral Gables, FL 33146

April 28th, 4:00pm
Northwestern University – Radio, Television & Film
Louis 119
1877 Campus Dr.
Evanston, IL 60208

I’ll be at all of the above talks and Susan will be at this one:

April 18th, 2:00pm
Department of Radio-Television-Film University of Texas @ Austin
Studio 4d in the CMB Building
W 26th St. and Guadalupe St.
Austin, TX 78705