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.

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.

submit films | watch films | learn to make films | fest news | fest streamGet the special Embed code or quicktime download links here. This is a video about how film festivals are suppose to function as a filter to decide which films are seen by distributors and therefor end up getting in front of audiences. It details some examples of how filmmakers have become empowered to side step that system and find audiences directly.

We want to share with other filmmakers the opportunities we’ve had with our own films so we’ve banded together a growing team of filmmakers, web developers and distribution partners to create From Here to Awesome.

If you have a film you want the world to see or if you want to see films outside of the standard hollywood status quo then Subscribe to From here to Awesome’s Video Channel.

Download this Song: Mp3 | AAC | .FLV | iPod Video | Apple TV

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This is a mash up of real hate comments and hate mail I got in reaction to my last video. The 4 places I collected the hate comments were Williamsboard, Gawker, YouTube comments and my own blog post.

In addition to a parody video, a confession video has also appeared in which the creator anonymously claims to have met me at the party introducing himself with his real name and shaking my hand. According to a commenter on this guys profile posted back in August, the individual behind this account might be named, “Adam Pearse”.

Going through these comments looking for leads on the stolen bike and coat was sometimes hilarious but left me feeling kind of depressed. Until I had the idea for this song which has made me feel way better. To create this song I pasted any good lines into a document that I then tweaked to add rhythm and rhyme. Here are the lyrics and chords.

Tech Notes: I filmed on the HVX-200 with a soft light above the camera and a back light you can see hidden just behind the de-popper. I always try to use a fast shutter speed for web video because you don’t want motion blur, compression doesn’t like it. So I went with 250 or 120, I forget. I used a Shure KSM27 Microphone hooked up to mic input 1 and a 1/4 to XLR cable to go out of my guitar straight into the cameras mic input 2 of the video camera. I recorded in 720pn making sure I had the entire song down in one single take, which took a few tries, most of which I deleted after trying it. Also I re-wrote the lyrics slightly after each take to fix what was tripping me up. Then I used, “log and transfer” function in FCP to get the footage in. Then a color correction filter to crush blacks, boost mids and drag the color temperature towards a cooler less red tone. Then I used sound affects provided in Sound Track Pro for the gun shots and bullet landing on the ground. But I didn’t use soundtrack Pro, I just found those files on my drive and pulled them into FCP. Then I added a slight delay using an audio plug-in to my singing voice and compression using an FCP default plug-in on my voice and guitar. That just generally smooths out the volume change as I’d move closer and further from the mic. Then I chose export to compressor and selected iPod 640 by 480. Because the video was 16:9 compressor knew to actually make a 640 by 360 video and I double clicked on the settings to insure that was the case. Then I hit “submit” and waited for it to encode and then I posted to YouTube. Then I used senduit.com to get a copy over to susan and she suggested i take out one extra line I had at the intro and I agreed so I re-exported the same way and posted to YouTube. Then I used compressor to make an Apple TV version which I posted to TubeMogul.com which cross posts to all my other video accounts including blip.tv which means this video is freely downloadable in iTunes and Miro in HD.

This evening I was asked by Thomas over at Williamsboard.com what I think about the WGA strike.

I shared a video I posted a month before the strike began about the opportunity creators have right now to make their own content. Then I gave him this answer as well:

We are in a time where writers can completely leave their positions if they want to. Then write their own content using small digital video crews to produce low cost shows to self-release online. Blip.tv, Brightcove, Revver and youtube’s content partner program all provide ad revenue and are looking for well written content. So thats the real strike in my mind. At that point a creator of a show can write what truly inspires them rather then being confined by the parameters of a mainstream TV Show. Plus instead of 4 percent they’ll be getting 100 percent.

Also it would be cool if then audiences jumped on board and could actually “boycott” mainstream media by simply not watching it and instead subscribing to independent shows they like and getting them free on what ever device they want to watch them on. Now and then there would be a thanks to a sponsor or some kind of ad model that gets the creators paid but it wouldn’t need to be nearly as obtrusive as annoying 30 second spots.

Even right now there is enough independent media out there to not have a TV and to do screenings of independent films at friends houses rather going to movie theaters. So I imagine this will only get more and more practical as things like the writers strike pull us into a new era.

This panel was moderated by Ingrid Kopp of Shooting people as part of the Evil City Film festival back in October. Panelists include Leah Meyerhoff, JERRY RAPP, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice.

Three very short clips were taken from the above video and posted to the new From Here to Awesome Video Feed. Look for the video feed and subscribe on iTunes, Miro, YouTube, MySpace and Blip.TV and several other video sites. Thanks to TubeMogul and Mike Hedge for cross posting that video to so many sites.

Thank to taxiplasm.net for shooting this panel on the DVX-100.

Please feel free to sample and re-post any part of or all of this video. Please link to ArinCrumley.com as the original place the video posted.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)