Retrospecticus: 2008

Entry 2:

The Year I Started Working

On the personal front, 2008 marks for me the year that I started to get my first professional jobs in the film industry. After leaving school, I initially found it difficult to market myself in the field that I had chosen, and a bad combination of location and scarcity of work led to ennui and a day job. I still have the day job, btw.

In January of this year I started getting work as a production assistant on commercials that were being shot in the Denver area. These were fulfilling, exciting gigs that really helped to re-vitalize me out of my early-20s boredom. I started hunting out work, and specifically people to work with, and have managed to make, in my opinion, some pretty tactful career moves.

The downside to all of this though is the failed / failing economy. I don't have any intention of leaving the Denver area for a few more years, and because of that I'm prevented from really making a push to work full time in the film industry. While there are a good deal of things shot in the state every year, the uncertainty factor really kills it. Therefore, I've chosen to stick with my guns and non-career day job.

I've recently begun to get jobs as a freelance editor, which I intend to explore more in the upcoming year. I'm a bit apprehensive about 2009 because I know that investors are scared, for good reason, and aren't going to be pumping money into the small scale operations that I relied on in 2008.

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This is why I'm a bad blogger.

Lack of capitalization in headlined, maybe? Probably not. I've not been able to keep up with me 1-2 day posting schedule at all this month--its been really quite dismal actually. But here's the scoop, and you'll know most of this if you communicate with me regularly or follow my facebook or twitter.

I went to San Francisco last week, for the first time, to do some filming for my most current project. Although I can't go into details about the project, its associate with the most recent web development that I've done, and involves historic formula one cars. Lots of historic formula one cars.

We got a lot of good footage, mostly interviews, and we're really excited to start editing it into what we already have. I wish I could do a little better in terms of details about this, because its all really exciting, but being intellectual property that's not my own I'm unable to go any further.

That's not to say that this is the last post about this by any means though.

I'm going to be super lazy and only post two of the pictures here from over the weekend, but take a look at them on my flickr.

I love those abstracted rack focuses. Favorite photo of the weekend.

Obviously, the other picture has yours truly in it. The other gentleman pictured is "Dangerous" Brian, a fine mechanic and the most excellent of hosts. Brian made me stop taking pictures and get in the car to see if the steering wheel was still too close to the driver's knees, making it so you ended up pressing against it to depress the very stiff clutch. Brian would have done it himself if he wasn't entirely too large a person to fit the cramped cockpit of this 50s era F1. Get back to me for the year and model, there were far too many to remember.

The other photos are here. There are about 20 others up as of this writing with more on the way. Maybe some stills from the weekend too, we were shooting in 1080 the whole time--and we got some truly gorgeous stuff!

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Drunk Goggles for Gmail

So, not that this has ever happened to me, but sometimes when you're drunk on a friday or saturday night the internets get dangerous. Facebook, myspace, gmail, all can make for some serious regrets when you're sober and hungover in the morning. (Note: I stopped using MySpace about a year ago because it was too slow and full of spammers.) So Google labs is offering a filtering service before it lets you send that drunken proclamation of love / hate on friday night.

I think its a funny idea that has great practical applications. Always impressive, g-men.

On another note, there's a fabulous blog post over at Small Parts: Choking Hazard, and I expect good things to come from this. And I love the title, wish I'd though of it. A few other things to check out: Alex's excellent biweekly podcast has been giving me excellent tune-age when I'm trapped behind budget spreadsheets in my home office. And for the record Google Reader is still trying to ruin my life.

I've been super busy working on an upcoming project (one whose details I'm unfortunately unable to divulge until a bit later in the game), but I'm working with some great people.

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Production Stills

At the wrap party for Breathless, the movie I worked on a few weeks ago, I got a dvd with all the production still on it, and there are some really great photos. It was a lot of fun despite the long hours and night shoots. We got some really good looking footage, and Mr. Koester is going to have a pretty hott little movie at the end of this.

Here are the stills:

Pedestrian bridge we lit:


Some pretty big guns:


There are innumerable pictures of me texting during downtime on set:


Ride that dolly:


Yeah for genny-powered sets:

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Pet Photography

...is incredibly self indulgent. But here it is anyway! I really need to start using my camera more, because I really take for granted that I have such a nice piece of equipment. Coviello just got a D700, which is fucking ridiculous, and I'm psyched to see some of the pictures he's been taking on set over the past 2 weeks. And I think I've successfully talked him into getting the D90 too, because of the digital video feature, which is pretty rad. I wish the D70 could get that with a firmware update or something, but c'est la vie.

So here's my lame pet photography:



And here's another one from the shoot on friday, up flagstaff, in the rain.



Only a few more days before we wrap, and then my life can go back to normal for a few weeks. More pictures of Tom to come!

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