It's 11:30 at night, I should be up for a few more hours assuming that the sugar-free RebBull I drank 3 hours ago is still wearing off.

I'm watching the counter on my Z1u's tape-deck count down to zero, this it the 7th hour of footage I've imported today. About the last 4 hours of it has been footage taken after the crew took a train back to Los Angeles. I've been nervous to get to this point, I've been worried all my footage would turn to shit after they left. But, I'm relieved to say that so far, I've seen a handful of shots that I'm excited about using in the film. So far... it's not a total disaster, keep your fingers crossed.

I have 220 GBs left on my 1 TB before I'm out of space, and I'm only about a 3rd of the way through the footage. Not looking forward to running out of space, it's going to slow things down.

I took the advice of a few readers and submitted Episode 6 into the Webby Awards under the 'Documentary: Individual Episode'. I really hope that wasn't wasted money - but if anything, at least a few more people might see the episode and become interested in the project.

I also, thanks to the FemGeek, submitted to the Babelgum Online Film Festival, I believe each category has a first prize of 20,000 €. Unlike the Webby's, the Babelgum Festival is free to enter, I don't agree with the Webby's charging $200 per category, I think Mark made the right point when he said it "cuts out so many indie producers!"


So, on Sunday, after Amanda and I left the Delicious Digital Brunch at Palm's Thai Restaurant, we sat down and wrote out, in detail, outlines for Episodes 7, 8 and 9. Tonight, while I had footage importing, I put Eluvium on shuffle, and wrote 4 and half pages of Ep.7, I should have it wrapped up in another 2 pages by tomorrow.

Well, I've got more work to do before I sleep tonight, in the meantime, I was interviewed by the fantastically creative Mark Maynard, of Crimewave USA, Monkey Power Trio, and Severed Unicorn Heads, to name a few, and you read an excerpt below, with a link to whole interview here.

"...We are - and that has been a very difficult and emotional experience for the both of us. Something we plan to get into a bit more with later episodes on Pedal, but it was hard for a while. Still is sometimes - it took a lot of trying on both our parts to stay in each-other’s lives, and to be able to still work together in a productive way.

People are always very shocked when they hear that Amanda still came on the trip, despite our somewhat recent break-up, and a part of me was shocked also, but I think it would have all fallen apart without her. She’s been there from the beginning, it was her idea in the first place to think about documenting the experience of long [distance] travel."

Labels: Post-Production

Amanda and I recorded a vlog-update last weekend after working on some not-so-exciting (digital) paper-work stuff for 5 hours, and that vlog didn't quite make sense after watching it, so I did one tonight and tried to fill in the blanks of what we missed.

Thanks a lot for your questions and comments, I hope we did a decent job of answering some of them here. Now, if you'll excuse me, I just realized it's 3 in the morning, and not 1 (like I was thinking for some reason), and I'm exhausted. Long, long day.

Labels: Post-Production, Vlog, Weekly Update

It's hard to know where to begin. The last year that we've been releasing episodes for Pedal, people have said some really fantastic things to us, everyone has been very encouraging and supportive. The episodes have helped us gain a wider audience, and better define the project we are making.

The seven months between episode 5 and episode 6, went by both very fast, and very slow at the same time. It was difficult to find the right place to start talking about the production, about the tone and where to end off, where exactly we were heading with them. We're very excited about the production related episodes we have coming, which will all be under the sub-name of '64 Days'.

I wanted to share just a few reactions to ep6 here from several different sites, including vimeo, youtube, and twitter. These comments mean the world to us - we would not be able to continue doing this without support like this:

From Patrick Moberg, "I watched this during my lunch today.

It was one of the most engaging, interesting, and memory provoking pieces of content I've consumed in a while.

I'm your newest fan."

From Eric, "you know how one of your catch phrases is saying "that's.... (long pause) awesome!" yes mike. yes it is awesome. this can't possibly be anything less than beautifully brilliant when you're done. it will be worth all the sleepless nights. im proud of you. <3 eric."

From Dan, "Awesome! I can't believe how good that looks, Mike. I can't wait to see the rest!"

From Tiff, "I am so looking forward to seeing Pedal. From the beginning I was able to feel your passion and is has not died away. This looks so good and it just encourages me. You and Manda should be proud."

From Steve Garfield, " This video proves that high quality independent video production exits on the web..."

From Zadi, "What I've seen so far is beautiful, layered and rich. I can't wait to see the entire film once its finished."

I also wanted to share a bulletin that Larry posted about this episode:

"As Always, thanks for watching this. And supporting the Project.

Mike and Amanda appreciate it. And so do I. These people bled, laughed, cried, screamed, and helped me make these ; a preview of my fondest memories."

Larry was always very poetic in the way he spoke - and I found his description of production very fitting. It was... by far... the most difficult thing we've ever done. And again, I don't know if we would have gotten through it without you.

Labels: Post-Production

share this   |   'save as'   |   add to miro

64 days was the exact length of Pedal's production, the number of days we were out on the road. It feels really exciting to be releasing episodes again, I've been editing and filming the last few nights till 5 in the morning, and although it's been hell on my cold, I've had a blast doing it.

I'm anxious to get started on part 2 - when Amanda and I originally began writing the production related episodes, we were expecting to fit everything into 3 cuts. But that doesn't look to be the case any longer - we're finding we have a lot more to say, and many different layers of the whole experience to cover.


We'd love to hear your feedback - it will help greatly in deciding what questions to answer in what order. Thanks for watching.

Note: If you'd like to watch this episode in 1280x720 HD, click here :)

Special thanks to: Angela for her footage of our last dinner home - and to Justin and Amanda for helping operate the camera.

Labels: 64 Days, Episode, Post-Production

It looks like (from the stats) some of you have already noticed that a new 'donations' page has been swapped out for the old one - I had written the updated post-production version some time ago, but I kept trying to pull off a certain design on the page with the ChipIn widget... apparently my HTML skills are too limited.


A lot has changed since first posting the original “how much will cost” breakdown almost three years ago. Firstly, the saying ‘everything cost twice as much as you budget’, is kinda’ true: Pedal originally was supposed to cost around $10,000. Having just finished production, it’s safe to say the film is pushing $35,000... still cheap for a film, but more than we first expected. Part of this, well almost 90% of this, is because originally the idea was to bike ourselves across the country, and document it with little cameras and just “see what happens”. Obviously that isn’t the approach we took in the end.

Now we are back from the road, with (at best) a years worth of editing ahead of us (don’t quote me on that). Which requires hard-drive space, pick-up shots, 16mm film processing, time, more hard-drive space, lots of writing, software... and I’m sure, with the way things have always gone in the past: plenty of things we never saw coming.

Making a donation to the project will greatly help us afford the time and equipment we need, as well as pay off the $8,000 we borrowed, during production, to finish the film.

You can use the nifty ChipIn widget, or check out Pedal’s Amazon WishList. Every little bit is very, very, very appreciated. Hugs and kisses.

Labels: Post-Production

It's about 3 in the morning - I feel like I'm up way past my bedtime, but I've been filming footage for Episode 6 with the help of Amanda and Justin, and the last hour or so been recording some different voice-overs. Although I still need to clean up and tie together better the last two sections.

I hope this post make some sense - it does to me at the moment, but I feel completely out of it... this post might need an update when I wake up fully rested.

Labels: Post-Production, Vlog, Weekly Update

Originally my flight back from Michigan was for the 1st, but having no real urgent reason to return (aka: no job), I opted to stay longer, flying back on the 4th. I hope everyone had an awesome holidays "slash" New Years.

I've been a bit under the weather since getting back into LA, I spent a lot of afternoons curled up in bed, or on the couch watching Netflix movies: King of Comedy, Deliver Us from Evil, and 800 Bullets... I still have 'The Sea Inside' to watch.

It's the first time that I can remember in the last 5 years that I've been sick-sick, where my whole body aches, and my head feels like it's been kicked around - luckily I didn't have a bad cough, just a sore throat and a super runny nose. Nice.


Yesterday I got back to importing and logging footage for Pedal, at the moment I've imported 17 hours, and fully logged/tagged 9 of those 17 tapes. It's been very exciting for me to see exactly what the footage looks like after so many months. While on the road I was probably only able to see about 50% of the footage that was being captured, so much of it is a surprise to me.

Thanks so, so much to all of you who have said such great things in response to the stills I posted earlier - some of you even went so far as to use them as desktop pictures, which for some reason, seems the ultimate compliment to me :)


Amanda and I went to watch 'There Will Be Blood' last night at the Arclight, I think we were both hoping to be a bit more inspired afterwards - not to say that we both didn't find the film very powerful; the acting was really, really fantastic, Daniel Day Lewis was amazing, the story was long and slow (which I love), the look and feel was very beautiful. It's just, the film, at least for us, left us with a feeling that was other than "inspired".

But - regardless - we both managed to look over what we already had written-down for Episode 6, and finally mark a beginning and end. Pushing back a lot of the content for later Episodes. Basically I had been trying to get to point "X" in the trip for the last few weeks, not realizing that I already had an ending for the episode written down - I was just treating it as a middle. So Amanda helped define those areas, and we also came up with a bookend for the first and last episodes dealing with production that we are (for now) happy with. We hope to shoot the opening on Thursday and have it edited soon there after.

I know the episodes are long, long overdue - but I feel okay with that, I needed the break, and I wouldn't have been happy with what would have put out had they all been on time. It took a lot of rewrites to flush out what needed to be said and when. Till then.

Labels: Post-Production