It's Christmas today, and here in LA it's warm'ish and raining. I have a lot of packing and cleaning-up to take care of before I get on a plane tonight and head to Michigan till the 6th. I don't have much to write a post, but I wanted to take a second to say I hope everyone has an awesome holiday and new years.

I also thought I'd give a sneak peak at something we're working hard on - not sure when it be ready to go live, we still have some kinks to work out. But we are pretty excited about it.

I'll do my best to check in before too much time goes by on the blog. If anyone has any questions they'd like answered, or topics you're curious about, let us know - progress on the film is always slow at the end of the year. So we could use a good conversation-starter. Here's to the new year!

Labels: Post-Production

post production week 55 from amanda walker on Vimeo.

getting ready to fly back to Michigan for the holidays. just a brief wrap up of what mike and i have been working on. we're trying to get more organized and set some good goals for ourselves. honestly, this is very boring and i wouldn't bother watching it. :/ and i mumble anyway. sorry folks. would've redone it, but i just don't have the time. waking up at 5 am to catch my flight.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE! we'll be back to work in full-effect in January :)

Labels: Post-Production, Vlog, Weekly Update

Mark, at The Poverty Jet Set wrote a really great post in response to the question in my last post, about viewers. he made a lot of excellent points and as i was reading it i wanted to respond and decided it would be too long to leave in the comments.

he writes: "I think you might want to consider re-adjusting your questions. Why? Because at the moment, you’re not selling advertising against your media. Since you’re not looking to make money off them in that way, it doesn’t matter how many people watch your videos, but rather, the quality of the folks who watch."

it's true we're not trying to get the kind of numbers that we'd need to sell advertising, we're not really into that. but we are interested in raising money, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done and many things we need to pay for. and money is something we ran out of a long time ago. i know we can't expect our subscribers to fund our film, but it does feel great knowing that when we get into a jam (as we did when all of our hard drives started dying) that people are there willing to help (as many were**).

mike is generally the more number obsessed one. he knows the view counts and subscribers and all that stuff. and he's the one who gets on my case when i'm not doing my part and the numbers start dropping. and to be honest, i never really understood why. maybe because i really do believe that quality is better than quantity, and to me, just knowing that one person out there is genuinely touched by something we've made or really LOVES what we are trying to do, is enough for me. i never expected this project to turn into a blockbuster hit.

but i do agree with mike that growing an audience that is eager for the film's release, when it is finally finished, is very important. i suppose that would be the answer to Mark's question of what our goal is. we do hope to take the film to a few festivals (not too many cause that can get costly and they aren't really tremendously effective), to make it available on-line and sell DVDs.

but mostly we'd really like to do a few small openings in theaters across the country just like Arin and Susan from Four Eyed Monsters did, by getting people all over to commit to going to see the film, if it came to a theater near them, and then convincing those theaters to have a limited number of screenings. i guess mike's big fear is that our numbers won't really be enough to pull something like that off.

i hope i addressed everyone's comments and questions. if i left anything out please let me know and if you have any further feedback i'd love to hear it. again, thanks mark, for the nice post :)


**thank you!!!

Labels: Post-Production

Six years ago, before Pedal was a film, it was a book I was writing. Something I had started a year after moving out for the first time to Ypsi. The prelude to that unfinished book was a chapter about "Voodoo", something my Cross Country coach, Mr. Hunt, had the team do in preparation of a race.

We of course ran everyday, and he carefully laid out specific exercises to work different aspects of our body... oxygen delivery, sprints, endurance, on and on. But he was big on preparing us mentally too. And the habit he helped form is something I still find myself using today.

So basically, Voodoo was simply lying on our backs, closing our eyes, stretching out and visualizing the race course. What moments we'd surge around corners, what moments we'd speed up into a sprint and move ahead of a pack, how we'd move when the gun sounded. We'd go over it again and again, Coach Hunt would talk us through the race.

I would imagine at what points my legs would go heavy and numb, what mile my lungs would taste like blood, when the acid would start to replace the lack of oxygen in my muscles... but visualizing each meter, each mile helped break it down on the day of the race. I'd feel prepared, I'd barely have to tell myself to kick when coming to the foot of a hill I'd already sprinted up dozens of times in my head.

So, where am I rambling with all this? I've been using this technique with 'For Thousands of Miles', I've been playing music and going over each cut in my head. What the first frames of the film are, what shot follows next. I've been trying to break down the edit in my head moment by moment so that when I'm sifting through thousands of clips, I barely have to ask myself how to use them, I'll just drop it into place where I've already visualized it dozens of times before.

If anything... it helps me feel not so lost and overwhelmed.

Labels: FToM, Post-Production

Post Production - Week 53 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

Just a video of Amanda and I hanging out working on Pedal stuff... another late night. Trying to get organized.

Labels: Post-Production, Vlog, Weekly Update

so mike and i are sitting together, he's working on something quite important, i'm sure, and i'm staring at this blank page. my brain just hasn't been functioning to it's fullest potential lately. for the last month or so i was going through some personal changes that had me sorta in a funk and now, for the last week, i have been incredibly ill, sleeping about 15-20 hrs a day and sort of walking around in a half daze when i am awake. anyway.. with all the commotion going on here, in mike's apartment (with the animals, his roommate, etc.), i'm having a hard time concentrating. mike never seems to have that problem. that's to say, he is not easily distracted.

so, there are few things i've been wondering about lately and thought the best thing to do would be to ask you guys. the first thing i've been wondering about is viewers. or how do we get them? and how do we get more of them? it seems to me that most people who take the time (yes, i know, they are LONG) to watch our videos generally seem to like them. so a big question mark for mike and i has always been... why don't we have more viewers? why are our numbers so low? how come we still only have 122 subscribers???

we know that word-of-mouth is one of the top ways people find us, every time someone links to us or writes a little something about us, always helps to draw in some traffic, but generally it's not hugely substantial. and we really don't know what is. a goal of ours, over the next month or two, is to contact as many folks as we can to write about us or feature us in some way, in hopes to draw more traffic. if anyone out there has any thoughts or advise, we would really appreciate it.

the other thing that's been on my mind is... which is more important, finishing the film or putting out episodes? according to the plan that mike and i worked out, when we released our first post episode (64 days), back in jan (almost a year ago now) we'd made an outline for all of the 64 days episodes (10 in all, 15 including the first 5 from pre-production), and planned to release about one a month, which would hopefully have us releasing the last episode just as we were finished importing and logging all of our 120 hours of footage, at which point we planned to put all of our efforts into editing and working on the feature film.

so, obviously the problem that we now have run into is that we are WAY behind on releasing episodes. i'd say we greatly underestimated the amount of time and emotional strength each of these episodes would take us to produce. at this point we still have 6 episodes left and we've been done importing and ready to begin the huge task of editing the feature for several months now, and really haven't gotten too far. there are just so many aspects of this project and little things to work on that it seems hard to focus on only one thing.

lately we've tried to nail some things down and get a formula together for editing the film and i'm hoping that will really help with getting us moving along faster and in the right direction. but the real question here is, do we put aside episodes for now and focus solely on editing the feature or do we continue to work on episodes as well, and try to get a good handle on doing both, while still maintaining the website, social networks, day jobs and regular lives of our own. please please please... i haz questions, it you haz answers, we'd love to hear 'em!!!


also, thank you to everyone who generously donated to us since our last episode came out. we've been submitting to a bunch of short film fests and those donations have really been helpful with the submission fees. thanks again! you rock :)

Labels: Post-Production

Teaser 008 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

I wish I had more shots like this... sadly the crane was snapped in half during the trip. But that's another story for another time. One that I'm sure will find it's way into an upcoming part of 64 Days.

I wanted to a) post our new teaser clip, since it's been two weeks (in case any of you are wondering when to expect new teasers, we post one every two weeks on sat or sun), and b) thank everyone for the help in using up the HD embeds we purchased (that I mentioned a few post ago here).

The thumbnail above was snapped on the 6th, so as I'm writing this we've actually pushed that number to 7,221 HD embed views left. Which means, since posting about helping us "burn through another 500 plays", we've actually used up 2,278 views! Again, that number is just counting HD embeds on blogs or sites *outside* of Vimeo. I can't say it enough; thanks so much to everyone who took a moment to write a post and embed our 64 Days shorts, it means a lot to us.

I thought since we still have several thousands HD embeds left - we might as well put them to good use. I really like the newest teaser, I wish I could just keep floating up, and up as Larry steadily climbs over the rolling hills. There's a lot of things about this shot that bring me back to the road in a very powerful, nostalgic way.

<object width="499" height="211"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2512858&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2512858&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="499" height="211"></embed></object>I updated the widget box above with the cut & paste code for teaser 008. So, if you like it too, feel free to pass it along.

Labels: Embed, Post-Production, Teaser

Post Production - Week 52 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

Labels: Post-Production, Vlog, Weekly Update

I have a handful of clips in Final Cut rendering, and several others smoothcam'ing at the moment - so I thought I'd take a minute to post about some of the tools I'm using right now to stay organized, and fully backed-up.

I'm going to mainly talk about three apps: Hazel, Punakea, and SmartBackup - and no, sadly, I'm not being paid to write this :P

The first app I use to stay organized is Punakea, I've posted two videos in the past about this app - the first one being our very first 'weekly video update' (when I began importing the first hour of tape), and the second video was a time-lapse screen-capture of me logging the last several hours of footage.

Both these videos go into how I use the app to tag each video clip... like I would a flickr, or facebook picture - but these tags are indexed in your Mac's Spotlight, so you can search for them with any app.

I know that's not saying much on Punakea, but I wanted to just bring it up because it's part of the reason why I use SmartBackup. The way SBU works is different from CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! in that it hides the backed-up files from indexing, while still keeping in perfect sync all the metadata I enter with Punakea.

This is extremely important because when I use Spotlight (or Punakea, or Final Cut) to search for a tag, like "Larry", or "Kettle Falls", the results aren't doubled up. It's got a super clean Mac-like interface and it tells you (where the blue arrow is pointing) exactly how many changes there have been to either the number of files on that drive, or changes to the metadata, color labels, *everything* is synced up.

Here's a screencap where I searched for a clip I needed: z1u_t008_c-9, the only results I get are the two SmoothCam reference files (the purple one is the one in my documents folder, I have Hazel label it that color automatically when it copies it), a SmartBackup LOG file (just so I know the raw video clip *has* been backed-up somewhere) and the video file itself. The other two (un-numbered) files are just render files from earlier today.

The last app, Hazel, is one that I could not work without. One of the most important files for me to keep track of, aside from the raw footage itself, is the SmoothCam reference files. This file, which has an "mtdf" extention, is usually no bigger (in file size) than an email, but some of these reference files can take 2 days to create. Loosing them is a huge, huge pain. So this is where Hazel comes in, Hazel monitors folders and then performs actions you set up.

So, for example, Final Cut does it's thing with SmoothCam on a clip in the timeline, let's say clip: fx1_t009_c-6 (this clip came from the Sony Fx1, it was the 9th tape from that camera, and the 6th cut on the tape), when FCP is finished it dumps the SmoothCam mtdf file where the clip source is with the same name as the video. So all these little files collect on external drives I have set up, and with SmartBackup they are synced weekly.

But by having Hazel monitor the two external drives for new mtdf files - it will automatically (within 30 seconds usually), in the background, copy that small file and dump it into a folder under my documents... doing this makes sure that the reference files are in 4 places at all times: the external-drive where the video clip is located, the mirrored USB drive, my documents folder, and the last one is on my Time Machine drive.


Okay. That's enough being a dork for tonight - I need to get back to editing now. Hopefully this helps *someone* out there and is not a total bore. I'm always happy to answer any questions people have about workflow or anything else.

Labels: Post-Production, Punakea

I have to admit, it's been a slow week, I don't feel I've made much progress... and that, when it happens, becomes a heavy feeling in my chest... I guess there's a few things in my life that have been getting to me. And it's causing me to loose pace... when I need to be moving much faster as it is.

It's the 52nd week of post-production. Looking at those words is kind of hard, I don't feel I'm as far as I should be - as far as I want to be.

These type of "anniversaries" are tough when you're working on such an overwhelming project. Rounding out the number to a full year, instead of one step, one week at a time, makes you feel like a loser in a way. Like you've failed to get as much done as was expected of you. But it's just a number... it's important for me to keep my head down and focused... to not step back too far and get distracted by what we've done vs what we have left to do.

I mentioned in our post about 64 Days - Part 4, that we released the script for it - but judging from the number of hits we got on the video, compared to the number of views on the script (and how many times we've been asked if we really write on a typewriter), I think it was just too far down in the post and people's eye were drawn to the large video thumbnail. So I just thought I'd mention it again, with a pic this time :)

I recored a weekly update tonight - and I'm trying to import at the moment, but my laptop has been freaking out the last two days. iPhoto hasn't worked and now I seem to be having issues with iMovie... don't know what I did wrong. I think I'll run a couple clean-up apps and keep my fingers crossed. Vlog will coming soon.

Labels: Post-Production

Teaser 007 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

This was still in Washington... probably only 3 or 4 days into the trip. It was a very beautiful area... big skies... endless evergreens... slow climbing hills.

I remember when logging and tagging this footage - just how much we captured here... I have tons and tons of wide open shots, tons of close ups of everything from Larry... to evergreens... to chipmunks :)

Labels: Post-Production, Teaser