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Post Production * Week 112

posted Feb 6, 2010     Comments

Post Production * Week 112 from mike ambs on Vimeo

I sound a bit under the weather in this update - but despite my sore throat I've been hard at work editing and writing for the film.

Amanda and I have been working over video-chat to work out the rough parts of the script. On top of that, we recently finished our 64 Days Production Journal and I just so happened to get it in the mail today after I started recording this video.

I'm really excited at how they turned out! We'll be posting more on that later - for now, it's time for me to get back to editing.

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we ♥ karen abad ♥s dinosaurs

posted Jan 30, 2010     Comments

A few post back I mentioned: "Amanda and I are very close to working with two very talented people who's work we think is amazing". For some of you who follow the film on twitter, you might have come across the USA Today article that made the announcement a few days earlier than planned - which I thought was quite funny. But in any case:

In May, Amanda and I will be traveling to Northern California - we'll be doing this to film scenes with Larry that are from the perspective of both coming home and (then later in the film) prepping for his next 16,000 mile adventure. We've always known that we would need additional help with these scenes - unlike the strictly documentary part of For Thousands of Miles, these will be specific shots that involve a lot of planning and precision (in some cases). So, after a lot of thought, we approached our 1st choice for the posistion, Karen Abad. And she said "of course!".

I really can't explain how fortunate I feel about the history of this project - I think back to just weeks after this production blog launched (in 2004), when I talked with Amanda about my number one choice, out of *anyone*, for filming this documentary, being a small team of Belgians half way around the world. And by some odd and random string of events - it actually happened. I actually was able to spend two amazing weeks on the road with a team of three filmmakers who taught me so much about storytelling.

And now we'll be working with Karen, whose work on Vimeo I love so much - she's always been such a big part of the film's support structure for me. Has always been very encouraging... and even gone out of her way to self-design and hand-make buttons for the film! She's just been great - and she's immensely talented and Amanda and I are extremely excited to be working with her on this step of the film (above is a picture from our first group chat).

Well, that's one big announcement related to people that we're very anxious to be working with - and that leaves one left to go. But I'll save that for it's own special post. In the meantime I'd like to leave you with one of my favorite Memory Banks from Karen, Memory Bank 120394a.

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* t-shirts

posted Jan 29, 2010     Comments

The VGkids were cool enough to let me come by and film them making the film's new t-shirts.

I had no idea the machines they use to print shirts were so awesome - the way it drops and spins around is kinda' hypnotizing. I think I shot way, way more footage of their machine than anything else.

The tees are 100% organic cotton unisex alternate apparel shirts - and all the profits help support our feature film. Get yours at big cartel.

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Assembling a Distribution Team

posted Jan 21, 2010     Comments

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The Filmmaker Summit is just two days away - the event is a collective effort of the teams behind the Workbook Project, Open Video Alliance and Slamdance. I've been spending some of my free-time keeping up with the discussions on WBP, many of which dealing with festivals, distribution methods, social media, and DIY culture in general.

There's a long list of tiny steps that have to be taken before For Thousands of Miles is ready to distribute. My goals for this year are highly ambitious - and I know that my chances of reaching those goals on-my-own are remote. Amanda and I have been fortunate enough in the past to bring on people who are not only amazingly talented, but incredibly supportive in their confidence of Pedal.

But there is one area of this project that is very intimidating to me. And for as far as we've come alone with this film... for all the obstacles and dead-ends and set-backs... the one area where I do feel increasingly isolated is: distribution.

I have heard over and over again - the last three years especially - the importance of a distribution plan *before* you even start your film. This is not to say that Amanda and I have zero plans for the release of FToM - we actually have a strict idea of releasing the film for free online (see Nina Paley). But with this model of release comes an overwhelming amount of preparation... preparation that I feel hasn't been done.

For example - On Peter Broderick's website, he goes into some of the key points behind a distribution team, which include: strategy, foreign sales, outreach coordinators, theatrical and semi-theatrical bookers, and print and online publicists. Do all of these points apply to FToM? No. But enough of them do to make it clear Amanda and I must find a way to really lock down our plans, to really fill in the lines between point a and point b of saying "we are releasing our film online for free" and actually making it happen.


I'll end this post with a few questions: How have (experienced filmmakers) / do-you-plan (aspiring filmmakers) on releasing your film? How did / will you form a distribution team? Was / is this team included in your project's budget? If your film, like many 1st time filmmakers, has no real financial foundation - how did you still go about forming a team of people for something global like this? Any advice could really help put my mind at ease and get Amanda and I pointed in a more constructive direction.

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Maintaining Momentum

posted Jan 11, 2010     Comments

The last week of work for Pedal has been a big multi-tasking challenge. It always seems like the holidays come with a traffic-jam of task and catching-up. I've been keeping myself overworked with re-writing / storyboarding / scanning those storyboards and editing them into the FToM timeline.

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I've been recording new temporary voice-over tracks for pacing. Finishing our 64 Days production journal. Packaging up all the t-shirts, stickers, and (now) little owls that people have been buying from our new store. I feel like I've had great momentum this month and I hope I can find creative ways of keeping that momentum in the next four months!

Which brings me to a question I wanted to ask: Do any of you reading have ideas about how we can be more open in what Amanda and I are working on from now until May (when we film in Northern California)? Are you interested in seeing a list of weekly task? Are you interested in simply seeing more Production Vlog Updates?

I suppose my thinking is, the next few months are going to require a tremendous amount of focus and energy... and I'm a believer in the idea that people's interaction and involvement, even oversight, is extremely motivating and sparks creativity.


Moving on. I wish I could go into details right now - but it's not time for a full announcement just yet, but I'm far too excited to keep it all to myself: Amanda and I are very close to working with two very talented people who's work we think is amazing. One will be (hopefully) involved with areas of filming, and the other will be (hopefully) involved with areas of design and illustration. More on that as soon as possible - we don't like to keep secrets from everyone.

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One more small note before I go - we've been migrating all our hosting and registration to Dreamhost, and over the weekend I accidentally deleted the .css file for our main site. So I ended up re-writing it from scratch. Then I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning re-writing 64 Days from scratch. Let us know if you spot any weirdness of certain browsers. Thank you.

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2010: the next year of post production

posted Jan 4, 2010     Comments

Detroit-Skyline-New-Years-2010
Erica and I stayed in a hotel room 15 stories up in Detroit for New Years Eve. It was a quiet night in and I enjoyed looking down at the few people (brave enough to be outside in single-digit temperatures) walking across the mostly empty streets just before midnight. We had a good view of the lights along the Ambassador Bridge as we were falling asleep... and I laid there thinking about about a lot of things really: I'm a year older... I've learned a few more lessons (the hard way)... I thought about the film and last year of work that's been put into Pedal.

This post isn't a resolution of any kind - but it is what I see happening with the project within the next year... what Amanda and I will be working hard to accomplish. 2010 is going to be a big year for Pedal - there's been an overwhelming amount of effort behind getting ourselves positioned to burst past some of our last and largest hurtles.

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I've been frantically going over and over in my mind everything that needs to be prepped for this late-spring / early-summer. I have to say that I get so excited and anxious when I think about the scenes we'll be filming with Larry... they will be something very different from our 64 Days on the road. A more controlled environment - one that mostly will be indoors, lit very unnaturally, shot very particularly. Almost everything we're planning to capture should stand out very dramatically against the bicycle trip's footage.

Enough about that for now - there's still a few months for details on our upcoming week in Northern California.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scared to say this out loud... to put it here in writing - but inside I do feel Amanda and I could have For Thousands of Miles done this year. I want that... so much. We're close enough to the end where it's something that's within reach. I've been patient for so long... and perhaps it's dangerous to focus on the end before we're there. It's a goal... but it can easily become a distraction.

2009 was a really exciting, really stressful, really amazing year for all things Project Pedal and life in general - and I know 2010 is going to be even better!

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Before I signed off - I wanted to write about two quick things. The first being our long, long, long-overdue opening of the Project Pedal store! It's a humble grand opening - but we've posted our new FToM stickers, Project Pedal buttons, as well as our new FToM unisex tees.

The second being - I stumbled across a site called Project 52 that had a simple but great challenge: Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year.

Earlier last year I was closer in the habit of 2 post per week - but I know these last two months especially I've been struggling to keep up. So I've signed up at 52 in an effort to not two weeks go by between updates this year. I'd also love to get Amanda writing more here - we've been working a lot over iChat and Skype and I think her perspective on this leg of production would be interesting for people. Remember - if there's anything you'd like to know more about, please let us know. We're always happy to answer questions and be as transparent as possible.

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filmmaking during the holidays

posted Dec 18, 2009     Comments

The holidays during High School for me always used to bring considerable stress - I ran Cross Country for four years and anything that interfered with my daily training felt like a major distraction and derailment. I always felt incredibly guilty and lazy if I wasn't able to, at the very least, put in three miles. Perhaps I was a strange teenager.

I bring it up because I find it funny that now, I don't get anywhere near the exercise I used to, but I do feel a great deal of stress when holidays come around because it's nearly impossible to work on Pedal my normal 5-6 days out of the week.

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I'm sure the occasional easing-up is probably good for my sanity - but still, I always feel so awkward and derailed when a week goes by and I haven't spent most of it on the film.

That's not to say I haven't touched Pedal in any capacity for the last week - I've been very busy finishing up some of the Kickstarter rewards for all the amazing people who helped backed our last campaign. Normally my time would be spent doing KSR work half the time, and the other half I'd be writing or story-boarding. It's just this month has been half KSR and half getting ready for Christmas.

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Anyway - last week I dropped off all the files for the new FToM t-shirts and stickers we're ordering from the awesome, local, indie-friendly VGkids in Ypsi. Two weeks ago we ordered 500 new, hand-made-with-love Project Pedal buttons from the wonderful Karen Abad. In the next few days we'll put the final-final touches on the 64 Days production journal (which was supposed to be 160 pages, but has ended up being 180 pages) that we're making with Blurb.

After that - the very real and pressing deadline of Feburary is coming up, in which all the film's writing needs to be done. Or at least done enough to film from. Any changes made will need to be small enough to work with what we have. All story-boarding and logistical planning needs to be complete by April - in which we also need to have nearly all the temporary voice-overs recorded and placed in sequence with the drawings of needed shots.

Larry will be leaving near the end of June or early July for his 16,000 mile adventure and sustainability efforts for Expedition to Endure. All of FToM's additional filming needs to happen between April and June or else Larry will be out of town for the next year.

It's a lot to finalize and I'm excited to do so. I can't wait to pull off some of the shots that we've been working on - much of the film tells the two-sides of coming home, and we're working hard to be sure the visuals of the film match those mirror opposites of someone's post-trip experiences.

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Crawling Out From Under the Bed Covers

posted Dec 6, 2009     Comments

On Thanksgiving morning I woke up with a killer sore throat - which by the time Saturday night hit, turned into a full-blown flu that kept me up the entire night in the bathroom. Three days after that and I was finally able to drag myself out of bed without being too dizzy to stand. I haven't been that sick in a long, long, long time - six days in bed was fairly extreme for me when it comes to my typical cold.

I have an overwhelming pile of things to catch up on now that I'm back on my feet - first up is putting the finishing touches on the Kickstarter rewards for all the unbelievably amazing people who helped us reach our goal and secure $8,945 towards the film!

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Our 64 Days Production Journal is 98% complete, and up next is creating the 64 Days - parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 - DVDs with bonus features and commentaries from Amanda and I. If any of you have ideas for fun things that we could add to some of the 64 Days DVDs, please let us know!

In between working on our KSR responsibilities I'll be very anxiously story-boarding more pieces of the film that we'll be shooting in Northern California with Larry. I have to remind myself most days that there are still many small stages of FToM left to complete - but at the same time, we feel so close to the end. I look at the script and I compare it to the time-line in Final Cut and it's just very exciting. I feel like we only have several major hurtles left to deal with before we're able to sit down and actually watch a rough cut of FToM.

It's time I get back to work - don't forget to share any ideas for DVD bonus features in the comments!

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Kickstarter - We Did It!

posted Nov 16, 2009     Comments

FToM on Kickstarter - We Did It! from mike ambs on Vimeo.

November 11th marked a few excited things: a 28th birthday, the 100th week of post production, and the day FToM on Kickstarter reached 100% of it's funding goal!

Since then pledges have slowly kept coming in - and we want to make the best of this momentum and the remaining days (campaign doesn't end until Thanksgiving).

We'd love to see if we can hit an even higher goal - Kickstarter is such a powerful and unique outreach tool and we want to raise the bar as high as possible.

We've designed FToM t shirts that we're really happy with (Alternative Apparel 100 percent organic cotton unisex) and want to give as many as we possibly can to the amazing people who helped us reach this goal.

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If we can hit our new goal, we'll be able to include a t shirt for every single person who pledged above $20.

Also - with 10 days left - I have a bit of a birthday wish: to get Livestrong / Lance Armstrong to pledge a $1 to the film. If you click this link - it will pop open twitter, with a pre-written tweet all ready to send. I know we can do this!

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*this* meets *this*

posted Nov 6, 2009     Comments

Amanda and I had already been struggling to get Pedal off the ground for 3 years by the time we released Episode One (in Dec of 06). Even at that stage in pre-production, the story driving the feature length film had evolved quite a bit since day 1 of planning.

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The project was always growing, and always structured around a current understanding of our own personal experiences with long distance traveling.

Now it's been over two years since following Larry McKurtis across the country, and Amanda and I have gone through several variations on roughly the same story during the writing and editing process. One of the most important changes has been the interview segments, which I wanted to talk about in this post.

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During our 64 Days on the road, we filmed as many interviews as possible, with people taking their own bicycle adventures. We always expected these interviews to fit into the film as the driver for a reflective, post-trip narrative.

After two years of writing and editing and more writing, I've been more and more accepting, specifically the last 4 months, of the reality that these interviews don't fit smoothly with the rest of the film. They don't need to be in the film... they don't bridge any thoughts or moments that otherwise feel rough. The only reason it feels that we would use the interviews is because... well, typically you see interviews in documentaries.

And that doesn't seem like a very good reason to use them.

The other day, Amanda and I had a long brain-storming session over iChat, we did a full read-through of the script as it stands today, and discussed the few pieces of the film that are still just notes in an outline. One of the most important things we talked about was "what" For Thousands of Miles has evolved towards.

We both agreed that FToM closer resembles a documentary like Earth, or March of the Penguins then it does Man on a Wire, or Dig!. I've always heard that documentaries really find their story in the editing room - I just hadn't assumed that FToM would become the film it has.

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I remember pretty distinctly, for whatever reason, watching Earth in the theater and thinking a lot about the basic format being used: visuals of different animals making great journeys, and an (all knowing) narrator talking about those journeys. Elephants traveling across great desserts... Birds migrating over some of the highest mountain ranges in the world.

And I started to really consider this format for the film... I wanted to treat FToM like a case study. Like we were learning about this species of animal; people, that sometimes would travel impossible-to-imagine distances for seemingly no reason. Sometimes alone, sometimes in small packs. A big focus of this study would be the after effects that these youthful adventures would have.

Pedal has never been a project about someone's personal experience - it was never intended to tell stories from one person's trip. And although visually we follow one person from coast to coast, there are many layers in the narration that feel more generalized... That these emotions aren't unique to Larry's experience - that most people go down a long and exhausting road internally after they've come home.

Also, one last thought before I sign off - I've never been able to explain Pedal as a *this* meets *this* kind of pitch. It's been 6 years of working on this film and I just could never do it. But after talking with Amanda and really going over things - I think I'm finally comfortable with mashing two films together as a close'ish representation of what people can expect.

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So, here it goes, you're the room full of execs / producers and I'm the awkward, sweaty, unproven filmmaker pitching his film in 5 words or less: Winged Migration meets The Mirror. Now comes the part where I wait nervously for someone in the room to say something.

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A goal 6 years in the making

posted Oct 26, 2009     Comments

It's 11am, EST, and that means we're kicking off our day long Digg*athon! I'll keep this post short and to the point. Let's start with the shortened URL for easy sharing:

digg.com/d318Fjp

And if any of you are reading this post via your phone, you can Digg our submission here on mobile Digg:

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Here's a quick snippet from the description if any of you would like to pass the above links along to friends:

A film project six years in the making - with only 31 days left on an all-or-nothing Kickstarter campaign, it's time to see just how far we can push this ambitious documentary during post production!

Just have 15 seconds? Digg this story. Have a $1 you can pledge? Each backer goes a long way. Help spread the word, and be a part of our indie film!

Keep an eye on our KSR campaign and our twitter account for updates on how things are going. Here's to an exciting day!

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Digg*athon!

posted Oct 23, 2009     Comments

Several days ago, I posted a quick question about setting a date to Digg our current For Thousands of Miles (FToM) Kickstarter campaign - all the feedback we received was positive.

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So with only 34 days remaining, we're going ahead with what we're calling a: Digg*athon. Here's everything you need to know to be involved.

We'll be Digging the film's campaign at 11 am EST on Monday, October 26th. The first 2 hours following will be the most critical in pushing Pedal towards the front page of Digg, but the Digg*athon will last the entire day, as all diggs will be very helpful.

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Once the story is submitted, I'll post an update with a current shortened URL here on the production blog, as well as all of our social sites: Facebook, Twitter, IndieGoGo, Virb, Tumblr, etc.

It's important to clarify "why are we doing this?". Digg can be a very powerful site, and it can help reach out to hundreds-of-thousands of new people in a matter of hours.

The last time we submitted something Kickstarter-related to Digg, we spent only about an hour pushing the story on Twitter and Facebook, and had just shy of 40 people help Digg it. What was most amazing though; was at the start of that morning, our campaign was lagging at around the 20% mark for total funds raised, by the end of the night, we had jumped to over 60% - raising more than $4,200 in pledges.

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But Kickstarter is an all or nothing campaign - if FToM is even $1 short of it's goal (of $8,300), the film will received none of the pledges these people have made during the last 60 days.

We know that Digg was just one part of the equation that afternoon, but we're excited to see what kind of effect the site could have if FToM's campaign received, say, 100+ diggs, or even 300+ diggs? How many new people would that put the film in front of? How many of those new people would find the film worth pushing forward?

We are hoping that by taking the weekend to help spread the word about Monday morning's Digg*athon - we will be able to pull in at least 70 diggs within the 1st hour.

A few things to keep in mind: if you'll be away from your computer during the first 2 hours - you can very easily help Digg with almost any cell phone (ie: iPhone, Blackberry, or any cellphone with internet access) via mobile Digg.

If you don't have an account already, make one early so you'll be able to simply click the URL, and then the "digg it" button and be done with it. You can even connect Digg to your Facebook account to make signing up much faster.

Also, comments are factored into the algorithm for Digg's site -if you are able to, leaving something as simple as a one sentence comment could help launch the submission ahead of several other stories with the exact same number of Diggs. If you have a question regarding the film, it would be a great place to post it, it could help spark a conversation.

The hashtag we'll be using for all related tweets, post, or status updates will be "#diggathon", if you'd like to help spread the word, using this hashtag will help us track that progress.

We're only $1,900 short of meeting our goal! Let's see how much closer to that goal we can get by the end of Monday night. Mark your calendars or add yourself to our event page, and thank you all so much to everyone in advance for your involvement and support.

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three pages

posted Oct 17, 2009     Comments

I've spent most of the last week going over and over the same three pages of script. I'm not at the stage yet where I feel mostly frustrated, I just have yet to find how they fit together and overlap.

The three pages all deal with the moment Larry arrives at the Atlantic Ocean, in Bar Harbor, and for the first time in 4,200 miles, has reached the end of the road.

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The first of the three pages was written well over a year ago, and the 2nd two are variations on the same moment from different approaches. One version focuses more on the "chain of events" perspective; that Larry's own experience will go on to influence other people's experiences, and how that relationship feeds itself at a level that often goes unnoticed.

Another page deals with the rush of emotions that come at the very end of any long adventure... all the memories associated with your trip, all the struggles and little memories seem to snap together at once and it's an overwhelming rush that comes and goes all too fast.

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Some of the script tries to touch on how these memories are all filed away in your brain, how the human body works in an environment that's always changing and always challenging. There's also a layer of the anti-climatic, when you come to end of something grand and ambitious and no one around you seems to have any idea or any or interest.

I guess I just thought that writing about this might help me find what I'm looking for, and also it's been 9 days since my last post and I wanted to let people know what I've been working on piecing together. All this talk of Bar Harbor and arriving at the Atlantic has reminded me of this video Amanda and I recorded, knowing that we had finally made it to the end of production:

Bar Harbor (Aug '07) from mike ambs on Vimeo.



Also, before I sign off, I wanted to say thanks to everyone for all the feedback on the Digg*athon question. I've been working on putting that together as soon as possible. Stay posted.

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Digg*athon?

posted Oct 8, 2009     Comments

I've been procrastinating on this question for a few weeks now - mostly cause it wasn't necessarily pressing, and I had a lot of other higher-priority things on my "to do" list - but with only 49 days left in our post production funding campaign, I figured sooner was better than later.

Nine days ago, I launched a new KSR introduction video - I submitted that new video to Digg, where more than 30 people helped vote it up. By the end of the day, we had raised more than $4,000 in new pledges!

I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself.

First the "idea", then the question: The idea is pretty simple; pick a date (just a few days out) to submit Project Pedal to Digg. Spend those 2 or 3 days getting the word out to people - with tools like twitter, facebook (an event page), emails, etc - to mark their calendars, and (if they don't have one already) quickly create a Digg account.

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Considering what 30 diggs helped accomplish, you can imagine all the ways 100+ diggs could help change things for Pedal.

Having said that, I wanted to get feedback, before committing to it, from everyone out there reading: Should we try this? What area of the project should we digg (our film's homepage, our kickstarter campaign, a specific blog post)? How many days out should we set the "Digg*athon"?

This post is all about feedback. If you have any questions, comments or thoughts, please leave them so we can openly discus this and make a decision. Thanks!

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leaps and bounds

posted Oct 5, 2009     Comments

There are days, weeks even, where this project can feel stuck in the mud. That no matter how hard I try; I just spin in place - and it goes without much saying that it's a difficult feeling to put up with. Whether it's accurate or not.

And I'm not writing this post to whine or sulk - I'm writing to say that I feel quite the opposite right now. A month ago I was still running over and over the same 4 pages of script and barely making any real progress... I was also starting to worry that I wasn't able to reach out to enough new people for our current Kickstarter campaign.

I felt like I was dragging my feet on both fronts. I know a lot of people find themselves in these situations, that no matter what it is you're working on or busy with, that there are times when you just want to crawl under a rock and sleep.

And, I admit, that I did that for several days... not literally, but I would sit at my typewriter and blank out... I would walk around in circles with the script in hand, reading the same 4 pages out-loud on repeat. I would see that we had a slow day on Kickstarter and instead of pushing harder to get the word out, I wouldn't mention it anywhere.

But last week, something finally shifted and I began to make leaps and bounds with the script. Long lost pages and narration began to fit together and tell a story that felt smooth and progressive. Which, I believe, lead to the burst of confidence and momentum I needed to re-record and re-edit a new intro' video for our Kickstarter campaign.

The morning I uploaded our new intro', we currently had raised 20% of our goal - a handful of RTs, a few dozen diggs, and a wave of status updates later - and by the time I had gone to bed we jumped forward to an amazing 60%!

Which means a few things: a) we might actually be able to pull this funding campaign off after all (which means lots of exciting progress just ahead)! b) that in the next 52 days, I should be able to piece together large and completed sections of the film (writing, editing, voice-over, etc). c) that we are reaching all kinds of new people out there... and that we are very anxious to make a lasting connection with them. d) I felt like I a fourth point... but it is past my bedtime and I'm feeling groggy. So, I don't think it's coming back to me.

Now I'm sitting here on the floor, listening to The Wind, and blanking out in the direction of my typewriter - and I just want to finish this post by saying: Everyone gets into a slump. Everyone. But in my personal opinion, it's important to let it to depress you... to let it eat away at you and your confidence... to let your lack of action get under your skin and leave you feeling anxious.

Because when all that gives way and eventually comes out in full force - you can use it in your favor. You can come out swinging harder... as if you'd been up against the ropes with the timer running out. It might not be the most efficient way of working, but it does feel damn good sometimes.

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we have a film to make

posted Oct 1, 2009     Comments

FToM + Kickstarter = Love from mike ambs on Vimeo.

33 days ago, Amanda and I launched a brand new Kickstarter campaign to help fund the last stages of post-production.

Since then we've been backed by over 40 people, with pledges ranging from $1 to over $500! We have raised $1,638 towards our goal of $8,300!

This is an all or nothing campaign. Meaning if we don't hit $8.3k, then no one's pledges go through.

Help support For Thousands of Miles, plus get awesome stuff like Pedal buttons, posters, autographed scripts, a 64 Days DVD with audio commentary and even my personal typewriter.

If you're new to this project, take a quick moment to check out our "hi, hello" intro page, it's a very informal, brief recap of the last 6 years.

Please consider backing our film with a $1 donation, or help spread the word by liking this video, sharing our KSR project with your followers on Twitter or your friends on Facebook. We are really excited about the next stages in post - and we are very, very grateful for all of your support!

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Post Production - Week 92

posted Sep 15, 2009     Comments


Up past my bed-time getting some writing done - wanted to check in to update people on how writing has been going, and also to say thank you for all the amazing support we've been seeing through Kickstarter.

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something a little more sincere

posted Sep 6, 2009     Comments

Okay, my friend Eric suggested I get a little more sincere in my Kickstarter project description, so I wanted to give that a try:

There's a part of me that assumes when I mention, "I've been working on this film the last 6 years", that people automatically connect the dots, that they fill in the gaps of that statement and with it; understand how personal and important this film is to me. And that might be an unfair assumption.

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The truth is this project means everything to me. This project has stemmed from a 55 day bicycle ride from Onsted, Michigan to San Francisco that I took in 2001... and ever since those two months, I've been haunted by the experience of my days on the road. The memories of lonely sunsets watched from empty back roads in Montana's badlands. The memories of endless waving fields through North Dakota. The memories of feeling small against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean.

The first few years after my trip I bottled everything up that I felt and learned from it - there was a frustration of being unable to put into words what it all meant. How profound it became once I was back home and able to pick each layer apart and let it sink in. I felt separated from everyone I was close to before leaving, I felt still on the road in many ways.

Then I began to write things down, and those things first evolved into a book, and then later that unfinished book evolved into a film outline.

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This is what I want / have to show in the finished film. I've tried to stress the importance of this project to me, I've tried to make clear that for as much as my trip left me feeling alone, disconnected, and lost - it has helped me understand people's strength, their deep drive to feel alive and to love. This is what i need to show *you*.

I know all that might seem funny for a documentary about someone riding a bike for 3 months straight. But in order to successfully ride a distance of 2 or 3 or even 5 thousand miles, you have to, piece by piece, leave behind the person you thought you were.

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outreach ideas?

posted Sep 4, 2009     Comments

I put a lot of work and thought into our recent Kickstarter campaign - and the honest truth is, I know full well it's a big goal. A goal that percentage-wise, isn't in our favor of reaching.

We could have gone for a smaller amount, and we might be forced to do so 3 months from now; dividing the first round of funding towards securing equipment, and then a follow-up for travel expenses, and another for additional storage to actual edit the footage we took, etc.

That would be a safer way to approach the next steps in post, but in the spirit of biting off more than we can chew, we went with the whole needed budget. I would love nothing more than to sit back and let the magic of the interwebs reach out into the world and find new people who might fall head-over-heals for our project. But... they say better safe than sorry, and in this case, I feel it's very, very important to reach to this goal. And I feel that to do so, we're going to need to pull some major strings, and think of some new and very effective ways of reaching new people.

I am open to suggestions. Actually, the entire point of this post is a call for new ideas. Don't hold back, I am interested in any and all possible forms of outreach. Raising the last $8k of our goal is going to take some serious hard work, and some serious love.

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the next step - cont'd

posted Aug 30, 2009     Comments

FToM + KSR = ♥ from mike ambs on Vimeo.

Amanda and I just launched a brand new Kickstarter campaign to help fund the last stages of post-production!

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Help support 'For Thousands of Miles', plus get awesome stuff like Pedal buttons, posters, autographed scripts, a 64 Days DVD with audio commentary and even my personal typewriter.

Here's the (long) description from our campaign page:


Our 1st round of initial post-production funding was a great success on Kickstarter! And because of the amazing 18 backers, which helped raise $1,105, I've been able to work full-time on FToM for the last three months.

Recently, I finished editing a huge chunk of this ambitious documentary, cutting down over 120+ hours of footage into a near 5 hour rough edit. Which brings us to our 2nd round of funding:

So what's the next step? I have a long road of writing still ahead of me. The script, which mainly deals with several narratives blocks in the film are still rough at best, and in most cases detailed treatments and outlines.

The few connecting pieces of FToM that have yet to be filmed - that mainly deal with the experience of coming home from a long ride - need to be story-boarded and added into the editing sequences as place-holders for pacing and mood.

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During the length of this KSR campaign, I'll be hard at work writing / story-boarding. The goal is to be done writing when this campaign ends and use (if successful) the raised funds to carry out the following steps as quickly as possible:

Pick-up shots: it's time for Amanda and I to travel to Northern California, where our main character in the documentary, Larry McKurtis, is currently living and working. FToM deals a lot with the hardest part of a long-distance experience... waking up one morning in your bedroom, and realizing it's over.

That is to say, your entire experience on the road shifts when it begins to sink in that it's over. Moments that, at the time, felt slow and uneventful, blur together and begin to represent something more. You try to move on with your life, your routine, but so much of your mind is still stuck on the road.

There is a very, very short list of needed equipment (mostly simple hardware-store lights, an SLR adapter, and a basic DIY dolly cart) that we'll have to secure for the 1-2 weeks of controlled shooting.

From there, we'll need to purchase additional hard-drive space (because I'm working on two completely maxed out Lacie drives as it is) to import the new footage (as well as inexpensive USB LaCie drives for redundant backups... can't be too careful). Several more weeks of heavy editing will follow - which will mostly involve replacing all story-boarded sequences with the actual footage. Recording any temporary narration track (we have someone professional in mind for narration, but that's a different adventure all together at this moment).

At this point - we should have a watchable edit in Final Cut. Amanda and I will begin to work closely on making adjustments, and doing small personal screenings to receive outside feedback on the project. Make more adjustments. Repeat.

From there we'll need to ship off a locked edit to Belgium where Olivier will color correct the film. As well as hire a visual effects creator (for "I'm doing this because I love your film" wages) for a small number of simple and subtle layers to scenes dealing with imagination on the road.

I know this sounds like a lot - and it is, but all these overwhelming steps can be speed-up and more easily managed with a working budget and, more importantly, a supportive community.

DIY film-making can be a crushing, lonely, experience... but all things worth doing are difficult - and together we can be a part of something that I believe will beautiful, inspiring and unique.

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the next step

posted Aug 24, 2009     Comments

I've had several days to think about the two possible directions I mentioned in my last video update. First off, thanks so much to everyone who gave their advice and helped me weigh the pro's and con's.

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After a lot of consideration - I've decided the next step in post-production is continue moving forward with FToM, and to hold off longer on another addition in the 64 Days series.

There's a lot of little reasons for this, but for the most part, I left LA behind with the idea of focusing 100% on the film.

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I feel that 64 Days, being a supplemental aspect of the project, needs to take a back-seat while I'm being so heavily supported by Erica. She has been bearing a great deal of financial stress the last three months - and I am trying to not waste any of support she has been willing to give.

On a related note - for whatever reason, we've been getting a sudden increase in donations and I wanted to stress how amazingly helpful they have been. The recent PayPal donations and the $1,000 Kickstarter campaign we ran in June have helped me work full-time on FToM and narrow down 115+ hours of footage into a 4 hour rough-edit segment. And that has been an huge step towards finishing the film, so thank you so much!

That's all for tonight - I'd like to write a separate post about the specific steps ahead, as always I'd love to hear questions and comments regarding any aspects of the project.

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Post Production - Week 88

posted Aug 18, 2009     Comments

Post Production - Week 88 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

I was up late last night working - and decided a video update was long, long overdue. I've been finished up on a huge step of post-production for almost two weeks now, and I've been waiting to make that announcement on video.

Also - and more importantly, I need people's input on what the next step for me should be.

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There's more than one kind of free

posted Aug 16, 2009     Comments

I just finished watching a really inspiring video, twittered by Zak Forsman, of Nina Paley at the Phily DIY Days meet-up, that I mentioned recently, presenting the revenue results for her Creative Commons free-distribution approach. Yep, that's right, she has made money by giving her film away for free.

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My favorite part of her presentation was early on when she defined "free" as having more than one meaning: there's the free as in "free beer", and there's the free as in "free speech".

Nina released her animated film, Sita Sings the Blues, five months ago under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Now this site, has for several years, published under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Share Alike license, and that license applies to all the content we post here; the episodes, the teasers, the production updates, etc (unless specifically said otherwise).

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What these licenses mean is pretty simple and straight forward; under both, people are free to share your work - this includes downloading it, making copies, uploading it to a bit-torrent site, etc... any means of sharing are allowed! They are even allowed to make changes to your work - in a film's case, they could re-edit or re-mix scenes - as long as they released that modified work under the same license.

But what you can't do under our project's current license, that you are allowed (and encouraged) to do under Nina's is sell the content. It's not even required that you cut a percentage of the profits with the person who created the work. Although, in most professional cases, that person or organization does share their profit.

She brings up a specific example of this in the video, a Film Festival downloaded her film, put it in their schedule, and sent her a short email afterward saying something along the lines of, "hey, we put your film in our fest'. We'll send you a check in a few weeks". Her film played there, did very well, and she received a check for a few thousand dollars.

That is how film distribution should work! It's not there yet, but people like Nina are working very hard to prove that it is a viable option for both filmmakers and theaters. It's really inspiring and encouraging to see this model working, and working so well, even in it's early stages of approach.

The way in which Nina makes most of her money is through selling "containers", more specifically: DVDs and merchandise. This has been a hard sell for other filmmakers and distributors, a huge majority are still hard-pressed to understand that just because someone can stream or download a film for free, doesn't mean they will not pay for it.

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The more people that see Sita Sings the Blues... the more festivals it plays in... the more people who watch it online - enjoy it - and suggest it to a few friends... the more word of mouth: the more DVDs Nina sells. It's as simple as that.


The distribution of FToM has always been something I knew would have to be different - it's just not a film that is designed to be played in theaters all across the US. It's not a blockbuster, or a sleeper hit, or fun for the whole family. And I'm okay with that. I'm going to plan according for it, which means I won't be submitting to all the major film fest' with the hopes of being picked up. I'll still submit, but I won't be holding my breath.

FToM is guaranteed to do far, far better with a release approach similar to Nina's. And honestly, whether the film is more or less likely to be successful under this model is besides the point - I want to help push this form of distribution forward. I think it's important.

I think as more and more theaters upgrade their projection equipment to include digital, the more they tap into the internet, the more unavoidable it is to see organizations and companies come forward and help showcase film's with Creative Commons licenses. Most likely using something close to an on-demand / streaming / bit-torrent approach.

And that, to me, sounds like a very, very good thing.

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Teaser 017

posted Aug 4, 2009     Comments

Teaser 017 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

I've mainly been using instrumental music for these teasers - but to be honest, I've always wanted to use music more in line with this teaser.

If I can help it, at least half of the soundtrack will be music you're used to hearing in these teasers, and the other half will be more... old, lonely, love-related. There's a good reason for that - but one I'll save for the film.

Until then - here's a shot of Larry pushing slowly back against the winds in ND... alone on the road with nothing left to do but think about everything his life has been, and everything he wants it to be.

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Help us burn up the lat of our 9,735 HD embeds by posting this teaser on your own site. Just copy & paste the code below, or you can tweet this post to all your followers.

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Teaser 016

posted Jul 16, 2009     Comments

Teaser 016 from mike ambs on Vimeo.



Maybe someone better with words could explain why it is abandoned houses always feel so fascinating when on the road.

I used to spend hours in them on my first bike trip... Tim and I would drag our bikes off the road, make lunch while sitting on a dirty, glass-covered floor. I would poke through old dressers, look for things that used to be important to someone. Baseball cards. Magazines with notes scribbled on the margins.

It was late when Larry came across this old farm-house - he stopped, took a few pictures, wandered around the back and peaked inside... but there wasn't enough light to really find your way around.

He was only there a few minutes, and then he was back on his bike... I wondered when I was filming this when the last time anyone payed any attention to this empty home.

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edit. sleep. repeat.

posted Jul 12, 2009     Comments

I kept putting off updating the blog this last week - I was hoping I would be done piecing together all the elements I need for the next t.minus campaign, and that I could write a post announcing it was up and ready for people to look at. But... I've been running into some problems with that, and I needed to step away from it until I figure out how to fix them.

I realize that's not the most the exciting update - but the last few weeks have been incredibly routine. A lot of repetitive editing, repetitive tasks that I need to stay on top of: updating cycling forums about Stockpile, emails, newsletters, et cetera.

To be honest it's been a bit emotionally draining. I know some might argue that I need to keep a reasonable positive spin on my updates and what I say publicly, you never know who's reading or paying attention to your project. But I think all filmmakers go through different funks during each stage of production. It's hard not to - and it's even harder when you're going through it alone.

I guess I would just love nothing more lately than to focus on editing - to be able to pass off all the areas of responsibility to someone else. But I know everyone reading this could use an extra hand and 8 more hours during the day.

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Some of you reading might already be aware that currently Amanda is currently volunteering in Thailand with under-privileged children. So... perhaps I'm just feeling more on-my-own than I normally do.


I can say that music has been a huge, huge help recently, I've been able to catch up on a lot of the suggestions from our ♬ suggestion page. As always, if you've heard any great music recently that you think would be a perfect fit in For Thousands of Miles, be sure to drop us a comment in our Disqus thread.

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We do listen to all of your suggestions - almost all of them are added to an iTunes playlist that I try to keep current and use as a source of inspiration when writing and working.

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Teaser 015

posted Jun 26, 2009     Comments

Teaser 015 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

So, people have been asking me to post a FToM teaser that had a little bit of dialog in it for a while now. And I don't really have an excuse as to what took me so long to actually picking one out.

But, I have to give Erica some credit here... I had yet *another* quiet biking shot picked out and ready to go and she strong-armed me into saving that for another time and picking out something "different".

This group was one of the first people Larry ran into after having to say goodbye to his best-friend Jay earlier this morning. I know it must have been hard on Larry to carry on as if nothing was wrong or out-of-place.

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Update from Ypsi HQs

posted Jun 25, 2009     Comments

I'm sitting by the open window right now, enjoying the smell that comes after a mid-west thunder storm, and an iTunes playlist from Jon. It's almost been 10 days since my last post, so I thought I'd better check in and give everyone an update on what I've been busy with.


FToM: First on the list, the film. I've still been very busy going through clip by clip and dropping what I like in the timeline. I'm probably 1/3rd of the way through the 2nd TB of footage.

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Two days ago I sent a FCP project file to Amanda, she has the back-up drives in LA, and I've been waiting for feedback on what she thinks so far. The way it's cut now, it's not much to look at, but when looked at side-by-side with our notes on the arc of film, I can see a pattern emerging, and places where certain moods and points can be made. I'm anxious to be sitting back in-front of the typewriter again.

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Stockpile: I've been pushing hard promoting Stockpile on Vimeo, ACA, and popular bicycling forums (like Crazy Guy on a Bike). We're already getting some great feedback and interest so far. And today a few more clips were shared in our group.

One reader replied, "I have a good feeling about the project. It looks like the personal essence of the moments will come through. Teaser number two shows, to me anyways, how profound it is to be insignificant. Good luck on the project."

Our main goal with Stockpile is to be able to visually show just how connected we are by the places we've been - how our experiences are intertwined in ways that are easily overlooked. We have a long way to go before we reach the number of videos needed to do that, but with steady pressure and outreach, by the time the film needs it, I believe we'll be prepared.

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Kickstarter: Our Kickstarter campaign finished a few days ago and we were able to overshoot our goal by $105! I've adjusted the funding progress by by $1,105, which felt great to do. I can't thank everyone enough who donated, twittered, and help spread the word in anyway. It's by far the biggest jump in donations we've received since coming home from production two years ago.

It turned out to be a really impressive and supportive community of people. of all the sites we've joined that had fundraising support, it's been by far the most successful.

Also, of course, a huge thank you to those of you who have recently donated via our new funding site. I know we had a few people do so during the Kickstarter campaign and I didn't want to sound like I was leaving them out.

I'm excited about the next round of funding - and have been thinking of ways to incorporate a breakdown of upcoming expenses that we can split into individual campaigns.

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t.minus: I've also been putting together the next t.minus project. If any of you have dropped by the site recently, you'd have seen our 'currently closed' splash page - hopefully after this weekend I'll have it swapped out with all the new info.

I can't say too much about it at the moment, but I can tell you it's a collaboration project that anyone can be a part of! And, if I can make up my mind on a design, there could be t-shirts involved too.

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Post Production - Week 78

posted Jun 17, 2009     Comments

Sorry this took so long to upload - I recorded this friday afternoon, and wasn't able to edit it while in Kentucky like I'd hoped.

Post Production - Week 78 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

But here it is - just an update on how I've been combing through the footage for the trip and making sense of it. It's a basic approach, but the baby-step process seems to be helping.

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Scatter-Brained

posted Jun 11, 2009     Comments

Last night I twittered that I finished off the first of two 1 TB drives full of FToM's footage - I went through and condensed many of the edits and took out clips I knew weren't working now that I had seen it next to other clips. So the timeline is still just barely pushing 2 hrs and 15 min.

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But with another 1 TB of footage to comb through, and 400-some Mp4 clips (from Larry, and the crew), I'll be busy for a few more weeks before I have a solid 5 hours of footage that count as the most usable of the film's media. Then, the plan is, to play that edit on a loop while I make notes, write more of the script and narration, draw out the last of the storyboards for scenes we still need to film with Larry in Northern California... picking out music, et cetera.

I have a long, long road ahead of me. Finishing one of the drives was a great feeling, but it was a small step.

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We only have 9 days to go on our Kickstarter campaign - another $300 and we'll have reached our goal! Just as a note; none of the money pledged to this point goes through if our goal isn't reached. This $1,000 will be set aside for the post-production and pick-up shots I mentioned above.

In my last post, I mentioned that I had been working hard on updated our Stockpile project. If you haven't seen the new site yet, please take a moment to check it out and help spread the word. When I was on the phone with Winona, from Adventure Cycling, she suggested I create a promo video for our outreach campaign. I thought it was a great idea, so here it is, our new 60 second Stockpile promo:

Help us burn through the more than 16,600 HD embed'able plays we have left on Vimeo!

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It's easy - just copy the code above and paste it anywhere you see fit. Thanks for helping to spread the word!

That's all the updates I have in me tonight. I'm leaving town for the weekend but I'm hoping to record a vlog update while I'm working in FCP in the afternoon.

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Like a Mad Man

posted Jun 4, 2009     Comments

Since my last post, about simplifying my editing workflow, I've been cutting For Thousands of Miles like a mad man. I created a separate sequence, nicknamed The Odyssey, and went from a blank slate to over 2 ½ hours in the last few days.

Editing FToM Screen Cast from mike ambs on Vimeo

It feels so refreshing to just filter out the beginning, and the end of FToM, and just focus on the chunk that deals with a more linear (emotionally) arc. Treating it as it's own separate piece has lifted so much of the pressure and confusion from editing, and I can see already that having this larger, more complete block of the film actually in front of me, will make it much easier in the near future to tie it back into the bookends of the film.

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But editing isn't all I've been busy with, over the weekend I did some updating and re-designing of Stockpile (which will go live in the next few days), I've been putting together a 60 second promotional video for it also - something that the awesome people over at Adventure Cycling suggested we try. We're really excited about the upcoming mention of Pedal in their Bike Bits newsletter, I can't wait to watch all the newly submitted bike-trip footage.

Back to work for now - be sure to let us know in the comments if you anything questions about what's going on behind the scenes of Pedal.

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Up Bright and Early

posted May 27, 2009     Comments

I'm excited about editing today - last night I was making changes in the film's timeline - currently I am working on the section of For Thousands of Miles that deals with Larry's trip in a more linear fashion. FToM doesn't start that way at all, and I was using a different (more structured) approach earlier on - but that approach carried over into other areas of the story.

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And I realized last night that those solutions didn't work on this problem. So I'm excited about today because I'm going to try something very simple to solve something very complicated. I'm going to run through, clip by clip, and drop in the shots that I like. That's it.

It's how I usually go about editing more personal videos, not too much thought, not too much structure (at least at first), just grab what catches my attention, and set it in the timeline.

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On the 1st of two hard-drives I have somewhere around 1,170+ individual clips, ranging anywhere from 20 seconds to 20 minutes. So, it's not to say that this is a quick solution, but the approach is familiar, it's simple enough to provide immediate gratification, and sometimes that's very important when editing.

Will I end up with a 5 hour rough-cut of a part of the finished film that is supposed to only take up 30-40 minutes? Yes, at first I will. But that's ok. I'll start picking it apart when the time comes. Time to get to work!

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Teaser 014

posted May 22, 2009     Comments

Teaser 014 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

This was taken in Glacier Park Montana - it poured there for about two days.

At this point in the trip Larry didn't even own a tent, I'm not quite sure how he managed to sleep and stay dry. He used a tarp and a picnic table to create a kind of make-shift tent.

It's a strange thing to be so cold and so wet in weather like this - and not have a real roof over your head. Not only for just a few hours, but for days. When the sun finally comes out and hits your skin - it's an amazing feeling to be back on your bike.

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New Pedal HQs

posted May 20, 2009     Comments

Whew. I made it - barely, but still, in one piece. Next time I insist on driving across the country in a loaded station-wagon with no air-conditioner, someone might want to ask me to double think it. Despite my heat-rashes, I don't regret driving - I just couldn't afford it.

But, moving on: so I'm still living out of half-empty boxes and milk-crates, most of my hardware is unpacked and connected. I setup all my external drives and ran test on them to see how they handled the road trip and the 108 heat - everything looks great so far.

I have a lot of work to do today - so I'll try to keep this post short and sweet - and I don't have much to update aside from "I've been doing lots of unpacking and heavy lifting", but I wanted to stress just how much all of your comments, tweets and support have meant to me the last few weeks.

I would be lying if I said that my decision to move here was easy, and that the change in my life came with no aftershocks. As a struggling filmmaker, or really just as a human-being, I am full of second-guessing and nagging anxieties. And that's where all of you come in - you've helped me believe in myself. So thank you.


A few quick things before I go: 1) I started using Campaign Monitor to power our newsletters and out-reach goals.

If you're not subscribed yet, you can view an archive of yesterday's newsletter.

2) We launched a new Kickstarter fundraiser - in only 3 days 4 people have already pledged $65.

We have 31 days left to raise out $1,000 - which will go towards follow up interviews and pick up shots in Northern California - drop by and check it out!

3) We quietly launched our new Join our Team (formally our "Get Involved" site) and we are looking for people who are excited about indie filmmaking and anxious to become a part of the driving force behind Pedal's out-reach goals.

I'd love to hear feedback on what people are most interested in hearing about. If you want to know more about writing, or editing, or our out-reach, leave us a comment saying so.

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Post Production - Week 73

posted May 6, 2009     Comments

Post Production - Week 73 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

This is a very big announcement... and it was a decision that was more than difficult for me to make. I don't know what else to say... except that I'm prepared to work harder than I've ever worked to make it all come together as planned.

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tomorrow... and the next day

posted Apr 26, 2009     Comments

It's been over 10 days since my last post and always feel awful when the blog sits here quietly for that long. I guess I've been in a bit of a mood the last week and every time I sat down to write something... I just kinda' blanked out. "Why is that?", you might be wondering.

I think it had something to do with where I'm at in writing the script recently - I've come to a point where I need to find a way to say what the trip means to the people in our film.

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That might seem like an easy'ish thing to do... but I've been trying to find the words of how to express my own bike trip for the last 6 years... I've never been happy with anything that I've come up with. But it's time for me to make a decision on that - I can't let the film collect dust forever just because I'm lacking the perfect way to express something. It's become a fight of what needs to be said and what should left for interpretation. It's slowed me down... and that always leaves me down.

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But - moving on: tomorrow Babelgum will announce it's winners in the film competition. It's been nerve-racking this last month waiting for the final results... especially considering we reached this point last year in the competition. Regardless though of what happens tomorrow I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone again for all their support and votes - we couldn't have been finalist the last two years without you. Keep your fingers crossed for us tomorrow - and keep an eye our twitter accounts (@Pedal, @Manda, @FToM) for word on Babelgum!

And before I go - I know I've been jumping all over the place in this post - I wanted to mention the virtual panel discussion happening on the New Breed Workbook Project. I did a video-response with my perspective on film festivals. If you have any thoughts be sure to drop by and join the panel.

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Post Production - week 70

posted Apr 15, 2009     Comments

Post Production - Week 70 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

Larry shared a pretty personal and emotional letter recently - and I asked if he would mind my sharing it on the site.

I realize that many people might find his words in the letter a bit strange - but that was half the point of me reading it... I'm curious how these feelings come across to other people.

For me, the letter makes perfect sense, all the emotions seems right in line with what I went through... with what I'm still going through - but I know that won't be the case for everyone.

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2nd Year in a row!

posted Apr 7, 2009     Comments

The results for Babelgum's 2nd annual film festival were posted two days ago, and we were very excited to find that (for the second year in a row) we are finalist! The first year the contest wasn't very competitive - it felt like, I think, a lot of filmmakers hadn't yet heard of it. But this year it was much more popular and the climb to the top 10 was a lot more difficult.

Twitter / FToM the film: Great news! @Babelgum post ...
An email I received yesterday had our total vote count at 904! With that final vote-count it's pretty clear just how fast voting took off once they simplified their site and video player.

Babelgum
Again, we can't thank everyone enough for all your votes and support! We would have gotten no where fast without your help.

I wanted to take a moment to stress the importance of focused campaigning. Most film sites have a lot of links branching off into a lot of areas of the project. Our sidebar alone has around 20 links, half of which take a person off the main production blog and to other sites all-together.

We have a handful of ideas for upcoming t.minus campaigns, and like I mentioned earlier in the week, they aren't contest related. We plan on coming up with collaborative projects that tie into the film or episodes, and are confident now that t.minus is the best way to go about them. The focused site could be used to plan a digg event, raise a smaller amount of money for a specific part of the project, give away a limited supply of swag or work-in-progress DVDs, a sudden boost in film request to reach a number more attractive to DIY-friendly theaters. Et cetera.

By having a branch of your film's site that does one thing and does it well - as opposed to linking to a post that is surrounded by sidebar links and recent entries - we were able to really focus the site's traffic (from other people's tweets) and have one main goal for visitors.

The final results for the film fest will be decided near the end of the month by a panel of judges and eventually Spike Lee. Keep your fingers crossed for us - and in the meantime, we have lots of other work to do!

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Teaser 013

posted Apr 4, 2009     Comments

Teaser 013 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

This was taken around out 9th morning of our trip - we're either on the far end of Washington or just getting into Idaho.

In the background you can half see a group of female bicyclists that we ran into several times up until Montana. They had a pretty inspiring mindset about traveling - and one of the women would later email me on the memories from her ride, saying: "...It haunts me now like a dream that only exists in my head, separate from everything in my day to day 'real' life."

I thought that was one of the most perfect and beautiful ways I'd ever heard a person describe the after effects of their trip.

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closing our first t.minus campaign!!

posted Apr 2, 2009     Comments

Whew. So our first t.minus campaign is over as of this morning. It was a very interesting experiment in focused promotion for the project and I'm really happy with the way it all turned out.

voting closed
The shortlist results of the Babelgum contest will be posted tomorrow and I honestly have no idea if we'll make the top 10 or not, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I can't thank everyone enough for all their support - so many of you voted, so many of you twittered and send friends messages on facebook, some of you even wrote blog post and put badges on your personal site.

We ran our t.minus campaign for 45 days - ending with around 700+ votes - averaging about 16 votes per day - a total of 3,381 total clicks through Twitter (on our specific shortened url alone... other people used their own tinyurl but we didn't keep track of those numbers).

The numbers are very interesting in how they break down, it's pretty clear that early on in the campaign less people were able to vote (most likely, judging from the wave of emails I received, difficulties in downloading and installing the software), but they still Twittered about the contest for others to see.

Babelgum Votes Graph
Near the end of the contest, when Babelgum opened up their voting and ditched their software, voting really took off.

Twitter was the most powerful and efficient way in which we got the word out about tminus - like I mentioned above, the shortened url we used was clicked 3,381 times. There was a very big jump in the number of clicks and the number of votes - but that gap began to close quickly when voting became more simple.

tminus url tweets
Above is a graph from Tr.im that shows the ups and downs of the RTs (re-tweets) for tminus. We normally saw between 5-15 tweets a day about the contest, and from that saw between 60-200 clicks from twitter, with a spike around 700 clicks near the end.

I have a lot of ideas of how to make better use of tminus for the next campaign, not sure when that will be or what it will focus on (perhaps 64 Days screening events), but I do think it was a success. It was a long 45 days and I really appreciate so many of you sticking with us through it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what parts where good and what parts were annoying or could have been done better.

Do you think we should stick with Twitter as our main driver? Or should we experiment with other sites, like Digg, or Facebook? Do you think one has more influence then another? Tminus won't always be geared towards contest or award-related campaigns - we'll try to keep it a mix. Thanks again so much for all the support! We'll let you know the result as soon as we get them.

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post production - week 68

posted Apr 1, 2009     Comments

post production - week 68 from mike ambs ☂ on Vimeo.

We're down to the last 24 hours of the Babelgum contest - we really have no idea where we stand at the moment, since the relaunch of their site it's been impossible to even do a rough count of our position. So it will be as much of a surprise to us as anyone when the release their shortlist on the 3rd.

tminus 01 day
So keep your fingers crossed for us - if you can cast one last vote and tell everyone you think might take a moment to vote. Remember, now there's no signing up for an account or downloading software. Voting could literally take as little as 5 seconds and two clicks.

Okay, enough about the contest for now. I've been trying to get back into writing and editing mode, and haven't been able to re-acclimate as fast as I'd like after spending a few weeks neck deep in html, css, javascript and all kinds of other initials that are mostly over my head.

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t.minus 12 days

posted Mar 20, 2009     Comments

I have great, great news! When we first started t.minus to encourage and simplify the voting process for 64 Days in the Babelgum film festival, it required people to create an account, download and install software, oftentimes people needed to restart their browsers or computers to finish the installation, etc. Basically, what I'm saying is that was a terribly high number of hoops to jump through just to start casting votes.

Babelgum
As of this morning - Babelgum has relaunched a new design of their site, and it appears to be from the ground up. No more software necessary to watch or vote! If any of you out there tried to vote before, and were one of the many who had issues or ran into bugs with the player, then this is just in time! And for everyone else who's been voting once a day, well, now it's much easier.

Pedal (t.minus)
We're really getting down to the wire in this contest - from what we can tell, we're very, very close to the top 10 position (possibly 15th place in the Documentary category, though it's hard to tell). And with 12 days left, we're gonna have to push this very hard to make sure we a) don't get bumped back on the list, and b) manage to move up in the top 5 positions.

I know I've mentioned it on this blog before - but doing well in this contest could secure us the finishing funds towards For Thousands of Miles. It would greatly speed up post-production and give us a head start on promotional funding, and allow us to hire help that we desperately, desperately need. Thank you so much! We can do this.

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'Pathetic' Compared to What?

posted Mar 16, 2009     Comments

Amanda and I weren't able to go to SXSW this year - which had less to do with 64 Days not being accepted, and more with money and timing issues - but if one of us had gone to Austin we might have caught a panel discussion with several big doc' directors including Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), and Gary Hustwit (Helvetica).

Flickr Photo Download: Objectified panel
During the panel they debated digital distribution options and had some disagreements on it's value. Spurlock said, "The reason numbers aren't released (for digital distribution revenues) is because the numbers are pathetic."

And, from what I could tell, another comment, from Steve Savage, of New Video, was somewhat in line with Spurlock's, "It's good to be agnostic, and I think it's a good way to put everything out there and see what sticks but there's also other ways to do it," he asserted, "to be really strategic, to find where the money is."

I know it's important for distributors to crunch the numbers and track current and emerging trends, I know it's important for them to chase after the biggest pool of money - but I don't agree with Spurlock at all about online numbers for indie-films being "pathetic".

Keep in mind the numbers these higher-profile filmmakers and distributors are calling pathetic aren't compared from the perspective of marketing-resources. Sure the online numbers aren't very impressive when side by side to the theatrical numbers for Super Size Me - but how many marketing dollars were behind that film? When you take an indie-film with a promotional budget in the $10,000 range (basically whatever they can swing on a credit card)? Then the internet is, dollar for dollar, far more powerful. And is getting more so very quickly.

I watched a video recently that briefly went into the time it took different technologies to reach it's first market audience of 50 million. Radio: 38 years, TV: 13 years, Internet: 4 years. The tables turn a lot faster online then they do anywhere else.

Google Trends: online film
I haven't heard the entire panel discussion yet, only bits and pieces, so I'm not saying that anyone on it feels the internet is a waste of time for indie-filmmakers. But I am saying that focusing so confidently on where the "money is", is missing the point. I'm curious how long any of you reading think it will be before a majority of modern theaters have a high-end equivalent to AppleTV, or Roku running off an internet database of high-quality films that can be torrented or streamed on demand? 2 years? 4 years even?

Flickr Photo Download: IMG_1794h
The filmmakers currently tapping into the internet to distribute and push their films might not be rolling in it, they might not even be able to "pay their rent", as Spurlock mentioned, they might not be the talk of town during Sundance and Cannes - but they will be the pioneers that shape the very near future of online-film-distribution.

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Post Production - Week 65

posted Mar 13, 2009     Comments

Post Production - Week 65 from mike ambs ☂ on Vimeo.

Big announcement this week - it's been a few weeks in the making but we're finally ready to release the new design of the For Thousands of Miles site! I worked till 4 or 6 in the morning for about two weeks straight getting all this coded correctly and set up. We're really proud of the new site and we hope it adds a lot more interaction to FToM! We could use a lot of help in spreading the word about the new site - if you're up for blogging about it we'd be flattered.

FToM Screenshot
There's a few more little additions I'd like to make over the next few weeks - but they weren't critical enough to push back the release. So stay tuned for those and be sure to leave us any comments or questions you have about the new site. If you think something is missing we'll try to include it.

Pedal (t.minus) 19
There's 19 days left to vote for 64 Days on Babelgum - again, this contest could fund our entire post-production process! If you enjoy the 64 Days episodes, or Pedal on a whole, please take the 60 seconds each day to vote for us. It really means a lot to us. The t.minus website lays out quickly and clearly the steps you can take to get involved.

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building a team

posted Mar 8, 2009     Comments

I've been thinking about this for several weeks - and I've been hesitant to write about it, hesitant to ask people about it, hesitant to really admit that it's a problem. But we desperately need help with this film. Not in all areas, but there are goals I have that, it is becoming more and more apparent, will fail if it's just Amanda and I.

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I can handle the editing. I can handle the writing. I can handle keeping myself on schedule - not that I don't fall behind, but it's more a matter of too much to do and too little time (or not enough help).

And because of this I am always falling behind in one area of the project as a whole - I am always falling behind on emails, falling behind on blog post, on vlog updates, on reaching out to new people, on making advances with the script, on encouraging write ups and interviews to get our name out there. The weight of these un-marked to-dos has been growing the further into post-production I get.

DIY screening
An example; we have goals of planning multi-state screening events of 64 Days to build more awareness and practice DIY distribution (for when FToM is released). This is something I could take on myself - the managing of localized people who are helping to book venues, RSVP guest, handle equipment needs, etc. But I could not do this while at the same time writing as much as I need to, and editing the film. So I feel stuck - I know it's something the project would benefit greatly from, but how do I pull it off without more help? How do we find more help when we have no budget?


I suppose this post is simply a feeler - I'm curious about people's thoughts on this. What people's ideas and suggestions are on the possible trade-offs for people joining our team. We have a long road ahead of us... there's a lot of work left to be done... and it's a lot to ask of people. Is it crazy to pull outside people into this mess?

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Post Production - Week 64

posted Mar 4, 2009     Comments

Post Production - Week 64 from mike ambs ☂ on Vimeo.

A quick update on what I've been keeping myself extremely busy with the last week - keep checking back at FToM - it won't be long before we launch the new site. I've worked very hard on it, so I hope everyone will find it much more useful and engaging.

Pedal (t.minus)
Also don't forget there's still 28 days left of voting for 64 Days in the Babelgum film fest! Winning would give us all the money needed for post-production! Greatly speeding up our schedule.

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t.minus + awesome people

posted Feb 23, 2009     Comments

It's been a week since launching t.minus and announcing the Babelgum Online Film Festival. We've been keeping our fingers crossed and carefully monitoring all the available stats - I thought I'd be transparent and share all the info I know with the people who've been coming back everyday to vote.

Pedal (t.minus)
Up front, the least informative part of this whole process (for us) is the actual vote tally itself. There's no log-in or dashboard page for our progress with voting on Babelgum. So our only insight into where we stand in votes is a once a week email updating us on the count. Since we've only gotten one email so far, we don't know much - but as it stands several days ago, we were at 49 votes. Which was enough to pull us from the back of the line (600+ videos) to the top 20.

Fullscreen-25
Here's a snapshot of our Google Analytics graph from Feb 15th to the 22nd: You can see that the first two days were our strongest, now keep in mind this graph is only for page hits on t.minus, our stats for people actually following the "vote here" link are different.

Out of the 900 t.minus page hits in the last several days, the tr.im url we have linked from the t.minus page has been clicked around 180 times. But it's safe to assume most people, after clicking the link once, would either save a bookmark (if planning to re-vote each day), or just leave a tab open in their browser.

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We can tell from our Crazyegg stats that 90% of our t.minus traffic is coming from a) Twitter, b) Facebook, and c) the production blog. So everyone's RTs have been amazingly helpful in keeping the site active and the votes growing!

Chart
This basic graph above is very comparable to the Analytics' info - but I've been going through and doing my best to track the tweets pointing people to the contest. It's a rough count, because not everyone uses the tr.im url I'm able to track, and not everyone puts an @Pedal or @FToM - so some slip past my radar, but the above graph is close.

The light blue is the number of clicks on the t.minus url, and the dark blue capping each day's hits are the number of RTs on Twitter. So you can see a very immediate effect from your twitters and driving people to the site - it's especially amazing to watch how fast the stats jump when several people twitter within only minutes from each other. People's likeliness to click and then vote seems exponential to the frequency of the t.minus RTs - which sounds all fancy and science-like.

The graph is, of course, not entirely accurate to twitter's relation to page hits because we've blogged about it, we keep people updated on our Facebook group, we sent out Virb announcements, and contacted some our Vimeo friends about voting. But the numbers are helping in finding what's actually effective and what's not.

tr.im | Statistics
Amanda and I have been trying to figure out how to keep the graph tipping upwards - it dipped near the end of the week, but the last two days the RTs have been climbing, and if we can keep that momentum, then t.minus could prove to be very powerful. Making the top 10 of Babelgum could lead to award money; which would immediately lead to paying for help to really getting other aspects of this project moving at full speed.

Thank you so, so much for all your votes, all your tweets, all your support - I don't know how to full explain the way it makes me feel to see so many people fighting for our project. Also, if anyone has any ideas on how we can be more effective in getting the word out, please let us know!

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Film vs Digital Question

posted Feb 21, 2009     Comments

A few weeks ago Ayz and I were talking over IM - and at one point we ended up on the subject of film vs DOF adapters. Ayz has impressed a lot of highly professional people with his short film White | Red | Panic, which was shot on a tiny little HV20 (no kit was used), and he gave the short an amazing look with color work, and an eye for beautiful shots.

white-red-panic-still
At the time of our chat, I just had received the 16mm back from Burbank, and was surprised at how slow, regarding turn-around time, it all was. (Not to mention a bit expensive, but that wasn't really surprising). I think from the time I dropped off the 4 small reels for telecine, I had to wait around a week to get the 15 minutes of footage back. And as beautiful as the footage looks, as unique and nostalgic a feel as 16mm film gives - the workflow is just not something I am used to.

Ayz, although he has had a lot of success outside of film (and with next-to-nothing budgets), was saying he had decided that he needed to shoot a feature on film - that all his favorite films were shot on 35.

And I should make clear that I don't think people shouldn't use film... I don't think film has no benefit. I'm just thinking out loud and interested in people's perspective on this.


But I was wondering - how do I word this - okay, one of my favorite films is Days of Heaven, I think it's beautiful, I love the slowness and anti-climatic unfolding of the story, I love the sounds and the editing. And I wonder if I would love any of these things less if Terrence Malick happened to, in 1978, have access to a Viper - or even an SGPro, and had made a decision to shoot digitally?

I know that something about the image would feel different - maybe the weight or grain would be slightly off if compared side by side. But I'm just asking - would it really make or break the movie itself?

I guess, at this moment, I have almost no interest in shooting a feature or even a short on celluloid. I think it's very interesting having mixed formats to play with; 90% of For Thousands of Miles is filmed on HDV, but the 15 minutes of 16mm we have to use really stands out against the rest of footage, but so does the Mp4 in it's own low-quality / personal way.


I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on this - what's your favorite film? Was it shot on film? And what do you think would be the difference if it had been shot digitally?

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t.minus + babelgum

posted Feb 15, 2009     Comments

Last year we entered part 1 of 64 Days into the Babelgum Online Film Fest' - it was the first time Babelgum ran the competition and they had partnered with Spike Lee and Cannes. Amanda and I were pretty amazed at how many people took a moment to vote for our project - and because of all your efforts we made the 10 finalist for the contest. From that point, a panel of judges picked the top 3 that went on to meet Spike Lee and attend Cannes.

Episode 6_002
This year I've submitted a special 22 min edit of parts 1 & 2 under Babelgum's documentary category. Voting is open until April 2nd (but it looks like you're allowed to vote once a day).

If you support this project - if you believe in the story Amanda and I are trying to tell - if you'd like to see us stay independent - then this could be our best chance at moving forward and completing the film on schedule.

There's a total of $125,000 in awards for winners spread across four categories. If we placed top three, we would secure the funds needed for travel (follow-up interviews), additional HD storage, minimal but essential camera equipment, promotional expenses, etc.

Pedal (T Minus)
I also wanted to introduce a new branch of the site that we'll be using to power time-sensitive aspects of Pedal (like this online film festival), it's called t.minus, and the site is very simple: there's a current focus, a how to help, and a large countdown of the days left to do so. You'll also notice a special link in the left sidebar of this blog when there is an active event.

I know that voting takes time - and that doing so several times a week is redundant and not the-most-exciting way to spend your time online. But your support is greatly appreciated - the efforts that so many of you are willing to put forward for this film are really amazing to us. Thank you. Thank you.


Also, while you're in Babelgum be sure to check out and vote for the short film White | Red | Panic by our very talented friend Ayz Waraich.

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Planning for the Future - Cont'd

posted Feb 13, 2009     Comments

Back in January, I wrote a post about planning for the future by making the most of tools we have online: Twitter, Facebook, social maps, etc. It focused on the importance, for indie filmmakers, to build an audience outside of a theatrical distribution deal. Because if you're not a rare-enough-breed to make it into Sundance and then on-top of that strike a fair distro' deal... then you're stuck with your film and no one to watch it.

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A photo from our Pedal Push Party fundraiser back in May of '07, just days before we began filming in Washington - via Mike Hedge.

But there's another aspect to planning for the future that I've been thinking about: the actual event(s). Sure, you've made the most of social tools and built up a great base of people interested in your film. Now you have to plan the events these people are interested in attending - at this stage, you could blow it without any past experience.

I think it's important for Amanda and I to release the 64 Days episodes for a number of reasons - one being that they are great learning experiences. We learn what people react positivity to, what they react negatively to... or what they don't react at all to.

64 Days - Part 1 from mike ambs ☂ on Vimeo.

And it's not a clear 'do this, and not this' learning experience. There are aspects of the episodes that I personally love, and that people seem to not care for, or at least they aren't moved in the same way. But regardless, what I know at this point, after only releasing a total of 9 episodes, compared to what I knew before is a - not huge, but still - vastly beneficial gap.

So I have to take that into consideration when realizing that the day will soon come when the film is complete, and I will likely not have a distribution deal, and I will need to plan the actual screening events for people to attend. Will I be ready?

ROOFTOP FILMS
This idea is not set in stone, and I'm sure people's reaction to this post will help shape my decision, but I am currently thinking of planning a series of 64 Days events. A multi-state, re-occurring screening event of the 64 Days episodes - both older and new releases - at venues ranging from local-movie theaters to art-friendly warehouses.


We have a very ambitious goal of having the film at 90% complete in 11 months - it's ambitious because there's still three follow-up interviews to be scheduled (and plane tickets to be bought), we have pick-up shots to film with Larry in Northern California, we have more Stockpile footage to collect, there's 64 Days episodes to release, and I still have a day job, etc. But let's go with the 11-13 months from now the film will be 100% complete, that leaves us enough time to plan 4-6 events in cities like: Ann Arbor, San Francisco, LA, Austin, Seattle, Chicago, Fargo, Portland...

skitched-20090213-141257.png
It would require lots of organization, lots of volunteers, lots of aspects of event-planning that we aren't familiar with. We would need to be able to build onto each event - drawing on more interest, giving those people who are present at the events the info to help spread the word (if they enjoyed 64 Days), as well as request to see the actual film when it's released. Stickers. Buttons. Fliers. Organization. Fold-out chairs.


If you are making an independent film - I would highly recommend making (promotional / behind-the-scenes / tie-in) episodes to: a) help spread the word, b) set a tone for people to associate with your film, c) make your mistakes early on (when the stakes are less high). And if you have those episodes, it's time to put them to maximum use: a) organize events, b) meet the people face to face who enjoy your stories, and c) be involved with the community you're building on a personal level.


Be sure to let us know your thoughts on the idea of a re-occurring 64 Days event. Would you go if there was an event in your area? What would you expect from the event based on other events you've gone to? Would you be interested in getting involved?

11 months to go - time to get to work.

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Teaser 011

posted Feb 9, 2009     Comments

Teaser 011 from mike ambs ☂ on Vimeo.

This was one of the rare days that the wind was to Larry's back - which also meant that I didn't have to fight the wind when working the crane.

Most days it felt like trying to steady a massive sail with a camera on the end of it - but this day, the wind kept perfect pace with us, and I could move the camera almost anywhere without any real resistance.

This shot is a snippet from the middle of a longer 360Ëš that follows Larry. But if I posted the whole rotation, it would be about 2 min... and that's not much of a teaser.

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Looking for Inspiring Stories

posted Feb 4, 2009     Comments

The last few days I've been doing some research and trying to collect inspiring stories of people doing unusual things in their life. I've selected, so far, six people to write about - but I'm looking for more.

These people will end up being tied into a section of the film talking about what core ideas are behind people setting off to swim great rivers, or climb challenging mountains, or bike huge distances, etc.

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I thought I'd mention a few of the people I'm writing about now, and see if any of you had great suggestions that I could research for the film.

The first two people are college friends - Thelma Jones and Doris Roy. The two young woman left Buffalo, NY, on June 22nd, 1944, and headed west through Ohio, then south at the Mississippi where they eventually took a freighter to New Orleans. From the gulf they circled around the coast toward D.C.. They were both 21 years old.

Then there is Donald Forest - he climbed his first mountain at the age of 40, having never shown any interest in climbing before in his life. Several years later he reached the peaks of 27 of the highest mountains in the Rockies - all within the same year - setting a record.

skitched-20090203-224630.png
I'm also researching Gertrude Ederle - who had lost much of her hearing, at an early age, after a deadly case of the measles. She would become the first woman wade into the waters off Grey Nose Cape, France, and 14 hours later, reach the other side of the English Channel.

Then there is Martin Strel, born in the Republic of Slovenia, in 2007 he spent 66 days swimming the length of the Amazon. In the end he travelled over 3,270 miles... a distance wider than the Atlantic Ocean.

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And last there's Thomas Stevens - a miner from Colorado, who at the age of 29 bought his first bicycle (weighing 42 pounds) in San Francisco. On April 22nd, 1844, he left the Bay area and 103 days later reached Boston, becoming the first person to ever cross the US by bicycle. He decided then to keep traveling, becoming the first to bike around the entire Earth. He returned to San Francisco by steamer in Jan of 1887.


I'm open to more historical cases of great adventures - but at this point I'm specifically looking for more and more modern stories of travel. People who, at the later stages of their lives, decided to up and backpack across the world... Or run for years at a time. The suggestions should be physical accomplishments. I'm looking forward to everyone's ideas! Thanks in advance.

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16mm

posted Feb 2, 2009     Comments

Post-Processing of 16mm from Pedal :) from mike ambs ☂ on Vimeo.

A few days ago I spent the afternoon at Pro8mm in Burbank - I was able to watch them develop / process / telecine / whatever-you-call-it the 16mm footage from the film.

It's been ever a year since the footage was taken, because of that, I lost the blue channel on a few of the reels - but they managed to recreate most of the info that was lost. The footage turned out really beautiful - it felt so good to put in the film's fimeline and see it side by side with the HD footage. Here's a few quick still-frames:

John and Linda
Waterfall in Glacier

Jack
Sorry this post is so short, but last night Amanda and I managed to map out 70% of the film, in a much more scene-by-scene structure then we ever had before, so I have lots of writing to do today.

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Smoothcam Farm on a Shoe-String Budget

posted Jan 30, 2009     Comments

Several weeks ago, during a post-production vlog update, I mentioned using a 2nd computer as a poor-man's smoothcam farm, Leslie asked if I would write a post outlining the how-to for this. I meant to do this weeks ago, and plus today I listened to a voicemail from Mike Hedge asking me how I was doing this. So it's time.


Before I got in a crash, and the insurance replaced my MacBook Pro, I had an alternate idea for spreading the weight of smoothcam analysis, and I'll cover both options in this post.

What's the huge benefit of smoothcamming footage before-hand? A clip that is 12 minutes long can take up to 4 or 5 hours to analyze in FCP, so if you're editing away, and want to see which take of this tracking shot you have turned out the best, and you have 4 takes, you could be waiting up to 2 days to really see which smooths out exactly the way you want. So, doing this before hand really saves you time when you're in the middle of editing.


First let's go with the way I'm doing things now, I feel like I'm about to detail cooking directions: you'll need 1) Hazel, 2) a secondary computer you can leave on 24/7, and 3) Final Cut Pro.

This option is very simple, now I have all the footage for the film mirrored on two drives. The main drives I work off of are firewire 800 LaCie drives (500 Gbs each, I've had too many nightmare issues with 1 TBs), and they are synced with USB drives of the same size. Except the mirrored drives are no longer connected via any cables to each-other, the firewire drives connect to the machine I edit on, and the USB are connected to a second machine altogether (they sync over my network).

I've created a Final Cut Pro project called Smoothcam Farm. FCP has a limit around 10 hours per sequence, so you can't go dumping all 100+ hours of footage in one timeline and then just walk away after dropping smoothcam on the whole batch. I've had issues with crashing if the waiting-line for smoothcam gets over 400 clips, so be careful. All the footage that is being anylised on my 2nd machine is working off of the USB back-ups, so they never slow down my editing drives.

Note that if you need to restart FCP or it crashes, you'll have to kick-start the analysis again (I'm hoping FCP fixes this in the future), even though clips in your timeline have the smoothcam filter applied, and even though it still needs to be analyzed, it just won't seem to start unless you re-apply the filter. This doesn't hurt or double-up anything.

Anyways, now that you have FCP set-up and working away on the clips you need smoothcammed, you can use Hazel to automatically sync those smoothcam reference files to the original drives you work off of.

Hazel System Preferences
This is as easy as making a smart-playlist in iTunes. You pick a folder or drive, tell Hazel to search for smoothcam files (.mtdf) in the last few days, and then to copy those new files over to the main drives. That's it, Hazel will automatically connect over wifi to your main machine (when it detects it on the network) and begin backing things up.

If all is working as planned - which I have never had any issues - when I'm editing in the film's main timeline, and I drag and drop the smoothcam filter onto a 30 minute long dolly shot of Larry in Montana, it immediately references the smoothcam file that my other machine analyzed, and there's no waiting at all, I can make my adjustments and move on without the 4 hour wait!


Your other option: Now most people don't have two MacBook Pros sitting around waiting to be set-up like above - I know I couldn't afford it, I had to smack my head into a car at 30 mph to get a 2nd computer - so this is another option I was testing out before, and it worked perfectly.

For this you'll need an app called Papaya, from a company called Lighthead (they also make Caffeine, which is the best little app ever if you don't already have it). Papaya turns your computer into it's own server, you can grab any folder or file on your machine, drag it into Papaya, and ta-da, anyone from anywhere can have access to it without the need to first upload it somewhere else. Of course, you can password protect anything you share, and it can handle massive amounts of files.

Papaya
For example, both the USB drives that have the mirrored footage are shared over Papaya so I can check in at anytime from anywhere to get files I need, in total it's about 950 GBs of videos, and over 1,000 individual files. Here's a screen-grab from the machine I'm writing this post on, this is the browser view of my other laptop which is, as I'm writing, busy analyzing away:

Pedal Footage
So how could you use this app to spread out the burden of analyzing? Any friend with Final Cut Pro can be given specific access to specific files or folders that have raw footage you need smoothcammed. It doesn't matter if they live across town, or across the country; you'd drag the handful of video files you need analyzed, and set-up a password so only they can see what you're sharing. From there they can download the footage overnight, drop it into Final Cut, let it smoothcam and when it's done, they'll have a tiny smoothcam reference file for each video they dropped the filter onto. The reference file is dumped where ever the source file is at.

The other great thing about Papaya is it accepts uploads, so your friends can upload those tiny mtdf files right back to you, or they are small enough to easily just send in an email.

Papaya is the safest and most controlled way I've found of sharing your footage, which can be irreplaceable to you if stolen or misused, there's also a great activity-log that Papaya keeps so you can see a step by step of who accessed what and when and how many times.

Overall, I've smoothcammed about 40% of my footage using the first option, I have around 700 clips left that need a reference file and I've been thinking about opening up a handful of folders to select people to chip in and help with the analysis time.


Obviously, using Papaya has benefits beyond saving time with smoothcam, instant access to your footage is a huge life-saver when collaborating with other people. It would be almost impossible to upload 500+ GBs of film somewhere just so they could then in-turn download it. With your machine and personal hard-drives acting as servers; you could be editing in LA and have friends in SF and NY helping to fine-tune scenes all while keeping everything instantly accessible.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this - if anyone out there is using interesting workflows to make the best use of time feel free to leave a comment below.

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Teaser 010

posted Jan 29, 2009     Comments

Teaser 010 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

This is almost a cut & paste right from the first 14 minutes of the feature film - I just decided to pull the music out because I'd like to keep that a secret... or something like that.

This is Larry watching the sunset on the Mississippi... he sat there and watched the sky for a long time on that bench. Tonight he sent me an email, and near the end of it, he reminded me of a few things from that night, he wrote:

"I remember watching that movie that was like Quiinosquatsi but callled something else [Baraka], in the van. And than I went and waded in the Mississippi and drank beers listening to Jeff Buckley and wishing he didn't drown in that river."

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Pouches! Get your pouches!

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We've been getting our fair share of emails lately offering help with the project - and I can't even express how much it means to us. We've had offers of help building the tools we blogged about recently, offers of help with the new site design for the film, and just last week Elliot Cost said he'd like to offer merchandise!

So now, not only does the project have awesome buttons from the lovely Karen Abad that you can get from our Get Involved page, we also have handmade iPhone pouches! I think it's official, I need to cancel my contract with Verizon and get an iPhone, just so I can sport a snazzy Project Pedal iPhone pouch.

You can get them off Elliots' shop page, and not only would you be helping in spreading the word about the project, but all the profits get donated to the film!

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Post Production - Week 59

posted Jan 26, 2009     Comments

Post Production - Week 59 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

It's been another busy week - I just finished getting the Netflix Competition and the Rooftop Films DVDs all sealed and ready to go for tomorrow! And I was about to export a new teaser, then sit down and get a few more thoughts down on paper for the film.

ROOFTOP FILMS · 2008 · UNDERGROUND MOVIES OUTDOORS · FILM FESTIVAL · BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
I have to say the Netflix Competition is a long shot - more accurately; it's a really, really, really crazy long shot - but it feels good to enter and at least give it a shot. You never know unless you try. But I'm pretty excited and anxious about the Rooftop Film Fest. I don't know if it's possible, but I've wanted to attend for the last several years. And being accepted would be a great excuse to buy a ticket to NY!

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sxsw & aaff plans

posted Jan 24, 2009     Comments

Amanda and I submitted a special cut of parts one and two of 64 Days to both the 47th Ann Arbor Film fest, as well as the short film fest at SXSW. Not sure how likely it is that we'll be accepted to either festival, but I can't say I don't have my hopes up. Either one, or if we were really lucky: both, would help bring a lot of much-needed attention to the project.

SXSW-09
SXSW interactive and SXSW film take place between March 13th-21st. I've only been once before, just last year, and even though I had the interactive pass (Thanks to Lan and Bonny), I did manage to run all over Austin sneaking into special screenings of films like Mongol and Choke.

The AAFF also takes place in March, from the 24th-29th. I should say that I get extremely excited when thinking about 64 Days playing at the Michigan Theater - for as long as I can remember it's been my all-time favorite theater. I have a lot of great memories from that place, it's a historic and very beautiful building with large hanging chandlers and wide-mirrored stairways that curve around up to the upper balconies. They have a organ player perform before majors shows. Everything there just makes me very happy.

But there could be a problem if we were lucky enough to be accepted in both festivals - to be honest, there could be a problem regardless, work might take me to SXSW to begin with, and having our short play in Ann Arbor would give us only two days to make it from Austin to Michigan... with no money. I know this is a problem 90% of filmmakers run into when trying to grow their projects.

Plus this puts the pressure on us to get our redesigned main site up for the film. Running all over Ann Arbor and Austin for two weeks, handing out flyers, stickers, buttons, who knows what else, all of which promote our site doesn't do us much good if our site can't make good use of that traffic and interest.

I guess I'm just writing a post to say that we about to be very busy. If you're planning on being at either festival be sure to leave a comment and let us know!

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Keeping Yourself on Schedule

posted Jan 19, 2009     Comments

The six months it took me to import and tag the more than a 100 hours of footage - the main bulk of the film - was fairly easy for me to keep a pace with. It was "easy" because there was a solid goal: x number of tapes. It was "easy" because my progress was obvious: I would log the number of tapes imported by date, I would mark when that entire tape was properly tagged, I would keep track of which drive it was kept on. The process of importing was done in baby-steps, and as long as nothing stood in my way - ie, hard drives filling up - then I kept moving along.

But now, the footage is imported, it's scattered in chunks across a timeline that can be overwhelming to make sense of some nights. There is no x number of blank for me to track... there's 100 of hours of footage, and millions of ways to structure it.

There's pieces of the edit that I cut, and then re-cut a week later. There's pages of storyboards and scripts and hand-scribbled notes that get pinned to walls and scanned into Evernote. And they are built upon, over and over again.


So, after a few months, near the end of last year, of unsatisfactory progress - I decided to try and trick myself into a more reliable and steady "schedule". I maybe not know how many pages total I'll have to write before I'm done with the film, and I may not know how many storyboards and notes I'll have taped up on my wall before I'm finished... But if I have tiny goals set-up for myself, and I meet those goals, then it feels more trackable. Here's what I've been trying:


Set the bar low... very low: Each Wednesday my iCal reminds me that I need to write one page of script for the film. I realistically know that I need to write more than that each week to make any real progress, but I also know that a constant reminder to write five / seven / ten pages is intimidating.

Writing one page is easy, it usually starts off as notes, just thinking on paper... and then that sheet gets set aside and I write another scene down, and I grab a pen and scribble two more pages of notes. Writing is usually contagious - especially when I'm on my typewriter, that "ding" is very therapeutic - and by having a goal of one page, which is met very quickly, I feel good that I met my goal, and the next few pages that come out do so much smoother.

Share all of it... even the bad stuff: It does me little good to have a growing pile of storyboards and half-finished script pages pushed off to the side of my desk. Even if I think it's good enough to tape to the wall, it eventually becomes overlooked.

Every day that I type more of the script or detailed notes I scan those pages into Evernote, same with sketches for shot ideas we still need to get of Larry in his "present day routine".

Our Evernote account is shared by Amanda, Angela and myself - seconds after I add a new note or image, it's viewable by either of them. They can make notes, add their own revisions or tell me if something isn't working yet.

Distract yourself... but not for too long: This is the one that I have the hardest time sticking to - I have a tendency to work and work and work on Pedal. It's not a habit (good or bad) that was easy to form. This being our fifth year of working on the project, it took many years for me to be so... addicted, I guess is an okay word, to Pedal. I wake up in the morning and I start working on Pedal, I get home from work and I sit down and look over the film's timeline, I spend my weekends updating the blog or tweeking the site to work better.

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But what I have to remind myself of, is that I get much, much more done on the film - mainly writing and storyboarding - when I take a break: to watch an old film that a friend recommended (or just a favorite, I can easily watch Days of Heaven several times a month), go for a long walk with a notepad and pen, lay down on the floor and listen to music for a half an hour. Something... just step back, let your head rest and clear, when you get back to work you'll be much more focused.

Do any of you have tricks to make yourself stay on schedule and be more productive?

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Post Production - Week 57

posted Jan 15, 2009     Comments

Post Production - Week 57 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

It's been a few weeks since our last video update :( it's always hard to keep up over the new years. But it feels good to do one of these, we've been keeping ourselves very busy since being back in LA. Here's a quick update on what's been responsible for my lack of sleep the last week

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Planning for the Future

posted Jan 14, 2009     Comments

When Amanda first posted about us (mainly me) being concerned with our lack-luster number of RSS subscribers - ie: less than 5,000 - It came across as a "why do our numbers suck" post, and that's a fine question for us to be asking, our numbers do need improving just in a general sense.

But I'm less concerned with specifically the RSS stats, and more with our lack of tools in place to prepare ourselves for the future.

Even if our blog has subscribers in the thousands, we have nothing in place right now to make the best use of that readership. And that, out of everything, is what I stress about the most. Mainly because it's a problem I don't have the technical skills to solve on my own, but also because for every week that goes by, on editing and writing, it's another week we have make-up for in the future.

I have ideas on what tools I think we need, and I've been searching, within my little social circle, for someone qualified to help build them. And I'm interested in building tools that would help every filmmaker, and even beyond that, tools that could easily be used for projects of any kind.

I'm not a fan of forums, I've never been able to get into them or find them efficient - even in the 90s, when that's all there was outside of IRC. And there are a handful of tools, like Ning, that allow you to structure your own social network, but I'm snot ure a network, or a forum, is exactly what an indie film "movement" needs.

Before I talk about the two tools I've been thinking about the most, I wanted to stress that my main motivation behind worrying about this at all: is planning for the worst (or to be realistic, planning for the most likely). It's highly unlikely that For Thousands of Miles will blow people away at Sundance. Hell, it's unlikely it will even get into Sundance. It's even more unlikely that the film will be picked up by any distribution house. It's even more unlikely beyond that, that even if we got an offer for distribution we would take it. Amanda and I have come way too far with this film to sell it away for a next-to-nothing first-time-filmmakers compensation, loose all our control of the film, have them make a half-assed attempt at a theatrical run, and be stuck in a shitty DVD-release contract.

So, I want to plan on distributing this film ourselves. I don't want to spend a great deal of energy and time cutting For Thousands of Miles, and then, when it's complete, have it sit on a shelf and collect dust because we didn't have a plan B in place. It is time for Amanda and I to start putting into motion the audience now that will want to see the film later. So we can hit the ground running when it's ready to be seen.

Okay, two quick tools: A basic map-based request tool. Arin and Susan of Four Eyed Monsters used a Google Maps mash-up, plus a piece of code a friend wrote to allow those interested to put their name and zip down. Once that number reached a certain point, it was enough for Arin and Susan to cold-call theaters, which got them several screenings of their film all over the country.

I'm working on a map that has "phases" to it, all states begin at phase 1, all states have a low, realistic goal of needed request. Once a state reaches that first goal, let's say California needs 100 people to complete the first phase, it moves onto phase 2 and Amanda and I are required to dump more resources there with the people interested in the film. Using the first 100 request as a stepping-stone, asking those people to see if their friends would like to request the film, and so on. Mailing out flyers and buttons to those people. Branching out in baby-steps. I have the map designed, and the state-shaped-links are all entered into a basic template... but I'm having issues building a smart request tool around it.

Which brings me to the second tool I've been thinking about. Amanda and I had lunch the other afternoon with the lovely Jessica Stover, from Artemis Eternal, near the end of our lunch, we started talking about Twitter. Jessica said that Twitter seems to be nearing the point where a filmmaker could almost drive their entire movement with Twitter alone. Which got me thinking about Facebook Connect, which then got me thinking about Twitter Connect (which doesn't exist... yet).

A tool that I would give anything for; would be the ability to have people interested in the film, request it not with a basic "fill in your general info here" box, but to link their request to their twitter account. Allowing you to build a movement not enclosed on a forum, but open on Twitter's timeline. It's such a simple, powerful, immediate tool that tying it into a film's network of fans would be very interesting.

Giving you options of having people's activity on your map, or community, be broadcast automatically to their stream (if they want it to).

With the way things generally work now, a person would fill in their info for the map, request the film, be taken to a thank you page that ask them to also twitter about it. I'm sure someone out there is working on such a tool for general use, but in any case, I am looking for people savvy enough to code it.

Online tools are always presenting themselves, and people are always looking for new ways to take those tools and expand on them. Indie filmmakers stand to gain so much by re-packaging those tools to best fit their project. Do you have a project of your own? How are you planning for the future?

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A Much Needed Stockpile Update

posted Jan 11, 2009     Comments

I have a dozen things to do today, and maybe that's why I'm taking a breather to write this quick post... so I don't pull my hair out. It's been a few weeks since we've stopped to talk about Stockpile, and where we are at with it currently.

When we first launched Stockpile back in September, we did so using two different sites: Vimeo and Ning. If you've been to Stockpile's overview page, you've seen that Ning has been closed down, at least for the moment.

The main reason for shutting down the Ning group was we were having issues getting access to the original files uploaded to Ning... so for us, it was going to be a problem when we had a beautiful clip someone shared with us of their bicycle trip, and we only had access to the flash version. Yes, I could grab the .flv file if I wanted, but I wasn't about to stick a re-compressed flash file in a feature film's timeline.

As for Vimeo's Stockpile group, that's been going very well. Although we haven't been able to commit as much time to it yet as we would ideally like to, I've been doing a lot of writing, story-boarding and editing lately. But I feel good when I make the time to watch a few new videos, many of them are inspiring and remind of different aspects of my own trip. They get me excited about how to use those clips to tie together different moments in the film.

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The group has grown to 33 videos, 95% of which are specifically personal bicycling videos. We have 37 members, and are excited about seeing more from them. And we currently have 5 discussions happening in the forums. Over the next year of editing the film, we have goals to grow Stockpile to hundred of members and videos. We're still trying to find the best workflow for watching and taking notes on clips people upload for us.


If you haven't joined Stockpile yet, drop by our Vimeo group and add yourself! And if you know anyone who knows anyone who's taken their own long-distance bicycle trip, we'd love to see their footage.

Okay, there was my 15 minute break - back to working on the things I mentioned in my last post.

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That Point When You Realize How Unprepared You Are

posted Jan 10, 2009     Comments

Our friend, Zadi, from Epic FU, sent us a link to the Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition, the description sounds perfect for us. First off, if you are selected for the film grant, you retain *all* rights to your film! Secondly, they not only award your film money, they provide all the steps necessary beyond post to see that it gets out into the world.

Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition
A downside is they only accept 2,000 submissions, and that is going to fill up insanely fast.

So Amanda and I, after we both got out of work yesterday, spent as long as we could working on the submission requirements. Which has been a real wake up call for us. The only synopsis for the film we have is around 300 words, Netflix requires that plus a longer synopsis preferred to be around 1,000 words.

They also require a script, or in our case a detailed treatment of the film... which I've never written. A budget breakdown of the expenses left in post-production to distribution. Bios for the cast and crew. And a 1,000 word cover letter introducing myself and the project. None of these things are something we have prepared sitting filed away for ready-use. Which is resulting is long nights writing treatments and budget-drafts that we have no real experience with in a professional setting, which, I'm sure, Netflix is expecting.

But nothing like a hard deadline to get you moving on to-do's you've been putting off for months. Our Without a Box information has been lacking under 'For Thousands of Miles', so all this work will pay off and make it easier to submit to upcoming festivals.

We have very ambitious goals for 2009 - and I have a feeling this stress is only the tip of the iceberg for us.

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Teaser 009

posted Jan 9, 2009     Comments

Teaser 009 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

There's something about this clip that is heavily nostalgic for me. I can remember so clearly nights from my past bicycle trips, laying in my sleeping bag on the grass... hearing the bugs... watching the sun sink behind the horizon as I tried to finish writing in my journal about that day when I'm watching this.

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Time to Get Back to Work

posted Jan 7, 2009     Comments

I'm writing this post on my flight home from Michigan to LA - we're about an hour outside of California right now and these Spirit seats are killing my shoulders. I think I'll be taking a hot bath for sure when I get home - I'm gonna barely be able to move.

Thanks to everyone for baring with us over the holidays on the site - I know it's been far too quite the last two weeks but I'm very, very anxious to get back to work. Which includes more post and video-updates. I'm behind on a teaser, so perhaps I'll have to pick out two.

Twitter / Mike Ambs: Pretty happy with the firs ...
For those of you who follow the project (and also my personal updates) on twitter, you might have seen an update before Christmas about the first 13 minutes of the film. Amanda and I haven't got a chance to discuss it yet, she watched it alone while at her family's. I'm sure we'll talk about it tonight on the way back to North Hollywood from LAX (she's picking me up).

There's been a lot on my mind the last few weeks and I'm going to posting questions here on the blog about what all of you think out there on several different subjects (including: a request the film tool... bettering Stockpile and finding creative ways to reach out to bicyclists with trip footage... a FToM website redesign... ways of reaching out to press... and a project roadmap...).

Amanda's post about readership and subscribers and my concerns with it got a lot of people talking - and it was great to hear the feedback, as well as helpful. So, I think we'll try to keep that going - we're always weighting the pro's and con's of focusing our energy here or there on aspects of the projects and we could benefit a lot from outside opinions.

Okay, well I'm down to 20 minutes of battery on my laptop, so I'm gonna turn the overhead light off and catch up on some podcast. As always we'd love to hear any questions you have about the project or just filmmaking in general. Hope everyone had a wonderful New Years.

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here's to the new year

posted Dec 25, 2008     Comments

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.

FToM-Request
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!

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post production week 55

posted Dec 24, 2008     Comments


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 :)

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audience importance

posted Dec 21, 2008     Comments

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.

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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!!!

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what I used to call "voodoo"

posted Dec 20, 2008     Comments

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.

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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.

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Post Production - Week 53

posted Dec 18, 2008     Comments

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.

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i've got questions

posted Dec 17, 2008     Comments

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 :)

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teaser 008 - and 2,000 views later

posted Dec 13, 2008     Comments

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).

Settings for Teaser 007 on Vimeo
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.

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.

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post production - week 52

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Post Production - Week 52 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

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Post Production Tools I Use

posted Dec 9, 2008     Comments

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.

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52

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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.

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teaser 007

posted Dec 1, 2008     Comments

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 :)

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we owe everything to you

posted Nov 29, 2008     Comments

The last few days have been very crazy and exciting and exhausting. The responses from everyone on our two recent parts to 64 Days have been so encouraging and amazing. Amanda and I were both very nervous about how long it had been since part 3 - almost 7 months - and the expectations that might come with that kind of delay. So... seeing as how no one has come right out and said, "I waited all this time for this?", has really been a huge relief.

We've had a handful of really flattering blog post written by people that we wanted to point out here - and let people know that we've just passed our first 500 HD embeds out of 10,000! What exactly does that mean? The day we released 64 Days - Part 4, we purchased 10k plays in full, beautiful high definition *outside* of Vimeo's site. Usually, the videos can only be viewed in full quality when you're on Vimeo, but with these 10k HD embed plays, anyone who takes a moment to embed our episodes in a blog post, is doing so in full HD. So it looks exactly like it's supposed to *anywhere* on the web.

Settings for Episode One: From the beginning on Vimeo
Help us burn through another 500 plays - it's really easy. In the colored box below, is the embed code for Part 4, just grab it all, paste it in your own new blog post and you're done. Helping us get our project in front of new people is one of the most helpful things you can do. We really, really, really appreciate it.


The first post I wanted to mention is from Sev: "Anyone interested in motion picture, cinematography or a good story should which. Frankly, I think it is some of the best story telling I have seen."

And the second, which was incredibly flattering, is from Nathan: "It's more captivating then I could possibly make it sound in my own words. [...] There where times I felt like the person behind the camera knew exactly what I had been through....what I'm going through...and what I will go through."

You can find a ton more of what people have been saying on our tumblr 'We Heart You Too'. Your comments... your blog post... even your twitters mean the world to us. You are the lifeblood of this project - your support keeps us going when everything seems overwhelming and endless. Thank you.

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64 Days - Part 4

posted Nov 24, 2008     Comments

It's taken Amanda and I a long, long time to put out this episode - and in the last several months since we released 8, the script for 9 has gone through many changes. The last two weeks that we've been working on this has been exciting, I didn't realize how much I miss posting new episodes.

I'm watching the progress bar on Vimeo slowly climb past 8% and it's a little before 1 in the morning as I'm writing this. It's gonna be a long night - but it's worth it.

So - a brief introduction to this episode. This is the 9th episode overall that we've put out, and it's the 4th chapter in the 64 Days series. It introduces in greater detail the three crew members: Olan, Olivier, and Jef. Who all flew out from Belgium to work on Pedal without any pay... at least yet, I hope I'll be able to change that when the film is finished *fingers crossed*

Our time on the road with them taught us both so much. It was an experience I will never forget - and never really know how to properly put into words. Well, enough talk. I hope you enjoy it. Amanda and I worked very hard on it.

64 Days - Part 4 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

If you do enjoy it, as always we'd love to hear your comments and questions - but also, if you have a twitter account, we'd really be flattered if you send out a quick twitter about it. Which you can do all with one click here.

We're also excited about being able to embed this episode on your own blog in beautiful HD - we purchased 10,000 HD embeds from Vimeo so you can see it in full resolution *anywhere* on the web - so please help us put those 10,000 embeds to good use!

And as I mentioned in my last post - here's a link to the PDF of episode 9's script. This was scanned in about two weeks ago, so you'll notices some slight differences in what's typed out and what ended up in the timeline. We tend to make small changes and rearrange the edit up until the last minute.

Thanks for being so patient with us - and thanks for all the support.

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64 Days - Part 3 - Extended Cut

posted Nov 23, 2008     Comments

I guess I should start this post off by answering two questions: 1) "Why did we re-release Episode 8?" And 2) "Do I really have to re-watch this?"

First; Episode 8 was extremely exhausting for Amanda and I to write, record and edit. And by the time we were 2/3rds of the way finished cutting it together, we stepped back and said, "ehh, this is getting long, I think it's good enough the way it is now". And we chopped off the whole ending we had written. What bugged us about doing that after the fact, was that the ending is what tied the whole episode back into the rest of the 64 Days series.

And second; If you're pressed for time, then my honest answer would be, "No.", you don't have to watch the *whole* thing. But if you wanted to see the major change, then you could skip to the last 3 minutes. As for the rest, there are only minor changes... many things taken out, several small things added in.

64 Days - Part 3 - Extended Edit from mike ambs on Vimeo.

I believe Amanda and I said this before, when we first posted Episode 8, that we would never be 100% happy with this episode. That there was just too many things that could never be squeezed in - but I think we both try to remind ourselves that 8 was one of our most successful episodes. Not in number of views, but definitely in comments and reaction. People really opened up after watching it, and no matter how many little things we know we had to leave out, I think we still managed to make something people can relate to.

Okay, enough stalling. I hope you like the extended cut of this episode. As always we'd love to hear your comments and questions - but also, if you have a twitter account, we'd really be flattered if you send out a quick twitter about it. Which you can do all with one click here. Thanks!

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update on episode nine's progress

posted Nov 22, 2008     Comments

I spent all day yesterday and most of this morning editing episode 9. As I'm writing this, it's about 99% done, there's one shot I still need to take after I shower, but the rest is pretty locked down. Amanda will be coming over later today to watch and re-watch it, taking notes, tightening things up. Short of some disaster, I should be hitting export around 10 o'clock.

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If you're not subscribed already, you can subscribe to our RSS feed here, and be notified immediately when we post the new episode. There's a lot of work still left to do this weekend: I need to write up a newsletter, prepare the PDF of episode nine's script (I decided it would be fun to include that, show people how we work), and it's always tough uploading such a large HD file to several sites... this time we'll be doing it twice (with a newly edited 8, along with 9).

This was a difficult episode to write - it introduces the crew members - Olivier, Olan, and Jef - and we tried to really share what their personalities were like, and how being on the road with them shaped the film and Amanda and I. I'm sure we fell short of doing them justice, but I hope we made it clear that they are three amazing, talented, complex, and engaging individuals.

Okay. I have a lot of work to do. Thanks for all the support, everyone.

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post production week 49

posted Nov 17, 2008     Comments

mike and i spent all day on sunday, editing episode 9 (64 days part 4) and crossing other things off of our to-do list.

it was nice to connect and have a full day to work on things and talk about our creative visions. we got some fresh (smoke-filled) air, took charlie for a walk and got some frozen yogurt - yum :)

this part (editing the episodes) is always my favorite ;) unfortunately writing them takes much longer :P thanks for sticking it out with us, we are almost there. charlie and breaker thank you too!


VloMo08 - Post Production - Week 49 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

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teaser 006

posted Nov 16, 2008     Comments

Teaser 006 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

This was one of the rare days that the wind didn't blow directly into Larry's face... he could really fly when he wasn't the only object in the way of the wind ripping across miles of field...

I love this part of the country - the big sky, the endless green. It's all so flat and boring and unchanging... but something about it really eats away at you after a trip.

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A2 filmfest

posted Nov 10, 2008     Comments

last week i finally stuck in the mail, our submission for the 47th Ann Arbor Film Festival. we decided to submit 64 days part 1&2 (episodes 6&7) since we don't have a film ready yet. it took a lot of work to get this done. the day it was open for early submissions, i printed off, and filled out, all of the necessary paper work and had everything ready to mail out, the only thing that we still needed was a DVD to slide into the envelop. then we ended up having one problem after another with the disc, first missing clips, then missing audio, and so much more. when mike was hit by a car while riding his scooter, his laptop was in his backpack on his back and was damaged so that it no longer burns DVDs. so he had to create the file and then get it on my computer to burn it off and for some reason that took weeks. anyway one problem after the next, but we finally got it finished and turned it in, only a few days before the deadline. :)

this festival doesn't really promise to shower us with prizes or anything like that, but it means a lot to mike and i. it takes place in Ann Arbor, MI where both of us are from and it is held at our very favorite theater there (the Michigan Theater). in fact, after we moved to CA we would make a date to see a movie there every time we went to MI for a visit. so it will be really cool to have a chance to see our work there, on the big screen, with our families and friends.

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Teaser 005

posted Nov 1, 2008     Comments

Teaser 005 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

This day was a really long, slow climb for Larry - the hills just kept winding their way through the evergreens and after every turn, was another upward slope.

We pulled off the road after a while and walked around on a hill-side. Where we took this shot, and tons of other ones. We used all of our equipment on that hill: our Fx1 (with the 35kit), the Z1u, and Olivier's 16mm.

It was a beautiful spot - and I hope to go back and sit there one day... just take in the view.

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64 Days + My B-Day + S.W.A.G.

posted Oct 30, 2008     Comments

I've been slacking on post this last week, I get caught up in editing and forget to set 20 minutes aside to write a quick update on what we've been up to. Mostly I've just been hunched over my laptop in the dark, busy cutting and re-cutting the episode(s), both the newest part of 64 Days, as well as touching up the ending of our last one.

Things are going along great - but Amanda and I decided to not release them *before* I leave for Michigan for my birthday. I fly out on the 5th (I'm hoping, being the day after elections, that it will be a "hopeful" flight...) but anyway, I *could* get them done in time I'm sure, but that was a mistake we made with 8. We rushed the episode, and we had a lot of regrets about it.

So, as close as I am to wrapping things up, I think it will best to sit on them for a few days until I get back, take another look at the timeline, and then get to the fun part: posting and hearing all the feedback from all of you. I've been feeling very anxious lately, I miss that feeling of releasing a new episode. It's been too long.

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Amanda recently mailed Leslie a handful of Pedal buttons, and Leslie was great enough to take a pic and post it on flickr. I thought it had been a while since we reminded people that you can get free buttons off our Get Involved page. We have tons left, we bought a few zip-lock bags worth from the wonderful Karen Abad, and have just been giving them out here and there. But if you're not someone we run into at LA get-togethers, we'd be happy to mail some out. Just look under the "swag" section of Get Involved, it tells you how to get one (or a bunch, if you'd like).

Okay, I have to work early tomorrow, so I'm going to crash. But this weekend is going to be spent editing, and also shooting a few pieces that we still need... all I'll say is that it involves public-transportation and a scene from one of my favorite films.

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post production - week 45

posted Oct 24, 2008     Comments

post production - week 45 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

Amanda and I had another Thursday meeting - we worked on Episode 9, and recorded some VO for the end of 8. Re-wrote a large block of the 9 script to include things I'd left out. Picked out some music. And decided on the next teaser. Moving along.

We can't wait to release the next episode. I didn't realize how much I miss that feeling of excitement from the first few waves of reactions.

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From One Novice to Another

posted Oct 23, 2008     Comments

Twitter _ Mike Ambs_ Feel like I_m making a lot ...
I'm waiting for some footage I just shot to import into Final Cut for Episode Nine - I thought in the meantime I would respond to a question from Dustrotter. In the comments of our last blog post, Teaser 004, he said:
Hey Mike, would you mind filling us in on your background specifically your education, and professional experience working in "the biz" and how you came to know so much about film? I'm sure it would help guide some of us novices out here. ;-)
Now this background-post might turn out to be very short, because I a) have very little (to almost zero) experience in what anyone would consider the "biz". And b) I would argue I know embarrassingly little about film... or film-making for that matter.

As for "a)", I never took a film class in college, my old friend (now turned sworn enemy), Chuck, took a class at Washtenaw Community College and I was allowed to sit in the back two separate times just because I helped out with the student videos. When I moved out here I had very little interest in interning for a low-budget production house, or being an errand boy on a blockbuster set. Although, I have met some people here who were part of the crew for The Departed. Which I am quite jealous of.

So... as for the "biz", I'd be laughed off the set I'm sure for having no clue as to what role I'd play on a film requiring more than 5 people to shoot. Two years ago, I was lucky enough to edit full-time for NBC's "dot com" department. Mostly cutting behind the scenes interviews, but I occasionally got to leave the dark-windowless editing "office" and help film. Which was always a blast. I'm quite happy behind the camera.

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Here I am on the set of Deal or No Deal... I'm not sure what I'm doing with my hand, but I don't think I was digging in my nose :P

So that's the extent of my experience with the more established side of... entertainment'ish stuff.


As for "b)", I don't really have any advice or tips of tech-stuff. I always liked how Olivier put it while we were filming last summer, "what ever *looks* good". I don't know what lenses give what looks (for the most part), I don't know what lights or filters are helpful... I don't shoot in 24p, I don't think it really matters. I just am happy whenever I shoot something that "looks" good, I'm usually quite satisfied with "decent" also.

If I had any advice what-so-ever, I would just say that releasing episodes during this whole process has helped in ways I can't even fully lay-out. The episodes help us see what works on paper and not on video, helps see what story techniques get good reactions from people. Amanda and I have been able to test many of our ideas on a small more personal scale, before the film is even finished... which will hopefully help us avoid many mistakes we've already made. Mistakes that would quickly spoil our entire film.

So if you have a project, a short film, a series you're putting together. Do not keep it together, put it all out there for people to see and give feedback on. The things I've learned in direct reaction to this site has been amazing.

I feel this post wasn't as helpful as Dustrotter probably hoped it might be, I guess I'm still very new at this.

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teaser 004

posted Oct 19, 2008     Comments

Teaser 004 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

I know this teaser has no bikes, and no Larry. But I wanted to use a shot that was more from Larry's POV. This was taken in Glacier Park, Montana by Olivier - Larry was coming down from Logan's pass and we & the crew pulled off the road just before Lake McDonald to lay in the sun.

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Logan's pass was actually closed when we were here, if I remember right, snow had washed out the road and it would be another month before it was open to the public. But Larry, being the machine that he is, knowingly rode out of his way and up the west-half of the mountain range, just to turn back around at the top, and then back-track through Glacier. Took him the whole day. I miss this spot, I hope I get to go back soon.

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Last Night's Meeting

posted Oct 18, 2008     Comments

So, as Amanda mentioned in her last post, we had a meeting last night, like we usually try to do every Thursday, our main focus was to really get down on paper the film's outline.

So after months of me writing random thoughts and scribbling notes on the inside pages of books, or taco-bell napkins, we finally came up with an approach to organize these thoughts to match the film's arch.

I took our five main points, which stem from the idea that there are two overlaying "beginning and endings" for the story, there's the start and finish of the bike trip itself, and the start and finish of the after effects of that trip... and how long they take to play out.

So, since I'm a dork, I color coded the points, and hung them on my wall. Which is where I usually pin my notes and ideas, but now each note or rough-script will be pinned under the appropriate story point.

It's a much clearer way for me to see what areas of the film's points need more work, and which are getting too much attention.

But on-top of getting very far with our layout, we came up with a lot of specific points we'd like to make, we ended up with a lot of sticky notes and a handful of typed pages. The macro above is actually the work-in-progress narration of Larry's last day, and the moment he reached the Atlantic ocean. It's very, very rough right now, but I'm pretty happy with the idea.


Okay, that's all for tonight, I have a lot on my mind. Not all of it good, and I need to get some sleep.

Very quickly though, I wanted to mention two new things on the site. If you go to the main page, you'll notice something new when clicking on the 64 Days box. I'm pretty excited about that. But I'm also very excited about something a few of you may have already noticed to the left, in the sidebar there's a new link which reads: first time here? This page is meant to point out the essentials for new people interested in the project. As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Goodnight.

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slow progress

posted Oct 16, 2008     Comments

hello there, friends :p so... i just finished my homework.. very last minute. for those of you who don't know, i'm currently taking a child growth and development class, it's the first time i've been back to school in over 10 years. yikes! i've been a childcare provider for about 16 years and anyway.. this seems like the next logical step, moving on to teach preschool or kindergarten. i was never really a good student so i'm very proud of the fact that i have an A+ so far in this class. mike, on the other hand, probably not so impressed. :P i'm sure he'd rather i be spending my nights blogging here or commenting there, or replying to emails, tagging clips and finding music. i swear it feels like these days he only calls me to complain about what it is i'm not doing :P

anyway... even though my time is spread thin (between working until about 7pm M-F and schoolwork and taking care of my dog and trying to maintain my relationships with friends... oh and visiting the doctor several times a month due the herniated disk in my back), i feel like i'm certainly not putting in my share of hours on this film, but i still really enjoy it. on those thursday nights, during that time i've reserved for pedal and put all other things aside, i really have fun brain storming and collaborating.. watching clips and seeing this story unfold. and meeting new people along the way. i wish i had the energy to reach out to everyone who reaches out to us. i wish i had the time to do all mike askes of me and more. some days i feel like a total loser.

last week mike and i finished writing episode 9 and tomorrow we plan on picking out a new teaser, recording my audio for the last act of episode 8 and fixing our edit on that. i know i'm always way to optimistic about how much we'll actually get done, but i'm also hoping to have a finished outline for the film by the end of the night. anyway.. i apologize if it seems like i'm complaining, i'm really not. i feel totally fortunate to be where i am and doing what i'm doing... just wish i had more time in the day is all.. or maybe more days in the week :)

thanks for watching and i hope we get a new episode out to you by the end of the month. i'm looking forward to having a fun productive night tomorrow. happy humpday everyone. i'm beat and off to bed. night.

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Oh, I Forgot to Mention...

posted Oct 12, 2008     Comments

Get Involved Screencast from mike ambs on Vimeo.

This is a quick screencast that covers the newly designed Get Involved page that I forgot to mention (outside of Twitter).

Twitter / Mike Ambs: Spent last night designing ...
We tried to put everything into one place so it was as easy as possible to share. We're always looking for ways to make it easier and more user-friendly, if you have ideas we'd love to hear them.

Thanks for watching this boring screencast.

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better very, very late than never

posted Oct 10, 2008     Comments

Yesterday was the first time Amanda and I have been able to really work together in a while, she's been going through some things and I really didn't expect, last night, for us to get as far as we did with the script for Episode Nine. But, around 2 o'clock this morning we finished writing the next episode, nine has gone through a ton of changes since we first outlined it, but we're both really happy with what we have on paper.

2930572776_65b21abfb7
I'm very anxious to get to editing it, and also to film the several pieces we still need to piece it all together. On a strange but related note, if anyone out there happens knows of a really great underwater (preferably HD) clip of blue or sperm whales, please send me a link of where to watch it.


Last night I also sat Amanda down to play the first 6+ minutes of the For Thousands of Miles timeline, with the exception of one 20 second shot, Amanda seemed to really like it. We're trying to build on that, but before we get too far, we know we need to really lock down the film's outline.

Twitter / Mike Ambs: I'm scribbling voice-over ...
I was walking home from the Redline subway station the other night, and I wrote a bunch of ideas I had about narration for this episode, but when I got home I thought it would work better for the film, and I had Amanda read those too. Which she got really excited about - I guess I'm mentioning it because I was very relieved... sometimes I worry that everything I need to say in the film... I've already said in the early episodes.

A part of me wants to just share the notes now, but I guess it's way too early for that.

Anyways, thanks for bearing with us between episodes, I know it's been ridiculously slow... but I hope people like nine, we've worked hard on it.

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teaser 03

posted Oct 5, 2008     Comments


Teaser 003 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

This is Larry. This is somewhere between point A and point B. Where ever it is... I miss it. I miss kneeling on-top of the van, working the crane, watching Larry push through the wind. Knowing that every mile meant something to him... something people wouldn't see passing by in their cars. Something subtle.

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Finishing Grants

posted Oct 4, 2008     Comments

Since coming back from the road last summer, we've been making (and putting off) plans to go film follow-up interviews with several people from the road. More importantly, much of the film is structured in a "looking back" kind of way, and we have still yet to fly out to visit Larry for a week, and film all the every-day-life shots we need with him. I'm still trying desperately to pay my rent *and* put aside money for these things... and so far, in the last year, it's been not so great savings-wise.

So, we need to start looking into documentary or narrative film finishing grants... and, since none of us have taken any film classes where they teach you that kind of thing, we have zero idea how to go about this. I've done some searching online and managed to find a handful that don't really apply to us, or that have already closed their deadlines. Yesterday my friend, Eric, said I would just write a letter and then mail it to grant-giver-peoples that I could find directories of at the library.

Which sounds easy enough. Yet, I am confused easily... so I thought we'd turn to the blog and our readers to ask for advice. Does anyone out there have any experience with applying for grants? Does anyone have any good links we could look into?

It's taken us five years to get to this point - and I feel like in the last 2 years we've made leaps and bounds considering it's our first film. Considering before this, I'd never edited anything over 5 minutes. I think we're doing okay, but a film grant would help tremendously. Tremendously.

So it's time Amanda and I start looking into this - we'll post whatever we find on our end, and look forward to hearing any advice anyone has. Thanks!

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Post Production - Week 42

posted Oct 1, 2008     Comments


Post Production - Week 42 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

Coming home to find things like this is very touching, it keeps me going, it keeps me focused and ambitious. So thank you, Lori, for writing this.
I know my own journey will continue. I've not reached the Atlantic coast yet. I undoubtedly have thousands of miles to go. Every biweekly trip I make to Texas or California to visit my children or my wife brings immense fatigue to my body but resolve to my awakened spirit. With each milepost sign I pass, I find reasons to be thankful for this journey whether the desert basins are ablaze with sunshine or enshrouded with pregnant monsoon clouds.

I embrace the long hot black road now. God only knows what my final destination will be. There is no guarantee for success in my life. But like Mike, I "keep going, keep trying after failing, time, and time, and time again." Entire post here...

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So Far, So Good

posted Sep 26, 2008     Comments

I was very happy to wake up this morning to find new (and some of our first) videos in the Stockpile group on Vimeo, and I wanted to take a moment to thank the people who were the first to join and upload to the group.

The first member to join, outside of Angela, Amanda and myself, was Stephen Niebauer. And the first video added to Stockpile was called, 'A loney valley in Nevada' by Merten, he took the footage during a NY to SF solo-ride he took just this last summer. I embeded a video below from the end of Merten's coast to coast ride. It's all in German, but it's exactly the kind of footage we were excited about getting.

The end of my tour from New York to San Francisco from Merten on Vimeo.

I really hope we can pull this off and reach out enough to collect a massive amount of other traveler's media, it would greatly add to the film to actually *show* the way we are all connected by the places we've been at different times.

When I think of the film's core message about the importance of doing something you don't believe you're capable of doing, and the way that I might be able to cut together thousands of videos from all kinds of different people and places to support that idea, it's just very encouraging. And something I can't wait to see come together.

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Stockpile is here :)

posted Sep 25, 2008     Comments

Hello there.

Things have been going great working with Mike and Amanda on all things promoting and spreading the word about "For Thousands of Miles".

I've been in love with this idea ever since they told me about it years ago. It's always had a special place in my heart, and I would do anything to support the message they are trying to convey.

In the past week we've a launched a few communities involving "For Thousands Miles" and Project Pedal as a whole. We've started a spiffy new Facebook group that you can join and support here.

We have also launched a Ning community and Vimeo group called Stockpile. It's actually a really cool community for travelers. We are basically asking anyone who has great stories, pictures or film of their travels to contribute to the film. Doesn't matter how recent the trip was, it could have been 4 months ago or 40 years ago. Anything would be fantastic! By sharing your adventures with us, you will be giving us permission to use it in the final cut of the film.



As you all know we love to share our pictures and video with you. So we would like you to share with us :) We want to hear you voice, this is YOUR chance to be creatively involved with the film.

And thanks everyone for always supporting this project, means the world to us :)

Oh, and check out this short clip of one of our meetings at our favorite cafe.

Pedal Meeting :) from Angela Sauceda on Vimeo.

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I Miss Everything About This Shot

posted Sep 23, 2008     Comments


Teaser 002 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

I believe Olivier shot this with the SGPro 35 Kit and the crew's FX1... we had Amanda's 300 zoom lens mounted (which was a lot of fun to film with).

We waited at the highest switch-back in Cascades National Park for Larry to pass and ride down into the valley. We took a lot of footage from this ledge, it was a very beautiful spot to spend an hour.

Amanda was hoping our 2nd teaser would be a clip from an interview we just transcribed, but I had this as a backup, and she hadn't gotten a chance to come over and tell me which section she wanted.

On a side note, the title for this post: I miss everything about this shot - is just referring to all the little things I remember about standing on that cliff, the temperature, the smell that comes off snow-capped mountains and the mist from the waterfalls. I miss watching Larry pass by... I miss the crew. Just everything.

I know this post is short... perhaps a little *too* short. But I'm hoping to get some writing done tonight.

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what is at stake

posted Sep 20, 2008     Comments

I'm in one of those moods tonight. Perhaps it has a little to do with my smacking my head into a car, pulling an unexpected u-turn, at 30 miles an hour - I think the whole event (that happened last tue) has me thinking about... just stuff.

Twitter / Mike Ambs: Just destroyed my scooter. ...
Maybe it has nothing to do with my accident, I do tent to go through this thought-process every few months. I really get caught up in what's at stake if I fail. Not in a panicky kind of way, but in a: stay focused - make progress - work towards "something" kind of way.

I guess I just find it important to remind myself that I've put the last 5 years of my stupid little life into this one film... and if I mess it up, if I slack off or become slow and distracted, that it will set a precedent in my life. That the stories I want to tell after Pedal, won't ever be if I do not see this through successfully.

And it's a good feeling - I just walked two miles back home after dropping off the rental car, and it was a nice night, it was quiet out, there was a cool breeze - and I just felt calm... but highly motivated.


I used to run Cross Country in high school for Onsted - my Coach, Mr. Hunt, taught me a lot about patience and pushing myself, but the moments I miss the most, from those four years of XC, are the several seconds at the line: I remember so clearly the tingling in my lungs from the warm-up run before the race, the focus I had, the quite as hundreds of people held their breath for the gun.

It was peaceful... even though you knew you were seconds away from running as fast as you could for 3+ miles. Imagining the blood-taste in your lungs, the heavy-oxygen-deprived acid in your legs, the pins and needles in your arms, the instinct to slow down... to ease the hurt... all of that seemed like perfect meditation. I guess I feel that way tonight, like I'm on the line. I have work to do.

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Post Production - Week 39

posted Sep 13, 2008     Comments


Post Production - Week 39 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

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