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.

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.

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.

Labels: FToM, p52, Post-Production, Store, Twitter, Writing

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.

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!

Labels: Kickstarter, Post-Production, Twitter, Weekly Update

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.

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.

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!

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

<object width="588" height="250"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5070041&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5070041&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="588" height="250"></embed></object>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.

Labels: Embed, Fund, Post-Production, Stockpile, Twitter, Vimeo

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.

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.

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.

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.

Labels: Babelgum, Post-Production, t.minus, Twitter

Yesterday, at around 1:51 pm eastern, we arrived at Bar Harbor, Maine. Which means so many things I can't even begin to go into them here and now... but I will soon enough. When I was looking out at the ocean, I twittered this from my phone: Just arrived in bar harbor... how strange to be at the end..., and these awesome people responded with:

Labels: bar harbor, Flickr, Production, Twitter

First off, I've heard from several people who saw the CNN interview earlier today - if you missed it, don't forget to check it out tomorrow at 12:30 or 5:30p ET on, but so far I've heard nothing but nice things. Thanks for all the great things you all have been saying - it means a lot to us.


Speaking of great things that people say, I recently mentioned that I uploaded episodes one through four on Vimeo, I've gotten so many comments in such a short time, and they have been some of the most flattering comments I've ever received. For example: 2 days ago Sarah Shevett said about Episode 4, "Wow that actually made me cry."

And 3 days ago Robin said about Episode 1, "[Because in the end it has almost nothing to do with the bike and everything to do with setting out to accomplish something that is intimidating, that is unknown to you, something you know you have a good chance of failing at but doing it anyways and slowly but surely proving yourself wrong.] Moved to tears. Seriously. Bravo Mike!"

Not that my sole purpose is to make people cry with the episodes, but it's unbelievably flattering and inspiring to hear people actually felt *that* connected with what I'm trying so hard to find the words to say. I can't thank you enough.

Labels: CNN, Production, Twitter, Vimeo

Just wanted to mention two quick things that keep escaping me when I sit down to update. First off, I made a change to the "video & still" link in the menu to the left. Before it was a drop down that I had to go in and manual add/remove items from, now "video" is one link to Pedal's Blip.tv show-page, and the "& still" links back to my flickr collection of Pedal related pictures. These two sites (Blip & Flickr) are much better at social networking and connecting that I am - I think it's better to externalize those aspects of the this site.

Next is Pedal's Twitter log - on the main page of Project Pedal, before you get to the blog, there is a small'ish gray box with a short update in it.


That update is a "Twitter", what is Twitter? It's a great site that you can use to share "what you are doing" with your friends/family/strangers. For example, on June 25th, I wrote: Listening to 'Don't Stop Believing' at the park in Wolf Point, Mt. It's raining - the sky is pink/purple. Very hungry :)

You can receive updates through your IM, your cell phone, or just through the website (it's up to you how you are updated). Okay, back on the road for now.

tags: pedal, documentary, indie, vlog, blog, bicycle, coast-to-coast, community, flickr, blip.tv, twitter

Labels: Blip.tv, Flickr, Production, Twitter