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.

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.

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.

Labels: 6 Years, Kickstarter, Post-Production, Update

I have a feeling, as I sit down at my desk to write, that this post is going to end up a bit on the lengthy side. Which is entirely my fault, there has been *plenty* to update people on in the last few months, but for the wrong reasons I didn't want to add any post to the site. That wrong reason being: I didn't want to bump the most recent video-post off the main page - I know, I know, that's silly. So I've added the above yellow banner that many of you have probably noticed, which is going to help me get over my obsessives nature.

So let's get started:

Meeting with Matt. I'll start here because this meeting lead to much of the following news. The last week of February I had a quick lunch with Matt at Universal, the same Matt that this time last year was producing Pedal. On one hand he expressed how much he loved the project and the recent work I had been putting into it, on the other, he was concerned / confused / worried about the lack of attention it was getting - both real-world and online.

This has a lot to do with my long-time reluctancy to talk about things I'm "doing", as opposed to things I've done. It's hard to bring up to people that I'm working on a "project"... because in LA, *everyone* is working on something. I guess I just feel like every other "up & coming director" when and if I talk about Pedal to people... but on some levels I'm going to have to get over that uncomfortableness in order to have "this" work.

Which in many ways has to lead to the next five things.

Nokia Rocks. Although some of the motivation factor can be contributed to my meeting with Matt, this idea's credit goes to Jan, from the Faux Press, who has been an amazing help... in many ways that I can't yet talk about. Sorry for the secrecy, but I promise, it's not for long. But Jan suggested I look into getting a video-phone for the project, and after watching Steve Garfield's "How I watch InternetTV" submission for the NetWork2 contest, I was sold on the video-phone idea.

A huge deciding factor was the more I looked at the numbers in the budget, the more it became obvious that I had very limited hours of tape to be filming behind the scenes updates whenever I wanted. Not to mention the lack of hard-drive space and rendering / exporting time. So, the video-phone became both the obvious choice and a necessity.

I contacted Steve Garfield, who put me in touch with some great people in the UK who work with Nokia through WOM World. Long story short, they loved the project, they wanted to help. An oversees conference call later and it appears Nokia will be donating a N95-like phone to Pedal for the road. And on-top of this, they'll be following along on their official website. I'm very excited about this, it's going to allow many, many more video updates from the road.

Why Pedal hearts Adventure Cycling. The other night I contacted ACA about promoting Pedal's "Casting Call" in exchange for video post-roll advertisement. The great thing was; a few days prior to Aaron receiving my email, he had caught wind of the project and forwarded it on to their eNews letter team. Rumor has it those of you subscribed (all 27,000 of you) to ACA's Bike Bits might find a mention of Project Pedal! This is an amazing help in getting the word out to people who will most likely respond to the project.

On top of that, ACA was happy to promote us in their "Companions Wanted" section.

And they aren't the only bike-related association helping spread the word.

Hug a bike! Some of you may have noticed a new (and cool) sponsor logo in our sidebar. The people over at Bike Hugger wrote a great post about Pedal, offered to promote Pedal in their "brought to you by" section, *and* even throw in a few styling t-shirts.

Veoh digs Project Pedal! Hopefully a lot of you new readers came from Veoh, who were great enough to out-of-the-blue offer to feature Pedal's episodes on their main page... and even on their main player!


It brought on a flood of views and traffic. Now if only Blip.tv, Revver, YouTube, MySpace, iFilm, etc would follow suit.

Postcards! Postcards! Postcards! Recently I ordered 1,000 postcards from ClubFlyers - they turned out fantastic and I've been placing them everywhere. A special thanks to Leslie who asked for a few hundred to hand out in Chicago!


If you've come to this site because of a postcard you stumbled across - be sure to leave a comment and let me know (it wasn't a total waste of money)!

The VGKids are the best. Before living in Los Angeles, I lived in "Ypsi", or Ypsilanti, Michigan for those of you not "in the know". Ypsi sits in the "shadows" of Ann Arbor - which leads to the fitting name for Ypsi's 1st bi-annual art festival: the Shadow Art Fair, where I met James from the VGKids. I knew of the VGKids both because their workshop is in Ypsi and because they handled the designing & printing of the very cool Democracy Player t-shirts (pictured below).


Recently I wrote James and asked about some stickers for Pedal - James wrote back saying the project seemed "rad" (I was very flattered... I don't think it's ever been referred to as "rad" before) and that he would see what he could do. It's going to be very exciting for me to have VGKids involved with Pedal - I think they are *very* cool.

Film Festivals!? Already? Yes, I actually just this morning sent out my second package in under a week to a film festival. The 1st was to the 2007 iPod Film Fest from The Flux (thanks to Tiff from The Fem Geek for this one). The 2nd was to the Bike Film Festival, the deadline for entries has already passed, but Brendt was nice enough to say "send your stuff anyways". So, we'll have to wait and see if it gets squeezed in anywhere.

And now for the little things.

Del.icio.us links. If you click on the 'dig deeper' menu to the left, you'll find the five most recent Pedal related Del.icio.us bookmarks. There's a lot of great finds in there, so please, check it out. And if you click the little icon it will take you to all the (old) links related to bicycling.

Interactive map coming soon! I really love Platial.com, their Google Map mash-up is one of the best I've found. And hopefully, very soon, I'll have a full-screen interactive map inter-graded into Pedal's site. This will be a great way for readers to suggest locations for us while we are out on the road filming. It will also be a nice to way for visually post entries.

Full res versions of Pedal Episodes! I've gone back through and re-exported Episodes 1, 2 & 3 at full res. I did it for a number of reasons, the biggest being I kept needing full res versions for DVDs and decided I (and anyone else) should have access to these from anywhere at all times. From now on, clicking on the "share this" link under each episode will take you to the video's Blip.tv page, where you can, of course, share the video, or download the high-res version. Enjoy. And please, feel free to spread them around in anyway you'd like.


Okay. Whew. That's it for now - there's more to tell, but I think I've rambled on for long enough. For those of you still reading - get away from your computers and go enjoy this beautiful day.

tags: pedal, documentary, indie, vlog, blog, bicycle, coast-to-coast, community, funding, vgkids, platial, aca, funding,nokia, del.icio.us, veoh

Labels: ACA, Blip.tv, Casting Call, Festivals, Pre-Production, Update, Veoh