t.minus 55 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

Strange and redacted teasers are coming and going on t.minus - each one is a clue that ties into the finished film.

Labels: Post-Production, t.minus, Vimeo

Two nights ago I purchased Amanda's plane ticket from Los Angeles to Reno - we'll be filming during the 5th to the 15th in May. I still have to purchase a plane ticket for myself, but I'll most likely be flying back to NY and not MI, so I have some details to work out first. It's all very exciting - May is approaching fast (58 days from now) and I've been loosing sleep trying to make sure nothing has been left unplanned.

As for the script; it currently stands at about 98% complete (I'm sure it's been at 99% in the past, but come back down due to rewrites). I've been struggling with the right way to wrap up the film's very last paragraph. So much so actually that I'll be putting the script down for the time being and re-focusing my efforts on the rough cut of the film (with intercut storyboards and all). My hope is that I'll be able to get more work done on the script when not staring at the same two pages day-in day-out.

The wonderful Karen Abad and I will be going over - via Skype - what I have storyboarded so-far as well as what still needs to be added to our May shot list. I'm nervous because time-wise, as well as budget-wise; we have 10 days to get every last shot needed involving Larry. There's some other work that requires an old 8mm camera and two college-aged girls during the 40s... but that's a different shoot for a different time.

Also, one quick Kickstarter update before I sign off - I just received the first KSR-edition of our 64 Days Production Journals in the mail and everything looks great! So for those of you who have been waiting very patiently for those, I'll be getting them out very shortly.

I apologize for the post feeling so short and scattered - but that's very much how I'm feeling currently - perhaps I should force myself to bed before 3 am tonight. I think I'll do that...

Labels: 64 Days, Crew, p52, Post-Production, t.minus, Writing

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.

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.

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.

Labels: Editing, FToM, Music, Post-Production, t.minus

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Labels: FToM, Fund, Post-Production, Stockpile, t.minus

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.

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.

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!

Labels: Babelgum, Post-Production, t.minus

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

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.

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.

Labels: Babelgum, Post-Production, t.minus, Vlog, Weekly Update

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

Labels: Babelgum, Post-Production, t.minus