[The hip new way to keep tabs on Rob, without all that time-consuming conversation.]
I found a want ad for an illustrator file of the hollywood sign.
Requirements included a sample, turnaround time, and price (specified per project, not per hour).
So, 1) 
2) 5 minutes
3) $100, or free to you.
They, ah, did not take me up on the offer, no. Maybe they’ll find this post instead.
Current Rob (Producing) is working on the SpikeTV show, has a feature coming up in June that could maybe shoot RED, and is making daily visible progress on the new radio show. It’s visible because there’s a google doc spreadsheet with delightful color coding to keep track. It’s like this right now:
Current Rob (Consuming) is up to movie #1,452, and the recent lot is made up of some poor documentaries, a bunch of shorts of varying quality (including one he worked on in early 2006, which recently won a prize), and a couple of others. Role Models, for instance, was much more David Wain-like than reviews may have led one to believe, and whilst editing a UCB video starring an actor with a supporting role in the film, Rob’s worlds collided just a little bit.
Hanging around the LA comedy thing has begun the odd but not unpleasant phenomenon of Rob seeing folks he knows in a lot of movies and tv and things lately. Not to mention in some old conan bits that high school Rob sure enjoyed.
Speaking of, High school Rob is attending the St. Rita’s Youth Group Retreat Retreat, which is a planning session for the big 90-kid event weekend to be thrown at the end of the school year. On Saturday evening, Catholic mass is said. At the end of the first of two halves that make up the ceremony, the Liturgy of the Word, is the General Intercessions – a series of foci for which the congregation may direct their prayers – common subjects include world leaders, that their decisions may bring peace and harmony to the world; this retreat team, that they might receive guidance to achieve their task; St. Rita, St. Mark, and all the saints; ailing and recently departed relatives or members of the community, that they may be healed or find eternal peace (respectively); and in as small a service as the one being held, individual people or causes on the minds of the group. High school Rob contributes “stuntmen, daredevils, and people attempting to break or lay claim to especially dangerous world records who jeopardize their lives on a regular basis.” The priest struggles not to giggle and apologizes later in the evening, just in case Rob was serious and maybe knew such a person. He did not, but played the whole thing very straight, as one must.
It’s new video time! We spent around an hour shooting this last weekend, and I put it together this weekend. It’s about Amy, and the tricks she plays on her neighborhood.
It so happens that we have all the right props (literally, props) to be entered into the YouTube Project: Direct 2009 contest. I imagine that for any number of reasons, this isn’t quite the kind of video they’re looking for, but there’s something that seems very silly to me about a direct-to-youtube video with a credited Director of Photography and three Key Grips, so maybe it should be.
If it turns out that it is, then I assure you, you’ll hear about it when the voting starts. (Judges narrow down the contestants who are then voted on by the Internets) Until then, I recommend you watch it anywhere else.
It’s a little bit heartbreaking to spend time adjusting colors and finessing a video just to have the YouTube automatic video ruining system add its own ‘washed out’ color settings and a light blur over top of everything. It’s almost enough to understand why 1) most internet videos look terrible 2) people don’t bother with white balancing or microphones. I mean, macroblocking? Really? Even in ‘high-quality’ mode? It’s a series of stills, for pete’s sake. (EDIT: I’m told that there’s a longer wait for the site to process things into high-quality playback mode, and that it ought to look better sooner or later)
Anyway, I hope you like it, and that you get the film nerd joke in the middle. It was fun to do, and I’d shoot this style again sometime. Now if you’ll excuse me, I actually finished something, and a little bit of sunshine is in order. (I was going to go for an irony-free closing here, but I stumped the MTV site)
Ooh, look at me, embedding videos all over the internets like I’m some kinda fancy so and so.
This is the first video for the internets from the exciting new group Mode7, which is largely me and Matty, as seen here with a dash of Russell and Matt.
That’s LA slang for ‘you’re fired,’ and it has a particular feature that means it is used in situations where it also means “we know you’ve been working for us, and we’re going to keep that work, but we’d prefer not to pay for it.”
In a purely ‘fluent English speaker’ sense, it can make sense when referring to creative pursuits, like writing, or acting, or mousetrap design.
When it’s used to fire someone from a technical job, and the direction the producers are moving away from is an offer for them to pay as much or as little as they choose…I’m not sure WHAT it means.
First off, I’m writing for Sketch Cram at the UCBTLA on Saturday, Feb 9, 2008.
Writers start scribbling in the morning, performers come in and learn the stuff in the evening, and by the time YOU show up at midnight, we’ve assembled a show you’ll love like a precocious niece.
Also, last week, I wandered around LA county looking for billboards and taking photos. See the fruits of this effort on the internets, and go visit Project Nightlight (the organization responsible for said billboards) if you want to.
*Photos, while still valued at 1,000 American words apiece, are now only worth an embarrassing 978 Canadian words.
Alright, here’re some things:
-The feature I was editing last time I wrote about working isn’t done yet. The production may or may not have actually shot more footage that I haven’t even seen yet. I haven’t spoken to anyone on or about it in quite some time, and I’m somewhere in the middle of a color correction pass and finishing off some digital makeup fix stuff.
-Gripped on a short about ‘an intern for the Tonight Show.’ (carefully phrased, lest you think the short was for the Tonight Show, though the hope seems to be that they might show it or put it on some official website somewhere.) It was fun to be out playing with lights and things instead of sitting at the final cut workstation.
-Loaded on a music video, plus or minus an on-the-spot visual effect and some still photography (Indeed, I should add some photos! To the Internets!) What an excellent set. The team seemed to have a very good idea about what they meant to shoot. We were well-fed and promptly paid. Various crew memberswere treated appropriately to their position – which is to say, as the (digital) film loader, I was not ordered to move bales of hay or prepare the craft services table. Unsurprisingly, this treatment makes me much more likely to be willing to lend a hand when C-stands and sandbags need to move. Just a fine experience.
Those are the items of the recent past. Some portion of my self-something is based on Knowing Stuff. It’s good, I like it, I think it’s good. So totally failing is disappointing. Today’s little plague: That girl Erin from QU who looked like a 70s-era Piper Laurie. Last name totally eludes me, and isn’t important, and won’t benefit me after I remember (or if I’m lucky, some QU reader writes in to tell me). I just want information to…stay. It’s not even someone I’m likely to ever meet again, just, y’know, c’mon brain! I kinda thought if I wrote all this it would arrive in my mind by the end of the paragraph.
Then there’s this other thing I’ve got cooking, that isn’t going to be mentioned any more specifically than that. I figured before that if I told everyone about something I wanted to do, maybe I’d be held accountable and have to work a little more. Since Animal Crackers isn’t done, I’m going to try an opposite tack with this, since nobody I know is hip to it yet. I’ll just bring it up in past tense someday.
In professional life, there’s only been one person who has ever called me lazy. (She was later caught sleeping on the job to the detriment of the production going on elsewhere in the building.) Nonetheless, I was sure feeling it this week.
Took days and days to slog through what should have been some much faster work. Then a very effective meeting with the director and we’re just about picture-locked. I have some animating and jazzing up of a couple scenes to do, and then we’re handing it over. The post-production audio will begin, as will the color-correction and VFX (re: painting out a couple more booms).
In order to do the CC I’m going to need a bit more hardware – I’m looking at a Dell 2407WFP and Matrox MXO combo. The trick will be finding the monitor in town, which will sure cost more, but save a week’s shipping. Whether or not that’s even important depends on other circumstances though…
I heard a term somewhere, sometime recent, that I thought was pretty good: “First-world Problem.” An example is “would I like to earn money at a decent job, or would I prefer to sit around lazily for a month, accepting that I won’t receive income because I have enough money to survive?” We should all be so lucky as to have such a problem, eh? The specifics of the rub are do I want to try and squeeze in a month-long gaffer job between this and the next editing gigs – and whether that will even be possible. It would mean doing the finishing on this film in one week, and just a couple days to prepare for the next one. Not doing it means having extra time to finish this if need be, possibly a chance to pick up a bit of an older project, and time for some writing projects that are brewing.
Turning down a show someone called me to do for the sake of laziness isn’t a real thing, but it soothes the conscience if I don’t take it because I can’t meet their schedule. It would probably be fun, so I’m still going to go hear the details on it this week.
(luckily, I copied this to the clipboard before posting, because the internets here have sucked so powerfully the past few days…)
So we shot through the weekend. Directed more b-unit stuff (secretly just A-unit working unpaid overtime) on Sunday. At some point chunks of crew passed the ‘let’s make a good film’ mindset on their way to the ‘let’s go home now’ mindset. I understand that the more hours they work they less they get per hour on a show like this, but why not do a respectable job, especially on the last day?
The flip side of that is feeling faintly like a sucker for being so concerned and runnng around the set rallying and fixing things when it’s not my film and not my job to do so. But I have, and although I couldn’t stop the film’s action setpieces from being turned into cutaways, hopefully they are better cutaways and more accurate to the previously shot dialogue that describes them.
Remember how filmmaking is like going to camp? Further evidence of this is in the in-jokes and quotes, some of which undoubtedly echo with slight variations at lots of similar camps/movies. To this end, I offer “El Pollo Loco is how a movie says it doesn’t love you anymore.” I went to one such restaurant once, and it seemed to be a taco bell-like fast foodery. But on sets it is represented as tubs of foul fowl, slaw, thoroughly frozen and steamed vegetables, and of course soft tortilla shells/wraps that serve no obvious purpose.
And as long as I’m putting off editing a bit longer, I might point out that I just saw some of TV’s Bill Maher. Strikingly unfunny individual. At least on his own show. Loves a good pander though. Now back to syncing audio…
That’s Creative Utility Player. That’s me.
I’m editing the feature film Seducing Spirits. Wednesday I wrote three scenes and today I was directing second unit. In a 1-hour round trip, we shot 20 minutes worth, and got about as many setups as the first unit got all day. Sure, it’s exterior, no lighting, but it’s fast and hopefully good looking.
Also found that this company’s next feature begins principal in early August – looks like I’ll manage to stay employed for a while.