Yesterday was a bad day.  I made a mistake while wrapping a set, and that tiny imperfection grew into a mother of a problem.  Without revealing the nature of anything about the people, events, locations, or circumstances (bloggers get fired, remember), it ended with my boss and I having a serious chat about how I need to shape up or ship out.  It was emotionally draining, and when the onslaught was over and I could return home, I could think of no better outlet than to watch some web videos and have a good, long laugh.

After the third hour of chuckling at recent memes and political humor come to life, I began to think philosophically.  Why did I choose the web for my daily dose of humor?  Why does anybody?  Who makes these videos, and when?  How does anyone have the free time to do these, and what happens those people when they run out of steam?  I always seem to come down off of a great laugh with a sobering moment of inward thinking.

More people collectively watched the Evolution of Dance than watched the Superbowl last January.  It’s estimated that the modern office worker spends a quarter of their day on sites like on YouTube - which has been serving up 1 million video views every day.  Who uploads all that stuff, and why?  Why do we, the users, crave all this entertainment - and are never satisfied with just one or two gems?  We constantly surf, rate, comment, and move on.  If something isn’t worth our time, we simply do not grace it with our precious opinions and praise.  Somehow comments and hits have become new Nielson ratings.

Somehow over the last 50 years, we have become a culture obsessed with being distracted.  An interview I shot for a documentary on Italian immigrants had a 90 year-old man telling us that today’s kids don’t know how to play.  “In their day” they had little to do but run outside and make up their own games.  A brief bit of news and some annual festivals were enough to placate his generation - the only people seeking daily distractions were gossiping old ladies.  Was it the birth of our new consumer culture that drove the Baby Boomers (and beyond) to constantly seek out new ways of being amused?  Are television, videogames, and now the Internet simply an extension of the drive to get new stuff?

Have you seen The Story of Stuff?  Great piece.  It breaks down exactly how and when America became enslaved to buying new things.  The drive to have NEW! took over our lives after WW2, in a time where our economy needed this way of thinking.  This idea continued to spiral out of control at such a rapid rate that not only are we craving new things, but now we also need a steady flow of new entertainment.  With the rise of television, we saw a decrease in attention spans.  Since the advent of Sesame Street and the 60-second commercial, audiences no longer tolerate more than 2 sentences coming out of character’s mouth at any given time.  Watch prime time TV lately?  Name any show where a character says more than two lines in a row.  Three in a row is the new monologue.

Our cuts have become quicker and our scenes shorter.  Compare a slow-moving movie from the Hollywood Golden Age to any blockbuster of today.  We’re holding down the fast-forward button.  Now insert web-entertainment.  One of the golden rules of making a viral video is that it has to be 2 minutes in length.  I’ve heard this at podcasting seminars, in interviews, and from my fellow producers.  Why is this a rule?  Is everyone anticipating that audiences have no better sense to know when they’re watching a web video and when they’re being fed a commercial?  Or is it that our attention spans are so severely limited that (outside of legitimate theater) we cannot hold our interest for more than 120 seconds?  Is this the truth, or are we all being forced into some kind of ADD culture?  Is the two-minute standard a Blu-Ray, or is there a real purpose for the change?

Distractions.  We all need them.  My wife has been reading the Little House on the Prairie book series, and telling me about how the culture back then was completely different from today.  Farmers didn’t need movies.  They made up their own games and mostly just lived and worked.  What changed?  The older generation doesn’t watch home-made videos on YouTube.  They prefer to watch Law & Order and the evening News, which to their grandparents is just as bad / fast.   What will be the next evolution in our sped-up brains?  How can our entertainment get any quicker, or be served any faster?  Will we all just give up and go back to attending theater?  Perhaps the answer is already here.

There are a zillion short film festivals out in the world. I just got an advertisement for a Hitchcock-themed contest in my inbox yesterday. That makes about 3-4 that I’ve become aware of this month. Just today I read about the “first ever web-based film festival“. You’d think that a guy like me, publishing bi-weekly shorts online, would be into this sort of thing, but it’s exactly the opposite. It’s because there is so much web-only entertainment out there that I loathe the entire idea of web-based short competitions. It’s the beginning of the end - imagine a future where all film festivals, and therefore all video content, is web-only. Without the social aspects of traditional festivals, the art of filmmaking will be watered down. Winning them would mean nothing and losing means that you’ll just create more to try and win the next one. As creators of web-based video content, aren’t we all competing for attention anyway? Isn’t a formal contest just a little redundant and missing the point?

The people that compete in said web-only film fests are small potatoes, each trying to claw their way out of the fog and into the public eye. Traditionally, venues like Sundance, Cannes, or TromaDance would be the fast track to get their names out there - gain exposure, become a commodity and the ability to make something bigger. With the advent of super-cheap prosumer electronics and an ever-moving Internet audience, you’re looking at millions of content producers that are too low budget to go to a real film fest, but who all have aspirations of making it anyway. These are the people who will apply to web-only festivals. That’s right - by entering, you’re literally competing with that scary guy who uses puppets and somebody’s grandma. Welcome to the Internet - we fight Grandmas here.

Our information culture is rapidly becoming an irony culture, or a remix culture - the biggest memes out there are always trainwrecks - and the bigger the better. With the influx of information pouring into people’s daily lives (i.e. Internet at home, Internet at work, iPhone inbetween), it didn’t take long to turn obscure stories into laugh-fests, and hot news items into entertainment. I just think it’s funny that the cable access of tomorrow (YouTube) is just as enabling to freaks, weirdos, and attention whores as your local college TV station was 10 years ago. The huge difference is that in the last few years, the cable-access personalities of yesteryear have become today’s instant celebrities. Lisa Nova, AVGN - both started out just doing something that they thought was funny - but now with the world watching, their millions of hits translated into fame and DVD sales. 10 years ago they’d still be unknown.

Now with video games adding shared level creation and sharable user experience video, people are communicating in whole new ways. Yup, now there are whole new ways to flip the bird. Isn’t that what people want to see anyway? Aren’t we just dramahogs at our most base? We just want to see some explosions, a pretty girl, an embarrassing sports injury, and some fat kid roll around like an idiot. Welcome to the Internet - aka America’s Funniest Home Videos. Would you like an award with that?

On Monday we resurrected our go-to filler item for this week’s content, a fun little PSA series about robot safety. After shooting for another producer on Sunday, I was reminded to keep my crew happy and my shoot short - with lots of spare time just in case. ‘Just in case’ time can turn into ‘oh crap’ time very easily.

For this shoot we required a beach scene, so I spent the morning scouring the Astoria coastline for a sandy beach. It turns out there is no place on the water that anyone can actually access without a portable ladder, rope, or extremely long legs. The entire surrounding waterfront is unreachable, with a ten-foot cement wall separating the public from the river, like so many zoo animals. Are we being protected from it, or is it being protected from us? This question sprang out of irritation as I turned around several times, trying to find a way to legally park my car next to a leafy State park area.

I had brought a bucket just in case, and it turned out that I’d need it. If the area failed to provide a good shooting location for a beach, we’d just create one in-house. Steathily, my eyes darting left and right, I crossed the park with the bucket and shovel. I looked hard for anything that would pass as beach sand. The river was once again blocked off from the land by a ten-foot drop. Eyeing the sand in the grown-over baseball diamond, I kicked some piles together on my way across the width of the park. On my way back, I quickly bent down as if to tie my shoe, opened the bucket, and scooped in some sand. In the same motion, I kicked in the pile I had previously made. On my way back to my car, I nervously thought of lurking State Park Police people and bad attitudes, maybe how I would explain holding a bucket of baseball diamond sand and a shovel. “This is ridiculous.” was probably my last thought as I stepped into my car and drove off. Free sand is just so hard to come by in the city.

By the way, before I continue my tale, you must know that I DID return all of the sand at the end of the day. No blood, no foul. I was just borrowing it, after all.

update: I just pulled another 17 hour day for SVU.  Tiiiired.  Have to get up in 4 hours.  I’ll finish this tale, with full video, next week.

=chad

I am a nerdcore fan. I go to Nerdcore shows, listen to chiptune music, even support local collaboration shows like Pulsewave and Blipfest. I love it. It’s one of my things.

There’s been quite a few docs done specifically on ‘music with an 8-bit influence’ since it began to show up on the radar a few years back. There’s Nerdcore for Life, Nerdcore Rising, Reformat the Planet, 8-Bit Philosophy, and a few that are YouTube-only.  You may have seen an article or two about it.  Mainstream media seemed to pick it up for a week, as if it was some disposable news story, and it hasn’t really been covered since.

Through a mutal friend, I wound up speaking to Dan Lamerieux, the mastermind behind Nerdcore For Life, a documentary covering the scene for two years. I saw him at Shael Riley show taping a performance for the film. Dan would later tap me to do some shooting in NYC for the movie.

Soon after we exchanged emails, I signed up to shoot an interview with MC Lars, one of the featured artists in the documentary, at an apartment in Park Slope.  Z asked the questions (brilliantly). Lars, a great guy and an intelligent interviewee, had some pretty interesting things to say about the scene. Short story: at this stage, all that existed of the film was this trailer in 4:3. It was surprising at first, but then everything seemed to be shot on prosumer video, so I guessed it made some sort of sense. Problem was that I accidentally left on the settings I would normally use our HVX: 16:9, letterbox + squeeze, 24p. After sending Dan my DV tapes of the Lars interview, I re-watched the trailer, cringed at my mistake, and asked him if 16:9 would be alright. “We’ll figure something out” was the gist of what I got back. Whups.

Last week I popped in a prerelease copy of the doc and found that the tail had wagged the dog. The entire film had been letterboxed to match our Lars interview. Maybe that’s a bit presumptuous. Everything was widescreen now- that’s a better way of putting it. It’s probably more festival-friendly this way. While watching, I forgot about the initial resolution until this interview popped up - the taller rapper’s head was pretty much cut off near the eyes. Outside of this shot, the rest of the film feels like it was meant to be 16:9.

What is Nerdcore?  The overall piece is a mashup of people, facts, opinions, throw-downs and throw-ups. Watching this film was very much like NERDCORE THE MONSTER just barfed its guts all over Toyko. An ugly yet intimate view of the scene from 2004-2006 is bared for all to see. There’s a lot of drama that erupted during the doc’s years of filming, including random beef between artists, but also between the artists and the genre itself. Without spoiling some great / viscous moments in the film, there’s hope and hate for the very word ‘nerdcore’ by and from the musicians that are considered thus.

Another signature to this doc is the style of the visuals. Mirroring the DIY spirit of the scene, multiple cameras / resolutions / lighting styles were used to piece the film together.  My understanding from receiving instruction from Dan was that alot of the interviews were done in a way to maximize the comfortableness of each interviewee (one Q&A was done in a hot tub). While this multi-camera, sometimes good lighting - sometimes bad lighting aesthetic isn’t really pleasing to watch, it gives the film a ‘guerrilla’ feel.  All the sub-sections have meaning and tie-in to give you, the non-nerdcore audience, a glimpse into the short history of the music and the people who make it.  You get the feeling that many different cameramen contributed to this piece, that the entire work itself might just be a labor of love.

I have yet to see the rival documentary (yes! there is a rival film), but I know that it won’t come close to the heart-felt detail that N4L discloses throughout its hour-and-change runtime.  At one point, we are guided through the history of the scene by the most well-known Nerdcore artists: names like Beefy, mcchris, YTCracker, MC Router, Shael Riley and others.  Not only is their reverence (and loathing) for the scene exposed, but their love/hate relationship with each other is also highlighted.  That’s something that I wasn’t quite expecting: Nerdcore is an explosive medium with a lot of giant egos, infighting, and name calling by a bunch of mediocre rappers that are sometimes eclipsed by one or two geniuses.  N4L, despite its apparent love for the artists and music, doesn’t pull any punches on this subject.  In their own words, the artists admit that the best and worst thing about Nerdcore is that anyone can do it.  Anyone can make a track in their parents’ basement, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.  Towards the end of the film, I found myself questioning if the scene would last another 5 years.

Overall, I enjoyed the perspective of the film and would recommend it to anyone who has no idea what Nerdcore is and needs a crash course on the history, drama, beef, and love/hate within the community.  Also, it’s a historical document for people in the scene to look back upon fondly years into the future.

=chad

I’ve been pulling alot of days doing prep / wrap for SVU and Gossip Girl this week, and through all of it I’ve been thinking about finally getting on the iPhone boat. There’s alot of downtime where everyone literally sits around and twiddles their thumbs (this morning the riggers and I waiting two hours for a truck to return) and I literally got bored with reading books, my normal go-to boredom killer.  Hurry up and wait, they say.  Ah well.

I’ve spent the better half of this week developing a new web series for GoodGame.  I had promised to shoot the pilot in April, but due to the sensitive nature of some of the props, it never materialized. Fates conspired over the summer and once again I’m looking at another go at the pilot - this time in late September. All my time up until then is organizing crew, scheduling auditions, and writing the damn thing.

Z and I had an interesting revelation today. Well, maybe it was ‘more of the same’ for her, revelation for me. Girls are always thinking ahead like that. What we came up with was something like “If you want something done AT ALL, you’d better tell someone to do it, or just do it yourself.” If it’s just your hobby or you’re clawing your way up the devil’s esophagus (aka getting recognized on the web), you might as well just invest your own time to make it great. Otherwise, who’ll get it done? There’s a ton of product out there, buried in a sea of regenerating crap. For the gems to rise up, they either have to be train-wreck or super special. The latter is my goal for the new web series.

I’ve been researching intros since Sunday - movies, videogames, even books. There’s a study somewhere that backs up my gut feeling, that if you can’t win someone over in the first 30 seconds, your audience is surfing somewhere else. Hell, on YouTube if you can’t show them potential in 2 seconds, they go elsewhere. So I got the idea to create a super-strong intro; something that is both beautiful, unique, and a trainwreck all in one. I latched onto the catchiest intros I could find, mashed them together, added a sprinkle of originality, and four days later, I have 1/2 of it done.  Will the pilot go over?  Does our creative team have what it takes to steal the attention of the Internet?  These answers and more, as the blog marches on…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY9VRTc_nIE

I’m cutting together the ‘behind the scenes’ video that Tim shot while we ran through this shoot at break-neck speed.  The video was shot at a filmmaking workshop ran by PBC at Otakon; we tried to get the entire thing done within two hours, but…well, once you watch the video I’m cutting together, you’ll see.  It turned out to be a pretty good lesson about what happens when you rush - even though I’m happy with the final product.

Right now batch capture is .. about 1/2 way through the tape. I’m just killing time while it gets all the footage, waiting for 4pm to roll around. We’re shooting some interviews / filming a Yoga presentation in Bryant Park right around then.

</thursday>

This week was a surprisingly good week for us. Two surprise jobs materialized out of nowhere - both fun videography gigs involving Yoga and Jewish Kids Music. Freelancers know that when a good weeks hits, you’re supposed to squirrel that money away immediately - but everybody winds up going out for a beer on payday. Workaholics like myself especially need a night off every week so we don’t go crazy.  Yesterday night turned out just this way.  Friends from out of town were around, we did the ‘dinner and a beer garden’ thing.

I’m taking a break from cutting together this doc, hopefully just in time for dinner.  When the food is all eaten, it’s back to work.  The days are just packed, I tell ya.

Our webcomic artist is sleeping over for a couple days.  We didn’t kidnap him, nor did we bribe him with comic books - he’s here on his own dime so we can have some meetings and crank out some comic scripts and outlines.  …  That being said, kidnapping, bribing, and literally just having him here is probably the only way that the work was going to get done!  The guy is a good friend of mine, but with what little we have to offer him per comic, it’s understandable that we would eventually get shuffled underneath bigger projects.  This is ultimately what happened in June.

The easiest way to get somebody back into work mode, when there’s no money, is to throw a party and treat your business partners like your best friends.  They should be anyway, but it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of fun to re-energize the team.  We spent the night drinking and playing Shadow of the Colossus and Soul Calibur IV.  Y’know, AFTER we had knocked out five really solid outlines, dialog, and descriptions for the comic.  These sort of meetings will happen more often, we decided.

This week is a little nuts.  Everyone’s personal lives are in a shuffle.  One of the crew has to move out of their apartment (he was sub-letting) by September 1st, and now the place he was lined up to get has passed on him.  The owners were old Polskies  who apparently didn’t like the fact that his main job was a web start-up that doesn’t make a lot of money.  Ugh.  So we, the company he puts so much time into, apparently had some hand in him not getting an apartment.  As I’m typing this another member of the crew is leaving for a funeral, while his girlfriend lies sick with more tummy trouble at home.  Yet another member is trying to figure out what they want to do with their life at the moment, and the company is trying to lend a hand in straightening it out.   To me, all this shuffling is just another part of playing it by ear.  It’s Risk VS Reward, baby, and we’re still on the fringe.

Tonight we’re going to shoot some music video-like thing that doesn’t make any sense to me, but it’s a paying job, so whatevs.  I haven’t heard much about it, except that what we shoot will be combined with animation to make some sort of mixture salad of concept-promo video thing.  No idea.  All I know is that we’re shooting in a studio WITHOUT LIGHTS.  Ugh.  I’m cringing already.

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I just heard this on TWIT: “The internet hardly cannibalizes, it actually fuels interest!” - from a NBC higher-up, talking about internet vs TV viewership for the Olympics.

Creating a lasting, kick ass, first-time impression is hard, unless you know your audience inside and out. This past weekend we were up against 500 screaming fanboys/girls who wanted to see nothing less than the best of the best of their favorite series, characters, and in-jokes.

On top of those limitations, we strove to do something original. It’s a problem of mine; I don’t know the meaning of “sell out”, even if precisely doing that would have helped our process 100%. What would be selling out, to an audience like that? We could have played up every stereotype, every in-joke, characters that people recognized, jokes they had heard before, repackaged into something that would make their eyes water and their sides split. Bah! That’s all been done before. I don’t know if it was my interest to play up originality as a selling point to the 1/10th of the audience that would appreciate new content, or just that I won’t ever bend to the yoke of rehashed jokes. I just wanted to make something that I’d be proud of - and that they’d accept.

Before I go any further, you may be wondering why the hell we were creating original content at something as chaotic as an anime con. The simple answer: when you’re an independent web company, you take any opportunity you can to spread the word about yourselves - and crazy stunts like what were attempting is the best way to attract attention.

Otakon 2008 - the 15th anniversary of the convention. It is the 2nd largest anime convention in America - I overheard some people talk in whispers about 25,000 being the number of attendees this year. That’s a crazy load of fans - and we had to impress all of them. We arrived on Friday around noon in a car overpacked with camera equipment, costumes, a cardboard city, green screen material, lights, and oh, the list goes on. Our plastic street kept slipping out of its resting place wedged ontop of the cardboard robot and was hitting Z in the head. The last hour of the three-hour drive had me holding the stupid thing in place from the passenger side.

We met up with old friends of ours - guys we see at most conventions we travel to - and set up shop in the Artists’ Alley area. This was the Baltimore Convention Center - nothing to sneeze at - the independent artists’ area was a huge space the size of a high school football field. The ceiling was so high that three floors of artists could have been stacked in there with room to breathe. Setting up our 1/2 table and stacking it with all our merch (DVDs, t-shirts, stickers, etc), 2 out of our 4 sold stuff while the other two ran around to help plan for our filmmaking workshop, which was fast approaching.

THE PLAN was crazy. Our idea for a workshop came from a collaboration with another indy content producer, Mike Dent from R5 Central. He runs a sentai news podcast that doubles as a futuristic audio drama - it’s way cool. We’ve been fans of each others’ works for a long time, and he happened to like what we were doing with our killer cardboard robot, Meep Mop. Together, we forged a script and an outline of what would be filmed at the con. Two hours of shooting on Friday, two hours on Saturday.

The workshop itself was only supposed to be one hour of shooting, with one hour of post. The idea was to give our audience a chance to see a film crew in hyper mode, then see an accomplished editor do something impossible. I’ll be cutting a doc together about the experience, which was taped with a miniDV cam by a friend. The short version is that the filming went exceptionally well! Our two actors, clad in robot costumes, fought each other over twenty-five shots in front of the screen. The HVX ran directly into a laptop, capturing every second as we flew forward with our chance of making our deadline clearly hanging on by a thread. Everything was going smoothly, until something I hadn’t anticipated happened.

Yeah, this is where everything went awry, which was in itself a learning experience for the audience - stuff can go way wrong on set. I thought (in the heat of the moment) that I should shoot outside of our normal area - that is not in front of the screen - if I set up our cardboard set in another area. While that was setting up, I thought, I can continue to shoot with one of the actors! Turns out I was dead wrong. The actress that had to be laid down on the cardboard set was ready way quick - and the city was quickly set up. Since she was in a robot costume that had weight to it, we couldn’t easily pick her back up again - it took five men to do it carefully. Suddenly that shot was ready, and the green screen shot was ready - I had to make a choice. I wound up leaving my sweet setup behind, slapping a battery in the HVX and moved to get the cardboard city shot - which was when I realized that the green screen WAS needed in that shot. Parts of the convention floor were invading my frame. Ugh. I pushed tighter and called it good enough.

The other problem with this shot was that with the laptop broadcasting over a projector for the audience to see what we were seeing, it couldn’t move. I had to shoot on tape for this breakaway shot. It happened fine enough, but when we re-hooked the firewire cable from the camera to the laptop, all hell broke loose. I powered on the camera, which registered in Final Cut’s capture window. Then I switched to VTR mode, so he could capture what I had just shot. Well, FCP didn’t like that. It crashed faster than a Russian test rocket - taking to the grave all the beautiful render files that Brett had been working on inbetween takes. We were sunk. There was no way to re-render everything in time to have a finished showing at the end of two hours.

In a flash of showmanship, I snatched the mic from our announcer and told the audience what was happening. “We have our first major problem.” I said, trying not to sound too down. As Brett struggled to restart the program, I reassured him that the capture files were indeed still on the computer, and all he had to do was reconnect them. “I lost all the render files” he moaned. I told the audience, with a crazy grin on my face, that the show must go on, and that finished or not we would have SOMETHING for them to see at the end of the workshop.

We pressed on, eating into post-production time. Darrin stopped doing interviews with anybody and just put the mic up to my face. Everyone seemed to just be paying attention to what was happening in front of the camera anyway. With about 1/2 an hour to spare, we wrapped camera. I apologized to Brett, took a seat next to him, and post began. I looked around. The remaining audience (some of the 50+ had dropped out) were hardcore - they were in it to the end. Even after I had told them that it wouldn’t be finished, they still remained in their seats, loyal to the cause and ready to see…something! It was for these people that we had done this crazy stunt - to get more hardcore fans that liked what we were doing and were into it. If we got only 10 of these guys to be fans for life, the expense and the craziness of the con would be worth it.

The deadline loomed. Brett showed what he had to the audience, and they cheered. As we told everyone that the finished product would be online next Friday, a staff member approached me and offered to screen the piece at a much bigger venue Saturday night if we finished it. I jumped for joy! At this point, this was awesome news. We’d be in front of an audience of hundreds, with a chance to speak beforehand and tell them how crazy this was and how hardcore we were for even attempting it - and that’s just what we did. The Saturday night audience was around 500+, and they all cheered at the right moments. Addressing the crowd, I thanked Otakon, my editor, and any audience members who had participated the day before. The response was immense, and I can’t praise that staff member highly enough for hooking us up.

I’m going to gloss over our shoot on Saturday, but know that yes, you CAN shoot video of a giant robot pummeling people in the middle of an anime con and get zero complaints or interruptions.  Everyone around us was so respectful, it was great. We had to wait a few times to continue filming because people wanted pictures with Meep Mop, but that was our only problem. Even the sound and lighting turned out aight.  In retrospect, perhaps the FCP crash was a good thing.  Maybe the audience picked up on this, understanding that no matter how much you try and plan, something will eventually go wrong - and you have to compensate.  Everything was flying by so fast that I’m a little surprised that the crash was our only problem.

As soon as the final version is online, I’ll post it. Until then, check out the viral videos we did with Meep Mop to announce our arrival at the con.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaOdxZ2e84

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJKUADD7VeM

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkufaeZCd0k

The last year of my life is best displayed through my reel. I was cutting together a new version yesterday (PBC needed an update, so I figured I would follow suit) and there was a moment where I looked on all we had accomplished in that last year and said: Wow! For truly independent web video people, we have seen and done alot since our inception. Most of it was for free starting off, but this reel reflects the change in our policies - and a change in the wind for profitability. For- most of the projects now featured were paying ones. Not very high paying, but paying nonetheless.

I have a saying that I picked up from someone wiser than myself: do what you want to do in life, and if you’re good enough, someone will eventually pay you for it. That’s been the mantra of PBC, and it’s finally beginning to pay off. From November 2006 to December 2007, we pooped out one 5-15 minute video a week, sometimes resulting in greatness, other times not so much. From that our reputation as ‘hardcore’ web video people sprang, and the events that we had previously covered for the fun of it began to want constant coverage! We had made a name for ourselves.

Now, I know producers that are scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of getting new projects and maintaining some sort of salary. Some of them even do PA and Locations work on the side. I’m here to tell you - we ARE the bottom of the barrel! We’re still a part of the fan community; we haven’t “made it” or leveled up enough where we have left the con floor or lost our sense of intimacy. Even if I have to eat beans and rice for another 5 years, this is a good place to be. I feel like every time that traditional media is mentioned (especially in the fan circuit), they’re completely put down - everyone hates on them. “G4 is a joke, SpikeTV isn’t that much better.” Anytime I hear these words, I can’t help but feeling like we’re filling a gap in the market.

Case in point: this weekend we travel to Otakon. Now, there’s an event - huge by fan standards - the biggest anime con on the East Coast, and it’ll have diddly squat for coverage on G4 and Spike. Sure, there might be a camera crew there for a couple of hours - but their goal is to create a small package that can be played within a larger show. It’ll either be: “Host makes fun of cosplayers” or “We’re here at Otakon and ____ is happening.” Always from an outsiders’ perspective. Now, let me tell you what we’re up to.

Instead of covering the event, we’re creating content inside the event. Big difference. We’ve been building up a character through some viral videos that’ll be making an appearance at the con, and have even started some beef with a mega-popular Sentai podcast that will also be making an appearance. With our powers combined, we’ll be filming the culmination of our beef - a Sentai-esque video complete with a slow-motion fight, super powers, over-the-top acting, and more. INSIDE the con, mind you. Would either of the two traditional channels do something like this? Well, if they hired ME they would.

I’ve got a lot to crank out by the time we leave early Friday morning. Still gotta make that script / storyboard, have to send out some trailer / slideshow DVDs for Make a Smile, and plenty of other things. My friend Darrin is taking his girlfriend out to Coney Island today; I’ll be spending my day indoors, working hard, earning credits for the future.

Friday morning update:

Everything is set.  We’re taping the entire production.  It’s going to be spectacular.

a DIY editor’s blog:

As I edit, I’m listening to j-pop on an obscure Sentai podcast at 1/2 volume. My legs have felt like lead for the last two days, and there’s something about how my breath is short that makes me hope “the haze” of NYC isn’t slowly killing me.  I feel like every week that passes without a big job is a total waste. However . . . I can’t lose hope! Gotta keep capturing! Here I go! Time to plug in, sit down, and veg out another 8 hours whilst my spine slowly disintegrates.

< / thursday night >

Today is the due date for a documentary that I shot in May.  Earlier this month I had a moment of clarity where I realized that it wasn’t going to be done on time (I’m cutting it all by my lonesome), so I whittled down what was due to a trailer - which will be great.  Actually, I’m thinking of posting it on here when it’s up.

The story is about 6 Correction officers from rural NY who take it upon themselves to make a difference in the world.  After their Superintendent and others in NAWS begin a campaign to build playgrounds in the devastated Upper Ninth Ward in New Orleans, their adventure begins.  We follow them for six days while they build the playgrounds, joined by law enforcement from several different states, civilians from all over the country, and hundreds of local volunteers.  The entire program should run about 1/2 an hour.

With yesterday spent capturing / cutting a Latin dance exhibition that we shot last week, and Tues-Wed spent shooting another doc in CT, plus working Monday for Law & Order: SVU,  I’ve had no time to work on this current doc.  I felt like I could do it in a day (organize what I DO have cut into a trailer), so I’ve left myself with this predicament.  Or…more like an opportunity.  A chance to work creatively within a deadline.  Something to get my blood really pumping.  But first, I’ve got to record some voice over for the PBC’s weekly video content.   Can’t slouch on the Internet, or it’ll bite ya.