We reached our goal 20 days ago, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still pre-order the DVD of Hal Hartley’s new film Meanwhile through Kickstarter. The campaign ends in 12 hours. And for free you can see these two cool videos made by Aleks Gezentsvey and featuring me!
This one’s about the radical, inexpensive editing process:
And this one’s about the music in Meanwhile.
Add comment November 30th, 2011
My good friend, marriage officiant, alleged Indie Film Legend, and frequent employer Hal Hartley just started a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to finish his film Meanwhile. In addition to being a big fan of Hal’s movies, I edited Meanwhile, and I am very excited to see it get a chance to go out in the world. It started its life as a short feature, and kept getting shorter as we pared it down to its essential elements. For a while we thought it was a TV pilot, but sadly the world is still not ready for a Hal Hartley TV show. There isn’t really space in the traditional distribution system for a movie like this, so Hal has decided to take it to the people.
For only $25 you can pre-order the limited edition DVD of Meanwhile. It’s a great deal. You get to support a truly unique and independent filmmaker and at the same time you get to take home a copy of a terrific movie. It also will help support me, since I edited the movie for free, and I only get paid if the movie makes any money.
And here’s the trailer for Meanwhile:
Add comment November 1st, 2011
Apple just announced the Thunderbolt port on its new Macbook Pros. Thunderbolt is a dumb name, but so is Firewire if you think about it, which I never had before. And it’s better than its old Intel code name Light Peak, which was no longer accurate because the first generation of Thunderbolt cables don’t use optical technology.
This seems like a good thing. Firewire is slow. USB is slow. USB 3 hasn’t caught on, and nobody ever adopted the higher speed Firewire protocols. We needed something really fast to replace the ExpressCard slot we lost in 2009 when 15″ MacBook Pros switched to SD Card slots. And if this could replace expensive things like fiber and SAS and open up high speed data transfers to inexpensive peripherals I am all for it. I’m not sure it can, but why not try?
But seriously. This?
That is the standard symbol for electricity, or an electrical hazard. If I saw that on a computer I would think that’s where the power cord goes, and I would be sure not to stick my finger in it. And personally I would be confused because it looks like a DisplayPort (which it is too). Here is what you get when you search for “Electricity Sign” in Google Images:
Looks like electricity. Why use the exact same graphic for Thunderbolt rather than inventing a new graphic like USB & Firewire have? It’s unnecessarily confusing.
2 comments February 24th, 2011
Some time last night, Two Night Stand passed 1 milllion views on YouTube! It only took 4.5 years!
Add comment February 20th, 2011
I have a new video on YouTube, and I have an Android phone (a Nexus One. Love it!) and so I wanted to check out how my video looked on my phone. So I pulled up the YouTube app and loaded my channel. I saw this:
Which confused me, because only one of those thumbnails is the right one. In fact, the app shows the third thumbnail generated by YouTube (3.jpg), regardless of the one I’ve chosen to display (default.jpg). Here are the thumbnails available for those videos with the one I’ve selected for display highlighted in yellow. It turns out even the one that looked right was right was the wrong one:
Using this method, you might get the right thumbnail 1/3 of the time, although it turns out I almost never use the 3rd thumbnail. And since I’m a YouTube Partner I often use a custom thumbnail, which makes the odds of getting the right thumbnail through the app even lower.
I checked with my fiancée, who recently bought a Droid Pro, and she saw all the correct thumbnails. It took me a while, but I figured out that she is running the stock Froyo YouTube app, and I had updated mine to 2.1.6 in the Market. I uninstalled updates, and got the right thumbnails.
When I re-installed the update, the bad thumbnails came back. Is anyone else seeing this bug?
Also, while I’m talking about YouTube thumbnails, they seriously need to increase the quality of thumbnails embedded in large windows. Compared to the bandwith and processing requirements of streaming HD video, it should be a piece of cake to generate and serve up higher resolution thumbnails to go along with the greatly increased video quality.
1 comment January 10th, 2011
Just finished today! It’s been six years, and Jennie and Steve are waking up in bed together again. Why does this keep happening?
And in case you need a refresher, here’s what happened six years ago. Sorry about the fuzzy video. YouTube is a lot better now.
Wow! I didn’t even plan those shots to match so closely. I totally forgot the original bedroom had one set of folding closet doors open!
Add comment January 6th, 2011
This afternoon I watched one too many of those xtranormal videos featuring world-weary professionals dealing with strawmen, so I made my own parody of the genre. Enjoy!
2 comments December 1st, 2010
I cut a trailer for Denis Leary’s Twitter Book “Suck on This Year.” It’s funny and it’s burning up the charts on YouTube. Check it out.
Add comment November 12th, 2010
I haven’t really made a live action movie since the summer of 2004, when I directed my not-very-short film Two Night Stand. In the meantime I’ve done some animation, and Truth @ 15 Frames Per Second which wasn’t exactly “shot” so much as it was “recorded.” My main focus during that time has been editing other people’s movies. Which I like very much. I’ve never been a huge fan of Two Night Stand. It was something I felt I needed to do at the time, and I got a lot out of it, but the movie is lacking a certain crazy energy that was in my earlier films. And if you read the comments on YouTube you’ll see quite a few people who agree with me. Many of them feel I’ve robbed 18 minutes of their life. You’ll also see that the video is approaching 1 million views. It’s always been my most popular video, and thanks to some mysterious change in the way YouTube links to and promotes videos, in August views jumped from 500 views/day for the past two years to around 2000/day.
Around that time, a producer I work with watched the movie and asked if there was a sequel. In the process of explaining why I never wanted to make a sequel, I came up with an idea I liked. So I’m getting the band back together. Jennie Tarr & Chris D’Angelo will return, along with the original DP, Alan McIntyre Smith.
The movie will be a lot shorter, and generally a bit nastier than the first one. And it will be in HD! It’s very exciting.
Add comment November 10th, 2010
Hot on the heels of last week’s 4/20 release of Cheech & Chong’s Hey Watch This, 4/27 brings two new releases from Hal Hartley. Both films are available on DVD from Microcinema and as MP4 downloads on the Possible Films website. First up is PF2: Possible Films vol. 2, the first new material from Hal since Fay Grim way back in 2006. It’s a series of short films made while he was on his European Vacation. Second is the re-release of Surviving Desire. The original release was pretty bad. The sync was soft, there was a bogus 5.1 soundtrack (the film was recorded mono) and the picture was pretty weak. We re-mastered the films a few years ago for some foreign releases, and I authored the DVD myself, so I can vouch for the quality of the films. I also designed the covers, which I’m really happy about.
Add comment April 27th, 2010
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