A Brief History of Two Night Stand

/1 Comment/in /by

Over the past few days, Two Night Stand has totally exploded on Vuze. It’s over 20,000 downloads in its first week of availability. I know the thumbnail of Jennie has a lot to do with the popularity of the movie, but I’ve also seen a lot of people coming to this site searching for Two Night Stand over the past few days. Today is one of my highest traffic days in a long time. Of course, YouTube is up to 320,000, but that’s taken a long time and I almost never see anyone searching for info about the movie afterward.

It’s funny how things change. Two Night Stand was my first real post-college movie. I had a really hard time finishing the script without any deadlines. In early drafts they wandered around the small town they’d ended up in and got drunk in a local bar. After a lot of revision I ended up with just one location and two characters. I decided not to act in it because I wanted to focus on directing. It turns out it’s a lot easier to make a movie when you don’t have to act at the same time. We shot it in the summer of 2004 right before I moved to NYC. I took my time with the editing and premiered it in February 2005 at The Pioneer Theater along with a bunch of my other short films.

At the time I kind of thought I was done with the film. I had gotten everything I wanted out of it. I made a movie that looked good and didn’t cheat by using the documentary tricks that characterized my earlier films. If the sound recording was bad I couldn’t turn it into a joke like I did in Kalesius and Clotho. After spending nearly $1000 on festival submission fees for Kalesius and Clotho I was totally sick of the so-called “festival circuit.” I half-heartedly submitted it to a few friendly festivals and got into a few of them, although I was disappointed not to get into the Anchorage Film Festival, which is my favorite festival ever.

So Two Night Stand sat on the shelf until YouTube took off. I uploaded it there and hardly anyone watched it. Meanwhile, my Bad Webcam Sex video got 2 million views. Eventually things picked up and now it gets around 1000 views a day. It’s been really great to have all these viewers for a film I never expected to get much exposure. I don’t see any reason for short films to go to film festivals anymore. The Internet is the place for short films. At festivals they’re a sideshow at best.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s watched it, and I hope I can make some more films soon.

New Hard Drive

/0 Comments/in /by

I currently have 10 external hard drives hovering around my computer. One of them used to be an internal hard drive, but it was PATA, and my Jmicron PATA controller does not play well with OS X when memory usage goes over 3GB. Don’t ask me why. It causes regular kernel panics. So now it’s an external drive.

I was getting frustrated with having system drives full of junk and having to constantly shuffle stuff between drives, so I went to J&R yesterday intending to get one of the new crinkly 1 TB Lacie D2 Quadras.

But instead I was seduced by the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II

It’s a RAID 0, with two striped 500 GB hard drives inside. I’ve never had a RAID of my own before and I wasn’t anticipating the ridiculous speeds I would get. Using the AJA Kona System test I get 125 MB/s on the eSATA connection. That’s fast. I have firewire 400 drives that go around 20 MB/s. And it was really cheap: only $280 for a terabyte!

I’ve been suspicious of the My Book drives in the past. They’re so aggresively priced it makes me wonder what they’re skimping on. But Western Digital has been making hard drives for a long, long time. Sure, I’ve had several of their internal drives fail on me, but never without any warning, and it was probably my fault for having bad case ventilation. I never ended up losing any data.

Now I have room to organize everything the way I want it. Naturally with a RAID 0 I’m not putting critical files on there, but I have all kinds of HD media that often needs temporary storage and that’s where it will live. Copying from SATA or eSATA drives to this new one is extremely fast. As far as I’m concerned, eSATA is the future and everyone needs to embrace it right now. Firewire: you’re on notice.

Now I just need a few extra eSATA ports. 4 isn’t going to cut it much longer.

Famous!

/0 Comments/in , , /by

I did an interview with Rob Feld for Editors Guild Magazine a couple months ago, and had my picture taken by John Clifford on my lovely Brooklyn roof about a month ago. Today I got a copy of the July/August issue and there’s a big picture of me on the cover looking squinty yet casual.


Sorry for the bad quality, I don’t have a scanner and it’s not online yet. Also, note that Pineapple Express didn’t get the cover photo. Someone at the magazine has a warped sense of priority.

The article is quite extensive and I’ve definitely been paraphrased and edited for brevity. I just hope I don’t come off like a jerk.

More Commedia

/0 Comments/in /by

The LA Times reviewed La Commedia a few days ago and in addition to loving the opera, they included a great photo of the show. You can just see the tiny “Screen E” in the upper left above the yellow construction office.

In the foreground, that’s the devil holding a soul. He’s about to rise up on that platform. It’s all very dramatic.

As the LA Times says at the end of the article, the show was recorded so we can make a DVD. It’s all in HDCAM and I’ll be combining it with the HD footage I edited earlier to make a single-screen version of the show suitable for home viewing.

Commedia Premiere

/0 Comments/in /by

I arrived in Amsterdam last Wednesday morning and promptly slept until the early afternoon. I got up in time to attend the full dress rehearsal of La Commedia at Carré, which was very exciting. I sat very high up in the theater, which is shaped like half a bowl. The video I edited looked terrific. The HD projection on the main screen looked as good as film as far as I’m concerned. And it wasn’t even a particularly fancy HD projector.

Then the next day I slept until 2pm, walked over to the Vondelpark, walked back, and got dressed up for the premiere. I got to sit in the Queen’s box, which are of course the best seats in the house. The Queen was in attendance, but it wasn’t an Official Visit, so she didn’t sit in her box. Some of the people involved in the show got to meet her afterward, although I did not. Of course, she’s not my Queen anyway. I certainly didn’t vote for her. I got to go up and bow at the end of the show. I heard a few boos when Louis (the composer) came up, which apparently he was quite happy about.

I’ve managed to find two English reviews of the show. One from Bloomberg, who says that there were television crews and red carpets and whatnot. I think I arrived late, or early, because I didn’t really see anything like that going on. The other is from some sort of music blog. Both reviews are pretty positive. They both mention the extreme difference between what Louis says is going on during the show, and what Hal says is going on during the show. I thought that was what made the show exciting. There were two lightly connected stories being told at the same time. They were both inspired by Louis’ music, and they relate to each other, but they aren’t the same thing. Update: I found a blog post in Dutch from someone who (according to the Google Translator) didn’t understand a bit of it, but loved it anyway. That’s the only way to experience it in my opinion.

Now I’m back in Brooklyn, although I might be off to Rome in a few weeks to edit a feature! More on that if it happens.

Return to Amsterdam

/0 Comments/in /by

Tomorrow evening I’m headed back to Amsterdam to attend the World Premiere of La Commedia, the opera I edited video for in April and May. Here’s a neat little promotional video on the opera company’s website that I did not edit, although I did edit the movie-looking footage they show sometimes.