The 48 Hour Film Project is a wild and sleepless weekend in which you and a team make a movie—write, shoot, edit and score it—in just 48 hours. On Friday night, you get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in your movie. 48 hours later, the movie must be complete. Then it will show at a local theater, usually in the next week.

It’s a neat idea, and a cool project that forces a burst of creativity in a short amount of time. While it is happening in Milwaukee the weekend of June 20th, 2008, I sadly, cannot take part… at least not for the entire weekend.

The main workstation is set up, as is the server, though we still have about two other machines to set up. And hey, there’s even a window, and it’s got blinds so I won’t be blinded. I may do some funky time-lapse stuff out the window, who knows?

All in all, I am totally digging the new set up so far. Organization, FTW!

Of course there is the dark underbelly… the “Behind the iMac” of this lovely little set up.

I think this is a major improvement over the old mess that I had (below) mainly because the power is now all hidden under the desk, and there’s not quite as much going on back there.

The challenge will be to keep things neat and tidy as we get into working like hell again. This office is bigger, and has a closet, so hopefully it will remain calm and collected.

You might remember that I got a DVI-D to HDMI cable back in January 2008. I tried to use it, but I just did not see a difference in signal quality, and there was this nasty lag when changing channels.

So when Gabe was over, I asked him about his experience with HDMI and he said he couldn’t stand the DRM wrapper it put on the video. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about until I mentioned the lag I was experiencing in changing channels, and he said “Dude, that’s the DRM wrapper I am talking about!” or something like that.

So I am back to using component video cables, because as Gabe pointed out, the ability to quickly go through the channels is of great importance. The component video cables allow that to happen, and like I said, I just am not seeing any difference in image quality. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s my 3 1/2 year old HDTV, I dunno… but for now, we’ll do it this way.

Oh, the working title is “Balancing Act” by the way…

There has been a lot of planning and discussion this week, including assembling the FAB (or ‘Film Advisory Board’) which is a group of people I will bounce ideas off of, and creating some different sponsorship opportunities. So far a handful of people have offered to help, financially, and otherwise.

In the next week or two we’ll set up a web site, and start outlining things a bit more. We plan to keep things fairly transparent throughout production, so people can keep an eye on what is happening.

(Once the site is up, expect most of the updates to happen there, but I’ll still post things here on RasterWeb! when it makes the most sense.)

During 2008 I will be producing a documentary about how people find the balance between what they want to do, and what they need to do. It’s definitely a balancing act; a struggle between making your dreams come true, and having reality set in.

Through a series of interviews we’ll explore how people deal with the choices they’ve made and have to make, to do the work they find rewarding and satisfying.

Filming will commence in the Summer of 2008, with editing wrapping before the end of the year. We hope to premier the film by January 2009.

That bit above…. that’s the pitch. That’s the description of the documentary I’ll be working on this year. It’s sounds like a large project, and it is, and I’ve got about 8 months to do it.

I’ll be shooting on MiniDV with a Sony PD150. Much of the equipment will be on loan from Z2 Marketing + Design, who is a sponsor of this project. I still need other equipment and supplies, and that’s where you come in.

While I thought I could produce this film for no budget, that’s not exactly true. I think I can do it very cheaply though. I’ve had a few people tell me I should apply for a grant, and that’s a possibility (know any grant writers?) but I also plan to get people to sponsor me. I’ll follow up this post with one specifically outlining how I see it working.

This is exciting to me. I’ve been compiling a list of people to interview, and if you know someone you think of when reading the description above, let me know. (It would help if they were in the Milwaukee area, as the travel budget is non-existent right now.)

Anyway… watch this space for updates. Thanks….

My cat Tinkerbell has skin cancer. She is just a few months shy of being 5 years old. I adopted her after she was found wandering around a parking lot in 2003. She’s a good cat, and by that I mean that she is very loving, but like any cat, she can annoy the crap out of you…

Dana first noticed a lump on Tinkerbell’s side a while back, and I finally got around to calling a vet and asking about it. We took her in to have it removed, and after it was tested, they revealed that she had skin cancer. So right now, we need to watch her, and see if she develops any more lumps. They said she could within a few months, or years, and if it gets bad, we could get chemotherapy for her.

If money was no object, I’d consider it, but as it is, we can’t even afford to have the humans in the house see a doctor, so sadly, Tinkerbell is not going to be getting chemotherapy, and if she needs surgery in the future to remove another lump, that might not happen either. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s the reality we live in.

I’m hoping she pulls some “miracle cat” magic on us (nine lives and all that) and lives for many years with no more problems, but I’m not counting on it.

Just to add some fun into the mix, she managed to remove all her stitches on her own. We had the vet check it, and she didn’t manage to infect it. (That’s the “miracle cat” magic I’m talking about!) So now she has to wear the cone, which is always funny on TV, but it real life it’s just sort of sad.

When I was a kid, my family had a cat name Licorice, and that cat lived to be over 20 years old. I grew up with Licorice, and I honestly thought my kids would grow up with Tinkerbell, but like so much that is planned in life, things go awry and you just deal with it the best you can.

The idea behind UserVoice is that trying to talk to your customers and users to find out what they want is too difficult to manage using things like email and forums, so why not leverage the idea of a collaborative site where users vote, similar to Digg, so that the common and popular issues float to the top.

They have an example site at example.uservoice.com you can look at to get an idea how it works, or even better, take a look at uservoice.uservoice.com and see how they are eating their own dog food.

If you’re dealing with user feedback right now using a forum, or trying to manage email requests, this thing looks like an ideal replacement that would be 10 times better for all parties involved.

See Also: Mashable had a good writeup a few weeks back: UserVoice: Vote for Features You Wanna See

I’d never even heard of Mowser. Granted, I’ve not been that deeply involved in the mobile web as I used to be, or as much as Russell has been, but years ago I followed Russell fairly closely. I think around 2003 or so he started reading my blog, and I then started reading his, and I took an interest in what he was doing. In my eyes he was the expert on the mobile web.

But as he says, today, the mobile web is (to many people) an iPhone, and I think that’s ok, and I think iPhone users who have tried to use the mobile web previously would agree with that. I know people who would have never used or even attempted to use something call “the mobile web” but the fact that they now have an iPhone and it has “the internet on it” is all it takes…

I tend to not think of myself as an Apple fan-boy, I do believe they got the mobile internet experience right on the iPhone. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll get one and see if that changes my opinion.

iMovie was a great tool for simple video, and pretty much everything I posted on tinkernet between 2005 and 2007 was done using iMovie, but I’m enjoying the advanced editing possible with Final Cut. (Here’s the first quick ‘n dirty video I did with Final Cut Express, which I shot using a Canon ZR800: MilwaukeeDevHouse1)

Over at Z2 I just completed a much larger project, a behind the scenes film showing how we shot a large-scale commercial for a car dealer. This was a mammoth project compared to the few minute shorts I’ve done in the past. I ended up logging 130+ minutes of footage I had filmed on a Sony PD150, as well as going through 440+ photos for the visuals, and did a bit of homework watching a lot of DVD extras I had available, before writing an outline of the piece, and then having Eric write the voice over script. I actually recorded the 1st and 2nd draft of the voice over myself to get it in place for the rough edit, before I engineered the final narration which was voiced by Joe Haas.

I also ended up shooting another 20+ minutes of interview footage to add into the final piece. Eric ended up helping a lot by doing most of the writing, and much of the picking and choosing of interview footage to use. Cory and Deb of Z2 acted as the producers making suggestions and comments along the way. I got a bit ambitious on the titles, which looked great, but definitely increased render time.

There were a few things that I felt thing could have been improved, mainly the audio. I didn’t have enough time to clean up all of the audio using Logic, so I ended up doing much of the editing and leveling in Final Cut, which was not ideal, but worked OK for the piece.

We ended up showing it at the Majestic Cinema in Brookfield, which was a blast. The crowd seemed to like it, of course, they were the stars of the feature. It was a little weird seeing my work projected on a full-size movie screen, but it was definitely very cool. I look forward to more video editing in the future.

(Photo by Janet Towbin)

When Creative Commons came along, I immediately saw a benefit to it. again, I’m not just a consumer of things, I am a creator of things, and I’ve published music, and created videos, and images and words, that I’ve carefully chosen a license for. I want others to be able to properly use my work, as I want to be able to use theirs.

BarCamp is a great example of open culture, and I’m proud of being one of the people who brought BarCamps to Wisconsin. Our local group, Web414 is modeled very much on the way a BarCamp works, ad-hoc and open. (In fact, we even declare our meetings a “Creative Commons Zone” and request that media created at the meetings use a Creative Commons license when published.)

(Photo by Leo Reynolds)

Almost all of the feedback on things like BarCamp and DrupalCamp and Web414 has been positive. Now, I did say almost, because there exists this small group of people who seem to exist to take and not give, to do nothing but shoot things down instead of lift things up. They’re similar to trolls, but really, they are like leeches in that they tend to suck things out, and give nothing in return. They don’t share, they aren’t open, and they are negative to those who do, yet… they are more than happy to take what they can (for free) while never seeing the contradiction in their actions. Even those who make a living on the net, which was largely built on the ideas of openly sharing, don’t get it.

(Photo by Chris Dunphy)

And that’s where I’m done. I don’t want to deal with these people. They won’t change their minds, and I waste my time trying to get through to them. What’s the point? I’m more interested in positive and creative people who are doing interesting things, making the future happen, and willing to share that with the world. People who get excited about the work they are doing, whether they get paid for it or not. The people who care only about creating things in exchange for the almighty dollar, I have no time for you. Leave me be…

I’ll continue my pursuit of people and ideas and cultures that are open. That’s where the future is, or at least the future I want to be a part of.

Maddy loves to have her picture taken, so it was pretty easy to get her in the mood.

Emma is not as much an “in front of the camera” person, and like me, likes to be behind the camera.

I pretty much let them do what they wanted, and didn’t direct things too much. Next time I might push a little further and see how well they can follow directions, as long as they still have fun with it.

So what happened at our little DevHouse? People hung out and worked on… well, whatever they wanted to. At one point Jon Thoms, Master of Flash, asked me what we were going to work on, and we somehow managed to hook him up with two guys with a startup that needed some Flash component. Matt Pickard taught Jeramey about clipping paths. Tracy did some crazy photo manipulation project. Nikol did… I’m not sure, but she was there… 4braham planned out some crazy Twitter mashup idea. Mike and his son Nathan scanned in drawings and made a book. KeVroN discussed when not to use Drupal, and I strung a guitar.

Things were in full swing from about 7PM on, with about 30+ people at the high point. We had food and drinks (mostly provided by Web414 folks) and ended up ordering pizza and wings later in the night. There were many photos taken, and I even made a video.

(Jeramey is already planning MilwaukeeDevHouse2, so I guess we’ll call MilwaukeeDevHouse1 a success.)

Last year we went camping at Bark River Campground. It sucked. I wanted to let people know this, because I didn’t want other people to have the experience I did, so I did what any self respecting blogger would do… I blogged about it.

The result was: Bark River Campground: Worst Campground Ever, which described my experience. I sort of knew where things were headed. Their site sucks and within a few days, my post was the second result in a search for “Bark River Campground” I was pleased.

Fast forward 9 months, and I get a phone call. It took me a number of “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?” to get to the part where I heard “internet” and “post” and “worst campground ever” and I then realized who I was talking to. Yup, they called.

I talked to the folks at Bark River Campgrounds. The man I talked to said he understood that I had the right to say what I wanted, but he also said they try very hard to make things nice at the campground. I wasn’t convinced of that, but I did thank him for opening a dialog about the issue. I did get the idea that he didn’t actually read the post because he asked me questions that would have been answered if he had read it. But then again, bloggers tend to think everyone reads their posts…

So, what is the responsibility of a blogger? What is the effect of what we write? On businesses? On people? Like I said, I knew what I was doing, and I had some clue what the effect would be. I honestly did not expect to hear from them, but was pleasantly surprised by them saying that I had every right to say it, and they didn’t expect me to take it down.

But it wasn’t all fun. It was hard at times, and there was frustration, and while I always knew I could easily record 10 songs, I wasn’t entirely sure the quality would be where I wanted it.

First, the frustration. I use a USB adapter to plug my guitar and bass into my Mac. GarageBand recognizes it. Usually. In the first or second day into the process, GarageBand went nuts and stopped working. I spent like 3 hours fixing it, including a re-install, and creating a new user and copying files between accounts. Eventually it all worked, but through the month GarageBand dumped on me a few other times in various ways. It’s frustrating when your equipment won’t even work right.

Then there was the creative frustration. Last year when I started recording on my own, I would just plug in the guitar when I felt like it and bang something out. For this album, there was the pressure of must record a song on an almost daily basis. Luckily since I only needed 10 songs in 29 days, I didn’t have to record every single day, I skipped some, like the day I worked for 14 hours, or the Sunday I did a video shoot on location for 12 hours. Yeah, it was a busy month.

Typically it would take me about 3 hours to do a song. When I say “3 hours” that is me sitting down with the instruments, playing a bit, recording, and then assembling the song. I didn’t write anything ahead of time, it was all done as I was recording. I don’t know how many people do it this way, but it worked for me. In the future I’d like to spend a lot more time on songs. Mainly because I think I can make them better. So even though I had 29 days to do this, I probably spent less than 30 hours total actually recording music.

Speaking of quality… am I happy with the quality of the album? Yes and no. There are some songs I actually really like. But then, there are bits and pieces I know I could have done much better, and some songs I really don’t like at all now. I think spending more than a few hours in the evening on a song would be worthwhile to get a better perspective on it.

I followed the same workflow I usually do with songs, once I record them and mix them (and yeah, I need to improve my audio engineering skills) I bounce to an MP3 and upload it right away. This is good because I get it out there immediately, but bad because I should spend more time tweaking the little things until is it just right. Release Early isn’t always the best idea. Also, I put everything up on Ourmedia and the Internet Archive right away, which again, is good and bad. SpinXpress totally broke for me at one point and I could not upload anything. I then started putting everything on blip.tv as well for good measure. Next time I might wait until I am actually happy with a song before I upload to a permanent place the the archive.

Even the whole packaging and cover art, I liked, but was not 100% pleased with. I had other ideas of how it would look, but I hit a time crunch, and finished it up on February 29th, just in time. The photos were taken by me in January. I really wanted to do a shoot in February, and I had a great idea, but could not execute it in time. I just thought it would be cool if the photos as well as the songs, were all produced in the month of February.

There was only one song I recorded in Logic. I was hoping to do more, but again, time constraints prevented it. Not a huge deal I guess. Oh, as far as collaboration, I wanted to do more… I did get to work with Emma and Maddy a little bit, but no one else really. Next year, Milt and I might work together though. And drum sequencing is not easy! I have no problem playing guitar and bass, but I can’t really record my own drums easily with the recording equipment I have, and I have not found good, cheap, drum sequencing software yet.

Wow, this post is way longer than I expected, so I’ll cut it here, but not before giving you direct download links to all the songs:

1. Stress Test
2. Attention
3. Nashotah Falls
4. Pressure Cooker
5. Watertown
6. Small Hands
7. Shipwrecked Crew
8. FAIL!
9. Empty Pockets
10. Mother Sink

All of these songs are released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which means you can use them in many ways without even asking me, as long as you credit me as the creator. If you need some other license, let me know.

Enjoy! And let me know what you think…

Team Z1 will be playing against Team Z2 (though we’re all Z2, but Z1 is the Black Team and Z2 is the Red Team, confused yet?) Anyway, The gang at Z2 Marketing + Design will be playing soccer at the U.S. Cellular Arena on Sunday, March 2nd, before the Milwaukee Wave game.

The Wave plays at 2PM, so come early and see us run around the field like a bunch of total spazzes and attempt to score a goal. Bring your camera, it’ll be fun (and humiliating) for everyone! (I’m on the Black Team, so cheer for us…)

Update: My team lost, and I hurt my legs pretty bad. There is a reason goalies wear long pants, sleeves, and gloves!