Some weeks I'm busy.

Jobs and opportunities in LA are fleeting. Here one minute, gone the next. Sometimes they move on without you, sometimes they simply cease to exist. It's a lesson you (meaning me) can learn over and over, as much as you want.

So when I tell my dad about a project, it means one of three things:

1. I've been working there for two days.
2. I'm trying sound less like a failure.
3. I have gone and made a classic error of optimism.

You work on a pilot that gets picked up, and the series doesn't hire any of the staff from the pilot? So it goes.

Offered a cool job on a studio movie, and it actually goes to the star's nephew, who has no experience in your job? That's just the nature of the business, it seems. Or the town. It's okay. In some ways, it's better, because at least you didn't lose on merit.

The contract for $20,000 worth of work dries up after $200? That sucks, but it'd be worse if you told everyone you had a big windfall coming your way.

I get repeat business from some producers, which is terrific. But when they haven't got anything for me, it's time to go out and sell. A day like today, I've emailed 3 feature films that are looking for an editor. On many of them I'll never hear anything at all, but in a given week I'll probably talk over between 1 and 5 possible new gigs with possible new clients or collaborators.

I'm not going to tell my dad about most of them. It's like sending out 'Save The Date' cards featuring a woman you saw, but didn't actually meet, on the bus. It's going to raise a lot of uncomfortable questions about her health and whereabouts.

I'm not sure that any project that has put me 'on hold' has ever come through. I don't think it's because I told my dad about them. NDAs were not involved. But when I call him up and tell him about an upcoming movie that says I've got the job and I'll be staying in a hotel in another state for two months, and then later it turns out the company that was going to pay for all that went bankrupt and didn't make any movies at all, well, those are the more memorable examples.

Put another way, I have no objection to trying and failing, but usually, I prefer to do so in private. I tried an experiment sometime last year where I applied for every job on every want-ad type site that I could possibly do (related to media production, that is), regardless of budget. By the end of the week I had met in person with producers and agreed to edit a complete feature film for free, color correct an 8 episode web series, also for free, and co-host a daily podcast about video games from an office in Santa Monica, whilst living in Burbank. Hands were shook, tentative dates were booked, and nothing was produced. And nobody had to hear anything about it.

It happens all the time. Like actors auditioning or surgeons blending horses and monkeys. It just got me again. A decisive factor in moving to my current apartment was convenience and proximity to a job that probably doesn't exist. But, y'know, I'm an optimist. Sure, the rent on such a place would be a lot more affordable with the job than without, but that's just motivation to keep looking for new gigs.

This isn't a "woe is me" kind of story. I mean, I manage to keep kinda busy. Some weeks, I'm so busy I only spend a couple of days thinking about which of a thousand tiny mistakes spelled my doom as the potential second full-time employee at Sandwich Video. Not this week, of course, but sometimes.

Change -> Angry

Parts of my digital neighborhood are being bulldozed to make room for informational highway bypasses lately. Google Reader has, once again, found a litany of things that weren't broken to fix.  The last time the site was redesigned, I was unhappy, and the while the visual changes seem unnecessary and unhelpful so far, I can cope with those.  The serious issue is that in a move to try to cheer up the unloved-feeling Google+, sharing features have been removed.  Anecdotally, the sharing features seem to be the most popular and useful portion of the service for most or all of the users that I know.

Now, I had been hoping that there'd be a way to pipe my Reader shared items into G+.  I like sharing things in Reader and I'd like to be able to let more people see them, for one.  For another, directing services into other sites gives me some kind of existence in that world where there might otherwise be none, like when I can route tweets into facebook posts.  I'm glad that seemingly simple and basic functionality between Google services has been added.

As detailed elsewhere, the only plausible reason for stripping features out of Reader is to drive users into spending more time clicking things in G+.  But I think the practical result is going to be that either a) I'll discover a new service that will finally take over as my RSS reader of choice, or b) I'll simply stop reading shared items from other people.

I don't think I'll be doing a lot of extra browsing in G+ because the reason I use an RSS (or really, web) aggregator is so that I don't need to keep 200 bookmarks sorted into sites that I visit daily, weekly, and monthly.  I visit one site.  It's my lens to the internet.  I use it so that I don't have to visit a million websites to find something to look at.

(Even if I DID want to go to G+ just to see what's going on, it mysteriously lists my own posts first all the time anyway)

Plex updated this week.  I wish they'd added a random play option for television, but at least they didn't remove the features that make it more interesting and useful than VLC.

(edit: I notice that this means my 'Reader Shares' sidebar on the blog is now broken.  So that will be going away soon.)

---

I don't know if this is the same thing, but it's been kind of interesting to watch Apple apparently moving away from some of the creative professional market that's been a mainstay of their business for so long.

I've wanted to like and use Final Cut X, and while some of the new features are nice, it's not convenient or powerful enough to replace the editing tools I already use.  Today it's rumored that it may be curtains for the Mac Pro.  Neither one of these is kicking creative folks out of the mac world, but I bet it does make things a little less welcoming.

On the hardware side, less so.  Today, if I were to rent out a machine for an editing job, it would undoubtedly be the Mac Pro, an 8-core model which has served me well and paid for itself, but the main reason it would be the machine rented is because it's the fanciest-looking box.  The modern laptops (and, I'd assume, iMacs) can give it a pretty good run for its money in a lot of areas.  It still wins out in having the most expandable storage and PCI slot upgrades, but Thunderbolt is going to be able to mitigate one or both of those very soon. And really, I've cut entire feature-length projects on macs less capable than the current Macbook Air, so it's not so much a question of whatever they release next being able to handle the work.

Losing FCP (because again, the developer has decided to kill features that previously made it an attractive option) is the more upsetting turn of events.  I'm a big proponent of continuing to use FCP7, which is just about as fully functional and useful as it ever was, for as long as I can, but the fact is that it's no longer being developed and will be unable to keep up one day.  Will FCPX be featureful enough to take over by then?  Avid already is (more or less). Maybe editing will take me full circle back to cutting in Premiere on a Windows machine, where I was 10 years ago.

At the time, the notion of editing on my own computer, in my room, was phenomenal.  No more tape to tape or Draco Casablancas, just get to work.  Whether or not the firewire cards would be able to interface correctly and it would be possible to export the finished video was another matter, but still.

Today, I expect to be able to slice up a project at a whim, anywhere I go.  I can, and have, finished and returned assignments emailed to me before getting out of bed in the morning.

It feels like tools are being taken away, and not in the service of the users.  So of course everyone's mad.

Time, Resources, Quality, Management, Attention, Speed, Price, Deadlines: Pick 6

So I listen to Back to Work, I pay attention to things Merlin makes now and again, even when it doesn't feel as though it applies to me or my own work. One item of discussion from an episode that went by months ago that's stuck with me is the general requirements to the success of a project: Resources, Management, and Deadlines.

I think Merlin and Dan were probably talking about guys programming in cubes, but when it comes to producing independent short films for the i-net, I find it's rare to be gifted with all three of those.  We try to make do with two of them, a la Fast, Good, or Cheap.

A video that comes to me on a hard drive, even when it's beautifully shot (or failing that, shot with technical accuracy), that someone wants made as a favor, just wants it done "soon" and never checks in or responds to my attempts to check in with them, is not a video that's getting done.

So without Resources, Management, or Deadline, a potential- well, not client, but potential favor recipient- is left to hope for Fast, Cheap, OR Good.  Just one!  Pretty much any other project is going to get done first, because the message that comes through to me is that if it's not worth the attention of the writer/director/lead actor, I don't know why it's more worthy of my time than any of the dozen other projects I'm casually juggling or tentatively agreeing to work on someday.

---

Apparently, every couple years I end up with a video that confounds me to a degree that between the client and I, someone should really be firing someone, but without any resources, management, or deadlines, apparently nobody notices or wants to pass up the sweetheart deal they're getting (or would be, if I could figure out how to finish the thing).

So why or how do I end up with such a project? Well, in the most recent quagmire, I didn't even agree to the work, the files were just delivered one day instead of answers to the preliminary questions I usually ask. This should have been a big red flag; I should have refused delivery. But I'm an optimist! I'll agree to at least discuss a project with almost anybody. This is partially because 1 in 5 projects discussed might actually happen. And I want to make things. I like making them.

At the most extreme example of experimentally saying yes to every project that came my way, I had at one point, in less than a week, agreed to cut an entire feature film for $400, color correct a different feature for $0, co-host a daily podcast about video games, and probably contribute in some way to another short or two.  None of those projects happened, and after agreeing to their terms and in some cases meeting in person I never heard from anyone involved in any of those projects again.  Perhaps now, years later, they'll all come knocking one day and wonder if I'm ready to get to work...

Youngstown.

Youngstown, Ohio is a standing set of a city.  Built for 200,000 and home to 60,000, it would remind you of the cliche facade towns of the old westerns, if it weren't so desolate as to be distracting. I've spent a couple of weeks there shooting movies - specifically My Soul To Take (a religious horror) and My Soul To Take 2 (a buffy-esque martial arts actioner).  Neither is the Wes Craven version, and neither has seen the light of day, as far as I know.

The films shot nights, meaning the crew woke up around 5pm and went to work as the sun was setting, and by the time the sun was rising again, those of us who weren't headed over to a third-shifters' bar for a few hours were headed back to the hotel for the free hot breakfast.  Ordinarily, you've got a handful of guests and patrons wandering downstairs over the course of a couple hours, stumbling towards coffee and perhaps sustaining some powdered eggs as a kind of collateral damage, but for a few weeks five years ago, one Holiday Inn (or something) was beset by two dozen filmmakers cleaning out the breakfast buffet as fast as the staff could refill it.

Today, I'm on set in a real Hollywood soundstage, and there's no make-your-own-waffle station.  What gives?

Let's catch up, won't we?

After a slow start to the year in which I was ready to start making rent as a professional gambler, I landed some jobs doing video editing instead. Most of the prominent and interesting stuff is UCB-centric, including demo reels for turning live shows you can see at the UCBTLA into TV shows, including things called "Back Talk" and "Live Green or Die." I think those were in June, as was the start of an hour-long special for Comedy Central called "This Show Will Get You High," which bled over into July and was followed up by some work on a feature film adaptation of a UCB stage musical, Freak Dance.  I saw / taped the stage version at least half a dozen times and I'm jazzed to be part of the movie version.  That's going on now and probably will for a little while.  I'll also be shooting a pilot for a web series sometime next month.

New episodes of Better Radio are written and await recording.  We've got some great guest actors, well, not booked, but in vague agreement to do the show.

Some other stuff's getting written, just to keep me busy.

As always, other projects are brewing and broiling.  Shot a new short a couple weeks ago.  Contributing somewhat to Better With Thriller, had a question read out on Answer Me This that got Olly in trouble with his mum, folded a million t-shirts for Maximum Fun, trying to rev up something new which is the #1 reason you haven't seen 2-line reviews of the last 60 movies I've seen (I reckon we're up to at least #1681: Daybreakers), although I've written a couple longer essays about some movies that will go here or there, if there becomes a place, and I'm still doing some standup, although not with the frequency and drive that someone who's going to get anywhere doing standup ought to be getting up.  It's good fun though.

What else, what else?

If you're here in LA this weekend, I have honestly zero idea of what you'll get, but SOMETHING I've written will be read out at a place called Wordlab, this Sunday, Aug 1.  It's found at 3191 Casitas Ave, #156, Los Angeles, CA 90026 (EDIT: NO. NO IT WILL NOT.  THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED.  DON'T GO TO IT.  IT'S NOT GOING TO BE THERE.  YOU'LL THINK YOU TRAVELLED THROUGH TIME AND THEN GET CONFUSED AND THEN QUIT YOUR JOB AND THEN SELL YOUR CAR AND THEN YOU'LL TURN TO THE STREETS AND NEXT THING YOU KNOW YOU'LL BE SELLING IMPORTANT SECRETS TO THE RUSSIANS.  DON'T MAKE THIS MISTAKE AGAIN.)

I don't think I know anyone in Chicago, except maybe a couple actors from Carpet Kingdom, and I don't think they check the site too often, but if they did, they could go see Matt Walsh and say hello in a week or two: