Moon Over The Bay Tonight

I took some photos from our deck after we gave up watching The Fifth Element. Tricia said she could do better (taking photos, not making sci-fi features) - she popped out and took this shot.

We are so lucky to live here. Click the picture to see it full size.

Peter Pan Shoot

Just back from "Peter Pan" press preview at the Ferry Terminal Park. Naturally I went there and back by ferry.

After an hour or so of waiting, we went inside and watched a mega-boring-uninspired understudy rehearsal. Finally the cast left the theater-in-the-round stage and the house lights were killed.

They ran the opening graphics and music sequence...

Gosh! Amazing! Worth the wait. The 360 degree animations are terrific - all done by one designer, Bill Dudley from Greenwich - close to where we lived in London. I've asked him to visit us here in San Rafael. He's stuck in a hotel, so he might come. It's so easy by ferry.

I shot it with my 360 degree fisheye lens. They were surprised to see the whole 360 degree animation in one shot. It's really Mark Spencer's job. I just came to help. Nice day. I fell asleep on the ferry back.

If he visits, Bill might be another 2-59 er. Little does he know.

Gold Kahuna Winner

E-mail is strange. Today in the "Junk" bin I found this, I thought it was spam:

Dear Gold Kahuna Winners of the 2010 Honolulu Film Festival,

It was great meeting so many of you at the festival and celebrating over a wonderful weekend of excellent films and fun on the islands! Congratulations again on your outstanding work and thank you for taking part.

Attached in this email please find the Official Gold Kahuna Laurel Icon. Please feel free to display this laurel on any web or print materials to help promote your award-winning film.

I went to their site and yes, surprise, surprise, Pinot:Sonoma Dreams is a WINNER.

Back again!

Cough! Cough! Ever been not really sick enough to spend the day in bed? I'm coughing my heart out. Day after day I say, I'm getting better. But no - it drags on.

Where was I?

Oh, last time I left you was Plan B. My friend Rod was here from London and we had dinner Chez Nicola.

Was that this month? Even this year? Wow...

Next day Rod showed me his cut of our 90 minute Pinot film. His is 52 minutes! He was quite right, I couldn't do it myself. Out went the proposal, out the night harvest, out the wine bar in New York. Crikey!

I can see his plan - keep it to Jamie. Forget the stockbroker to winemaker story. Gosh.

Well I wanna sell it. Rod is ultra smart and he might be right. So why did we fly to New York?

Excuse me. Another coughing fit!

Where was I?

The next day, Rod and I flew to Vegas for the NAB Conference. I have my way of doing things - Rod has his. We'll take a taxi - No the shuttle is better (my way). Rod wins. The taxi line goes up and down and up. Three quarters of an hour of shuffling my three bags. I get to Circus Circus $34 a night - Rod is off to the Sahara.

I promised DV Mag I'd shoot a video blog. Stupid!

I've shot leaving home - now to shoot the hotel room and the journey to the LV Conference Center. Yikes. What a mistake. It's not as though I'm climbing Mt. Everest. And it's a HUGE effort. I'm in the hotel room after midnight editing and trying to upload to YouTube,

Still you've got to do these things once to realize how really stupid a clever person (me) can be.

The next day, Monday - I'm still shooting anything that moves. Crazy. Tuesday, I filmed Adam Wilt, and might put that here on 2-59. Tuesday night, I shoot the SuperMeet.

Wednesday - only shot the Panasonic 3-D $21,000 camera and the amazing new Aäton. Just two. Way to go. Those stories out real soon on DV.com. Maybe. Still I had fun.

Thursday - I can't take anymore. First plane outa here.

Rod flies off to LA. Me I'm back to Home Sweet Home, Oakland.



Next day, I collect Tricia from Larkspur (I was on the way to SFO when her plane from Australia came in ONE HOUR early). That afternoon I go to a Sonoma Film Fest party. Come back home. Collect T and go to yet another Sonoma Film Fest party. Ouch! Good - I wasn't coughing then.

Saturday and Sunday were all Sonoma Film Fest. parties and the big premiere of Pinot: Sonoma Dreams.


The screening went well. I had seen my film here on a bright HD screen with saturated colors. So it was a shock to see it not so bright, not so sharp and with regular color. No one else seemed to mind and compared to the home screening in LA last year, yuk, it was terrific.

Lots of laughter and enthusiastic applause.

All our Audience Votes went to another film! Eating Alaska! Foul!!! Foul!!!

OK Now someone buy it! Once I clean up Rod's 52 min. version I'll start marketing again. This is a buyers market and there doesn't seem to be a real demand, You never know. I keep selling "von Bülow" year after year. Jeffery Dahmer sells well on DVD at Amazon. It's good to own intellectual property. It won't date. I think I'll make it an even 50 minutes - like Planet Earth,


Kristen snaps director (me) and star (Jamie) relaxing after the screening.

DV Mag has been running my SuperMeet blogas their main feature article for well over a week. It was only meant for their ephemeral "Almost Live from NAB Blog." I wrote it all at the Las Vegas airport's Burger King place right next to the boarding gate. Stopped writing when I had to board. I left a speaker out. He was only talking about film apps. on iPhones. Yawn.

I think (for me) if you write very fast the truth comes out better. So I thought he shot with a RED One - wrong -I should have written Sony F800 (a $42,000 camera) it didn't really spoil my story which was my impressions of the night. My impression was a RED camera. Same concept - I thought mixing a $42,000 with a $2,000 camera for a multi-cam shoot was just nuts. Whether it was a RED or a Sony makes no difference.

The Monday after the screening T & I were wiped out. Then we both went down with it. Cough. Cough.

I finish two more pieces for DV mag. make DVDs for various clients - post & deliver.I'll send Jamie, Chris & Karen, John Palmer some copies of the Sonoma version.

Yesterday and today, the mammoth task of moving 12 web sites from one server to a bigger, faster one. A truly scary moment to remote switch the old server off. Just a mouse click and that's it - gone! Hey I got $42 back and have four times more memory.

T has been flat out completing Rough Linen orders. Last ones today. I will post them now.

Puff, puff - just back from the PO & bank. Just one clerk at the PO office - an unhappy place in contrast to Chase Bank with four tellers all smiling. Two hours of my life just wasted, I need a drink.

Tomorrow Peter Pan - stay tuned!

Plan B

TGI Friday: With NAB starting on Sunday, my 2-59 plans are thwarted. So today a big clean up of the usual boring things - dish washing, taking out garbage, clothes washing (Tricia is in Australia looking after her mother). In the middle of this life style threatening routine, an email pops up from WildCare. They need urgent help.

Any excuse and I'm outa here. Minutes later I'm at WildCare loading up Alison's Windows laptop with a video I shot last year. Yes, she will be a 2-59er but not today. A great 2-59 subject - if only I had more time. Good to get out into a different world - WildCare is certainly that.

Later in the day, I collect Rod Allen from Larkspur ferry terminal. Rod is a great friend. He laughs at my jokes. He comes from broadcasting in London but was never tainted with "elitism" - a trait common with BBC & ITV producers. He was owner and editor of Broadcast magazine and later my sales agent for my indie documentaries. Sold "von Bulow" to the Discovery Channel for $65,000. I made it for $5,000. He is a sort of hero of mine - Rod - not von Bulow.

Last year post Burning Man, he agreed to cut my Pinot film from 93 minutes to 52, a task I could never do myself. What - throw out 40 minutes of pure brilliance! He says I'll hate it. Frankly, I don't care, I just want to sell it - and I've always admired his ability as an editor - so his choices will be good ones. So easy to get wrapped up in one's on pet favorites.

As we were having dinner with Nicola that night (she worked with Rod at Broadcast magazine) I thought it was better to wait until Saturday to see Rod's changes to my masterpiece -

which 40 minutes has he deleted?

As we were leaving for Nicola in Mill Valley, I received an email from a DV mag. reader commenting on my Flip camera article. Huh? Flip camera article? I wrote that four months ago - it hadn't made publication and I assumed that David Williams, the editor, had scrapped it. I mean, you really can't write and say "was it that bad?"

Surprise! There it is on the web but as part one of a series. Looks as though there will be another five episodes. I have no idea if it will appear in print as well. Read it here.

Great dinner with Nicola, who was the cook for The Rolling Stones. She now runs a market research and brand strategy company here in SF.

I was saying that one of the reasons I threw caution to the wind while I was in London was I had PLAN B - if it all got too awful, I would simply return to my home town Sydney, Australia.

Nicola is leaving the USA returning for "two years" to London with her two very American teenager children. She feels they need a European experience. I can understand that. Says that in a way this change is her own PLAN B.

Champions of Hope

The last two days have been editing 3 x 5 minute videos for the COH awards tomorrow night.

Cutting 15 minutes in a day is a slog - almost every shot was green screen - which slows things down. I try to keep it simple but this job needed 8 layers of video. Each five minutes took an hour to render. And then I had to tweak each and every green screen shot and render again.

click to enlarge photo

Today I made the DVD and delivered it to John in San Francisco. When I got back I was completely wiped out.

I had a visit to see the "wound nurse" at Kaiser. I arrived 15 mins early - she was 45 mins late (no "sorry to keep you waiting") - with a little shopping on the way home. Bang! My afternoon was gone.

I made 10 copies of Pinot to hand out at the festival and then the Mac went funny with error 5501 messages. Huh?

Thank god for pitta, hummus and red wine.

Here are the videos I uploaded just before midnight on Wednesday -

Mapes

Young

Amend

Delivered

This morning we drove to Sonoma with Blu-ray, BetaSP & DVD copies and handed them personally to the organizers. I hope they show the Blu-ray in HD.

Afterwards, we lunched in the square with chicken, french bread and beer.

Tonight, Tricia flies to visit her 88 year old mother who is in hospital in Australia. She's back April 16.

Sonoma Film Festival

Just received the official "grid" for the festival. Here's Sunday April 18. The day our Pinot film is screened. There's a Q & A afterwards.

Trailers and info here

http://www.sonomadreams.com/

Sunday - NAB a week away

I started this 2-59 project to fill in "empty" days (I'd just had a week's shoot and edit cancelled at a day's notice.)

Now I'm too busy to touch it. Pity. But I'll be back.

Friday and this weekend has been tied up with getting a decent viewing copy of our Pinot epic for the Sonoma Film Festival. They wanted BetaSP. Should be easy as George has one... read on

Thursday/ Friday I make a standard definition copy from my High Def. Yuk! I LOVE HD.

Friday I went to George & Cissy's office with a FireWire drive and a 90 minutes Beta tape to make a BetaSP copy. It always amazes me how differently people do things. I could not work out the setup at George's. The good news was that his BetaSP deck is wired in as component video not composite. Makes a HUGE difference.

The bad news was that the Final Cut Pro countdown clock had a circle that looked like a squashed football - yet the movie itself looked OK - though a bit soft. But a worry. Hmm... Too many bad screening in my past lives.

I guess it is only the monitoring as it looked great on the FCP monitor. I sat there worrying for 75 minutes - then checked - yep it was definitely 16:9 but the countdown was wrong. I can imagine the projections getting the clock right and the main movie wrong. I hope there's a rehearsal. The last screening I had at DV Expo in Pasadena, there was NO ONE working the HD projector. I just had a DVD stop start remote control. I think it went OK - "think" as I was on stage and couldn't see the screen. Back to george's place:

So I fiddled and discovered the the FCP setting - Anamorphic TICK was missing.

That fixed it. Now to re transfer the whole stupid thing. I started it said goodbye to my daughter and left it running - will collect on Monday. Can't sit through another 75 minutes. I used to make 30 sec commercials. There were benefits.

Friday night and Saturday morning (was it only yesterday?) I thought I'd make a Blu-ray copy. It's only 6 months since I made my last Blu-ray but I was totally lost. Adobe's Encore is not DVD Studio Pro and very twitchy.

I made three dud Blu-rays!!! Each one took two hours to burn, so I was pretty upset at 1:00 pm. Six hours down the drain. Not only that, they were my last BD discs!

I looked everywhere. Nope - no more Blu-ray blanks. So we went to Office Depot where they had RE-WRITABLE blanks @ only $14. 00 ( a bargain as their write once were $11.00 - I buy them on line at under $3.00 ).

We lunched at BaJa Fresh in Corte Madera shopping mall and later Tricia had an eye exam and bought new glasses as her own were lost. She looks great!

Back home, I started from scratch with Encore - used a different start button and burned another Blu-ray. Wow! It works. The drag is - it takes 2 hours to find out. I though I'd better check it right through. Put it on our 8 ft screen. Looked great!

After a while it got dark - the film still running - our sons arrived for dinner. "It's out of sync," shouted Felix.

And he was right. Shit! Back to the drawing board.

Today - I looked at it. Nipped a frame out here and add two there. But last night it was a good four frames out. Huh??? Maybe our system... It's a worry.

Now making yet another Blu-ray. Sigh.

Just projected it. Yep - it still looks a wee bit out of sync - but then "An Education" which we saw earlier wasn't exactly in sync. Maybe our projection system delays the component video. Weird. Anyhow I suspect they'll run the BetaSP.