Life

Life

Exciting times…

A couple of big time events are currently happening for me. The first one is the premiere of Hellphone has been announced for November 16th at the Carousel in Greensboro. It’s a full length feature that I operated second camera on last summer. It’s a small budget film with big time special effects, great performances and great action. Be sure to catch it.

The other exciting event is that I’m the director of photography for the latest web series episode of Roomies. Roomies is a comedy, created by Slade Blackburn, using puppets and is in the vein of South Park. It’s one of the funniest series on the internet and I’m extremely excited to be shooting this. This will be the first episode of Roomies in HD! Check out Roomies on youtube and be sure to subscribe to Jive Mechanic Films website. Hopefully, the latest episode will be up within the next several months. Stay tuned!

The Big Apple

I recently returned from a vacation to New York City and while I had an awesome time, I didn’t get to do as much film making / photography as I wanted to. I’ve been dying to do time lapse of the Brooklyn Bridge, but circumstances and miserable heat defeated my ambition. It’s tough to do photography excursions when you’re with other people that don’t want to wait around while you try to compose the perfect shot. If you’re going to shoot NYC, then you just have to plan on having several days for yourself and going at it.

Although the heat was unbearable for most of the trip, I did have a great time. And my most memorable moment came when I met my favorite young actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt at The National concert.  He was extremely nice and cordial. Most people know him as the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun, but he’s made many great movies. His most recent is this summer’s blockbuster of Inception, which he shines in along with Tom Hardy. If you really want to see some great movies with him then go rent Manic, Brick, Mysterious Skin and The Lookout to name a few. He shines in every one of them. There’s also a rumor that he’s been tagged to play The Riddler in the upcoming Batman movie. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

The photo below was created by taking three different shots and stitching them together with Photoshop. Probably the only good photo I took while in NY, but not portfolio worthy. I’ve seen many just like it. I guess I’ll just have to make another trip to NY and shoot it proper. Hopefully, from a helicopter.

This one is just messing around with color and light:

Please click on images to enlarge.

“I love your frame”

“I love your frame,” isn’t something you want to hear when turning in a piece of artwork, but that’s the comment I received today when I turned my photos in for this Friday’s Spring for Art fundraiser in downtown Winston-Salem. If anyone is in the area and enjoys art, you might want to come out. It’s $50 for non-members.

I recently finished a major computer upgrade from 32 to 64 bit processing. Of course, it didn’t go without hitches. The first problem I had was figuring out how to make a raid system. My motherboard has specific SATA slots for it and trying to fit six hard drives and two optical drives isn’t easy even with an over-sized computer case. Fortunately, after harassing my friend for technical advice, I was able to overcome the problems and now have a RAID 5 system in place. My next problem was with Windows 7. I wasn’t aware that if you make changes to your computer it won’t let you use the product key to register because it thinks it’s on a different computer. After an hour-long phone conversation with a customer service rep, I was able to get another product key and register Windows 7 64 bit. After that, I thought I was free and clear, but my computer was acting very strange. It was taking over ten to fifteen minutes to reboot and sometimes it wouldn’t reboot at all. I finally diagnosed the problem that it was reading a different version of Windows on my old hard drive and was merging the two together forcing the long reboot. I had forgotten to format the hard drive because I was on the phone with the customer service rep. So I wiped the hard drive, reinstalled Windows 7 and was good to go.

Garden fun.

I just spent the last three hours video taping my friend’s amazing backyard. I probably won’t get the video done until next weekend as I have one more week-long visit to the clinic. (More about the clinic coming in the next blog.) I have about a half-dozen friends with amazing gardens and I’d like to capture them all. I love watching HGTV and getting all kinds of inspirational ideas about gardening and homes. I’d like to add a macro lens sometime in the near future so I can get really close to animal and plant life. If anyone has any suggestions of a quality macro lens, please let me know.

I’m off to do some editing, but here’s some samples from the garden.

Hello world!

Hello. I plan on talking about everything and anything that I want to. Mostly about films, filmmaking, music, and photography.

I’m still trying to work out the kinks in WordPress. I’ve been told by many people it’s great and most of the sites I enjoy are WordPress sites.

On a side note, I just saw Kick-Ass today and it’s a must see. Not for the squeamish though.