Mux013: Black Friday Schizomix

If the sudden mad rush of the holiday season had a part-rock, part-slow, part-obligatory-guilty-pleasure-Chinese-Democracy-song, part-weird soundtrack, this might be it:

1. Jay Reatard - Blood Visions
   
2. Guns N' Roses - Chinese Democracy
   
3. Wolfmother - Joker and the Thief
   
4. Marnie Stern - The Package Is Wrapped
   
5. Weezer - Pork and Beans
   
6. Final Fantasy - This Lamb Sells Condos
   
7. Blitzen Trapper - Not Your Lover
   
8. Rogue Wave - Harmonium
   
9. Deerhunter - Agoraphobia
   
10. Brendan Canning - Hit the Wall
    
11. Nirvana - All Apologies
    
12. Radiohead - Let Down

The greatest day... Part II

I woke up at 4:45 a.m., drove to my local, overpacked Best Buy to look for a director's cut of The New World. Never mind that

• I'd have to elbow against insane Black Friday shoppers
  
• That none of said shoppers would possibly be interested in an hour-longer director's cut of a Terrence Malick film that they disliked in the first place
  
• The DVD was released in October and wasn't a wicked insane deal today
  
• I could be a rational human being and just get it off Amazon for the same price and not have to get near any holiday-shopping mouth-breathers

And yeah, Best Buy didn't have it, even though there website says it's in stock, just not where (other than somewhere in the Twin Cities metro area), and after witnessing the throng (the throng, people!) there (and inventing my own parking spot in the stuffed lot), and after seeing that Target didn't have its shit together and wasn't yet open at its promised 5 a.m., I called it quits and went for the Amazon option.

I was also planning to go to Walmart, but I decided I didn't want to get ringworm.

But if that's not passion for filmmaking if I venture out on the most dreadful retail day of the year for a director's cut of a Terrence Malick film, I don't know what is. Maybe if I had flown to the Toronto Film Festival months back to see Steven Soderbergh's Che in full (and not broken into a two-parter) and in live quality, and not my video-taped pirate that finished overnight.

But why all this talk of films when I still have a long leg of filmmaking to go? If I haven't been rattlesnaked for the Nth time, today is the holy day my deck returns and I begin stuffing my 1 TB external drive with delicious, relatively-uncompressed Transmissions DV footage.

The greatest day in the history of film...

...will be tomorrow. Because:

• My pirate download of Steven Soderbergh's The Argentine (part 1 of his two Che films) will be ready to watch
  
• My pirate download of Stanley Kubrick's Fear and Desire and his short documentaries The Seafarers and Flying Padre will be ready to watch, along with a PDF of his finished-but-not-shot Napoleon script
  
• Out of blind chance, I Wikipedia'd Terrence Malick and discovered that a 172-minute cut of The New World (one of my favorite films) is out on DVD and all the stores have it even though tomorrow will be an insane day to make a normal purchase but at least I can wake up at like 5 a.m. to go get it
  
• I'll probably get my deck back and can start editing Transmissions

Influences

Okay okay okay. I might've overreacted in that last post. Even though RS keeps changing the date of when I'll get my precious deck back. It was supposed to be Monday, now Friday (e.g. two days from now).

Like I've mentioned before: I'm a filmmaker, and, without a film to make, what am I supposed to do? Read a book? Buy the new Guitar Hero with the zero dollars I have? Try this "relaxing" thing I've heard others talk about? Start writing my new script at the potential cost of getting my head out of Transmissions mode?

So instead, I'll keep the trend going of teasing the hell out of Transmissions. No, I won't post a non-related teaser (since, as Braden jokingly described to a group of friends at a bar, that, based on my Facebook teaser trailer, the film is about systematically lowering myself in a pneumatic office chair), but I'll post a list of films that, dare I say, somewhat influenced my film. But since I like to delude myself into self-labeling that I'm a visionary who has no influence but himself, I'll preface this list with that statement. So, if you like these movies (that, subject-matter-wise, mostly have absolutely nothing to do with Transmissions), you might like mine:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
  
• The Conversation
  
• Elephant
  
• Half Nelson
  
• Good Night, And Good Luck
  
• In The Company of Men
  
• Primer
  
• Schizopolis
  
• There Will Be Blood
  
• The Wire

Deck Crisis 2008: Boycott RadioShack

RadioShack Houston called. Good news, bad news.

The Good: They can fix my deck. I'll have it back "no later than Monday."

The Bad: $120 to fix it. For a used deck that I bought for $500. That worked perfectly fine until an act of god wrecked the power supply or something.

What gets my goat: I got this estimate yesterday (or Thursday; the days just blur together), and the plant said they didn't get the deck until recently. So either RadioShack Matt (or Mike) was a rattlesnake and kept my deck on a shelf, not shipping it "as soon as possible," making the promised timeline of "five to ten business days" bloat into more than that. So, when the plant got my deck the other day and made the estimate, it's something they can do, apparently, quite quickly (if the "no later than Monday" statement can be believed), but yet requires $120 for parts/labor/coffee breaks/ham sandwiches.

I tell myself: It could be worse... But it could be a hell of a lot better.

So unless everything goes smoothly from now, RadioShack corporate is going to get a strongly-worded letter from me, "a member of the digital filmmaking community." And said digital filmmaker is very vocal (e.g. via blogging) and will give the following words of warning to every filmmaker he ever meets:

Do not trust RadioShack with repairing your gear. Even when told that time is extremely important, they will not respect your concerns, and you will not be contacted by them concerning your equipment unless you do so yourself, repeatedly. Furthermore, in lieu of these shenanigans, do not shop at RadioShack. Do not recommend RadioShack to others. In general, whenever RadioShack is mentioned in casual conversation over, say, an appetizer party consisting entirely of deviled eggs, tell all others within earshot that RadioShack is not to be trusted, and that they shouldn't get your hard-earned money, and they definitely shouldn't get their hands on your precious, time-sensitive filmmaking equipment.

I'll definitely class it up before I send some type of letter as such. This isn't a mission to get some apology or anything; I'm genuinely frustrated with their terrible service, and my film has been delayed at least a week (even when factoring in their "five to ten business days" estimate) needlessly. A week, of course, in Filmmaking-Time is equivalent to three months of Human Time.

But I get my deck back on Monday. That is, if the rattlesnakes can be trusted.

Chinese Democracy

Yeah, I've listened to Chinese Democracy. Hell, you can stream the whole thing off the band's MySpace, and it's not hard to find a leak link; finding one with decent-quality files that are not demos, are not the CD live tour, and are properly sequenced, however, is.

So, my initial thought:

Seventeen years for this?

It's not a bad album. But not a great one. For me, at least. Near the head of the Wikipedia page, it lists that the production costs of Chinese Democracy makes it the most expensive album ever made. Far eclipsing My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, etc. But then I thought: Should I give a shit, given that my favorite bands the past year have been No Age and Jay Reatard, who record on old equipment in their houses and have a lot of noisy grit on their sound? And whose pop-infused noise rock is much more entertaining than my first run-through of Chinese Democracy?

But anyway, it prompted a few thoughts. Seventeen years. Who can top that? Radiohead takes its time to make an album; three years between OK Computer and Kid A, then four between Hail to the Thief and the surprise In Rainbows. But that's not even close.

Then, of course, the obvious came to mind: Kevin Shield's yearly promise that a new My Bloody Valentine record is coming out within the year, which he says with the reliably of the "Free Beer Tomorrow" sign outside every dive. Given Loveless dropped in 1991, and given that it's safe to assume that it won't materialize this year (unless Shields pulls a Radiohead), that will make it eighteen years at a 1991-2009 minimum.

My listen of Chinese Democracy was, like many, I assume, rooted in curiosity: what does a cooking-for-seventeen-years album sound like? I'm not a big GnR fan. Sure, I like "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Sweet Child of Mine" as much as the next bro (and they're fun to play in Guitar Hero III and II, respectively). But I never polished off Appetite For Destruction and pined for more. So I guess I'm in the rare position to have an opinion of this album with no hype, no expectation.

And, upon first listen, I think it's okay.

Another story, though, will be my reaction to the next My Bloody Valentine album. Granted, I've only been a fan since 2004, so I haven't been biting my fingernails about it since '91. But Loveless is my favorite album, and I don't know if I want a rehash or something to blow my mind in a different way.

(Edit: Before writing this, I completely forgot about the monumental gap between the planned release of Brian Wilson/The Beach Boy's Smile and its release, but that doesn't count, since Smile was never in full-blown production. I think.)

Semi-progress semi-report

My edit test of that 2004 film, Old War, is nearing its close as I piece together a last few mini-scenes. I now have a much more solid grasp on Final Cut, and with my 1 TB hard drive all hooked up and pretty (and so smooth to the touch), all I need is my deck back from the shop. Which I haven't heard from; not even a price estimate.

But I will stay positive! Positive!

Anyhow, the old film I'm cutting is pretty interesting. All my old shot lists are at the bottom of my "Old War grave" (a big box of props, fake guns, and scripts in my closet), and I didn't slate anything, so other than my hazy memory of the script (and my equally-hazy memory of what was shot and what wasn't), I'm sort of winging it. The results are interesting; since I'm just stringing together clips for a Final Cut exercise and to give to one of the Old War actors, I'm cherry-picking the best parts and essentially re-writing the scripts so it's, you know, cooler.

I also recorded some original music for it that really punches it up, despite my four-years-ago purist mindset that the film would have no music. I give myself the excuse because the heavy audio filter I use to take out nearby-freeway drones takes out all the low frequencies, and I fill that in with music.

I guess I'm just teasing everything now: a fully-shot feature that, for the most part, I intend to finish completely before expending the effort on a proper teaser/trailer, and cutting an old film that I don't want to post yet. That doesn't matter; I just want to document little bits and pieces of what it's like for a no-budget filmmaker (which involves, as I've mentioned previously, gear that is literally taped and/or glued together in order for it to work), and how I cobble together some semblance of a story from bits and pieces that, by themselves, mean nothing.

Mux012: November 2008

Now some time since Dear Science came out, I finally figured out that the only way to properly include "Halfway Home" on any mix is to take the album's advice and stick that cut at the top. A little awkward transitioning into a Jay Reatard song, but when is that ever easy? "Always Wanting More" has such a triumphant riff that I can't deny it the eternal glory of finding its way onto JDK's Mux012. And while I'm still enjoying Deerhunter's Microcastle in its entirety, I'll save some of its better standalone tracks for later, and here I'll offer up the shoegaze jam "Vox Celeste," one of the few accessible songs off Weird Era Cont., Microcastle's ugly b-sides cousin that masquerades as an "album."

Here's my November mix/mux/muxtape/whatever and the tracks:

1. TV on the Radio - Halfway Home
   
2. Jay Reatard - Always Wanting More
   
3. Deerhunter - Vox Celeste
   
4. The Fiery Furnaces - Tropical Ice-Land
   
5. School of Seven Bells - Half Asleep
   
6. Born Ruffians - Sole Brother (Daytrotter Session)
   
7. Johnny and the Moon - Green Rocky Road
   
8. Blitzen Trapper - Furr
   
9. The Arcade Fire - Antichrist Television Blues
   
10. Rogue Wave - Publish My Love
    
11. Los Campesinos! - Don't Tell Me To Do The Math(s)
    
12. Marnie Stern - The Devil is in the Details

The slippery slope

I'm cutting together some old footage captured through my unreliable camera while waiting for my deck to come back from the shop. The footage is from a 2004 effort that I aborted about a third of the way through. Just for the sake of posterity, I'm cutting together a few scenes for myself and the other actor involved; that, and to strengthen my grasp on Final Cut.

I'm satisfied with the images I get with my Canon GL2 mini DV cam. But seeing how this is a Brave New Digital World, I decided to mess with some filters and see if I could find something unobtrusive that would make the visuals a little cooler and, thus, mask the potential discovery made by the viewer that the film is not very good.

Regardless, the results:


Old War filter test from Jack Kentala on Vimeo.

Now that I can see what simple, elegant stuff I can do, I'm getting worried that I'll want to overdo it on Transmissions. I could see myself finishing the picture cut and sound design, and then spending far too long doing a final color/contrast past. I just have to decide how long I want to ride this slippery slope.

The slippery slope

I'm cutting together some old footage captured through my unreliable camera while waiting for my deck to come back from the shop. The footage is from a 2004 effort that I aborted about a third of the way through. Just for the sake of posterity, I'm cutting together a few scenes for myself and the other actor involved; that, and to strengthen my grasp on Final Cut.

I'm satisfied with the images I get with my Canon GL2 mini DV cam. But seeing how this is a Brave New Digital World, I decided to mess with some filters and see if I could find something unobtrusive that would make the visuals a little cooler and, thus, mask the potential discovery made by the viewer that the film is not very good.

Regardless, the results:


Old War filter test from Jack Kentala on Vimeo.

Now that I can see what simple, elegant stuff I can do, I'm getting worried that I'll want to overdo it on Transmissions. I could see myself finishing the picture cut and sound design, and then spending far too long doing a final color/contrast past. I just have to decide how long I want to ride this slippery slope.

The feel-good movie of the century

Deck Crisis 2008 Part III

Looks like my deck will be repaired after all. Hopefully. RadioShack Mike called the RS repair center and they said they work on my model of DV deck. Said he can't guarantee they'll fix it once the get it in but said they usually do if they accept the initial inquiry. It just seems to be a power supply issue, not a tape drive issue, so I don't think it's a problem super-specific to my years-old deck.

Good thing it could work out. I called up a local film equipment place, and they rent out decks for $125 a day or $375 per week. Hella expensive considering I bought mine for the price of four days' rental. I might ask if they do dubs, since my deck can't slave timecode and I'm not 100% comfortable capturing my masters. I'm not one to fall into that sort of fringe paranoia (like backing up the back-up of the initial back-up, mostly since I just back up my project files, and recapturing logged clips wouldn't be any more stressful than having a drive crash), but accidents happen; case in point, my tripod, camera, and deck have all broke or malfunctioned during making this film. If I get to a point of desperation, I can send the tapes to my Post Production Adviser in Chicago and she could make timecode-slaved dubs at her workplace, probably. Or have her bring them to my alma mater, Columbia College, and use her boss's clout (as part of the faculty) to get the job done. For free. (Barring the fact that the years of nasty tapes run through their decks have put goobers on most of my personal tapes I've run through them.)

Because, like all films, this is just a money thing. For the physical production of the film, my only expenses were clothes (much of which was unnecessary), DV tapes, and a new tripod, all of which totaled under $200. (Barring the cost of the Canon GL2 I have, which I bought in 2003 for about $2300 and have a somewhat-falling-apart shotgun mic attachment that was $150 and a "wide angle adapter" that cost $200.) People all talk about how the Digital Age of filmmaking makes everything cheap. True to a point. Production is cheaper, yeah, but post? So far, my editing expensive have been a $2500 iMac, $200 Final Cut Express (e.g. Final Cut Gimped), a $500 deck (and an unknown price to repair it that I hope is under $100), and a $220 external hard drive.

Granted, I'll be using all that stuff for future work, so the next thing I have in mind, assuming I shoot it on my current camera (though I think it's time for an upgrade to at least something 24P capable), could cost under $200. However, I'd probably involve some other people, so add in food and whatnot and it'd probably bloat up to $500. But that's cheap for a feature. And besides, what the hell else am I going to spend my money on?

I'm spying on you / Deck Crisis 2008 cont.

My cookies know where you live. Nothing sinister, but Google Analytics drops a few breadcrumbs (cookie crumbs, I suppose) and, for the few visitors I get to this not-even-officially-official unpublicized blog, I have a pretty good idea of who's reading.

So I just want to give a shout-out to my main man in Lincolnwood, Illinois, who I haven't talked to since I disappeared from Chicago. Unless, of course, it's someone else from there who wasn't the guy who starred in my Production II epic. If it is, I'm sure I can find a part for you in a future project. And not just so I can claim an ethnically-diverse cast; you've got a good neutral look, and that counts a lot for A Jack Kentala Film.

In other news: No word yet on my deck. I'm waiting for some gloom and/or doom, since if RadioShack's repair place can't work on my obsolete deck, then I assume most/all places can't/won't/don't want to try to fix it. However, right now I'm capturing some old timecode-break-riddled tapes off my camera, and it seems to work fine. I just have the fringe paranoia of it eating my tapes, but I think normal playback and frame-by-frame scrubbing doesn't do much harm.

But I need all the tapes rewound to the start (and I think they are) if I just crash capture, and I'd have to do the whole tape instead of breaking it into separate load-in chunks or, dare I suggest, select takes. And if I needed to rewind the tapes, well, I could do it by hand...? Probably isn't a good idea to do the full tapes, anyway, since there's a lot of fat to trim, namely so I can get it all to fit on a one terabyte drive.

Regardless, the dark unending blackness of yesterday has receded, and I ultimately have some multiple last-resort options if my deck is toast.

The KORG "game" on Nintendo DS

Forget The Wire season 5 on DVD, this is what I want grandma to get me for Christmas:

True, I've been bumping some club trax with my newfound GarageBand interest, but it's always fun to add some new sounds to my arsenal. So look out MSTRKRFT, Crystal Castles, Dan Deacon, Simian Mobile Disco, Justice, and all you electro kidz.

Malfunctions / Acts of god

Filming wrapped. Mandatory self-imposed break.

But I just had to get started, right? At least, working on a small part of the film before I order my 1 TB external drive to house all my captured media culled from 21 hours of mini DV tape.

So this morning I plugged in my newly-bought-off eBay, no-longer-in-production mini DV deck. A little blue spark-flash came by the spot where I plugged it in. No big deal; happened a few times; happens with a lot of electronics.

But then the deck's fan didn't start up. And, when I pressed the power button, it gave me no LCD display, no power, no nothing.

Long, boring, crestfallen, troubleshooting, troubleshot story short: Thought it was the fuse once I popped the case, then thought otherwise, and the guy at RadioShack confirmed and said, Yeah, I don't think so. So now he'll call up the Fort Worth repair center tomorrow and see if they can work on my model. A who-the-hell-knows-how-old-it-is mini DV deck. And, prior to this morning, it worked perfectly fine. Total mystery. To me, at least.

I've had a dark look on my face all day, and I want to have some optimism, but my twelfth sense tells me that the center won't be "authorized" to work on such an obsolete deck.

For a moment, let's indulge my gloominess, and ignore the fact that I planned and shot an entire feature film almost entirely by myself ("almost" because of a few short voice samples supplied by friends and family) that looks and feels like how I wanted it, want it to look and feel. So, to date, here's what's gone wrong with the project:

• Multiple delays that made it nearly impossible to pin down exact shooting dates
  
• Minor electrocution during test shoots
  
• Camera tape drive malfunction (which prompted the purpose of the mini DV deck)
  
• Old, semi-broken tripod replaced with a "new" tripod that arrived with a foot broken off (and semi-successfully superglued back on) and a bubble level that, to my experience, doesn't level for shit
  
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 eliminating all compatibility with my old sound card
  
• Finding out my deck can't slave timecode, making cloned dubs out of my immediate reach
  
• Spending too much money

But, obviously, nothing is going to stop me from finishing this film. I just hope my prospective career doesn't involve me becoming my filmmaking generation's Terry Gilliam (see: Lost in La Mancha).

Obligatory wrap post

6 a.m. wake-up, 6:30 car-rearranging, and four precision driving takes from 7 until 8. I think I worried the neighbors with a suspicious number of garage-door openings and closings. But that was the last shot, and Transmissions is wrapped on this beautiful snowy morning.

Still a long way to go, though. I don't say that with dread, but with optimism. I love editing, and once I get a massive hard drive to store my 21 hours of footage, I can finally put all the pieces together and tell this story.

Obligatory wrap post

6 a.m. wake-up, 6:30 car-rearranging, and four precision driving takes from 7 until 8. I think I worried the neighbors with a suspicious number of garage-door openings and closings. But that was the last shot, and Transmissions is wrapped on this beautiful snowy morning.

Still a long way to go, though. I don't say that with dread, but with optimism. I love editing, and once I get a massive hard drive to store my 21 hours of footage, I can finally put all the pieces together and tell this story.

Obligatory Obama post... with video!

Nothing new if you're my Facebook friend:

Progress report

One weird thing about shooting:

There's a lot of downtime where I'm moving stuff, hauling stuff, carrying stuff, arranging stuff, or doing something that doesn't require 100% of my brainpower. What usually happens is that I get a song stuck in my head. Random songs. In particular, I end up getting songs I barely even know caught in my mind; and furthermore, since I don't know these songs well, I make them up as I sing along. Obviously, this is a bit of a moot point, since I don't have any audio files to demonstrate this strange occurrence... nor would I really want to share said audio files.

A small selection of said songs:

• The Beach Boys - Wouldn't It Be Nice
  
• Blitzen Trapper - Not Your Lover
  
• The Fiery Furnaces - Tropical Ice-Land
  
• The Hold Steady - The Chillout Tent

Also, the end of shooting is in sight. Right now I'm doing a long sequence that happens, more or less, in real time. So when I get back to shooting at around 2 p.m., the scene takes place at 2 p.m. in film-time. I won't have to keep changing my watch or clocks! And shooting in the daytime is better than waiting for nightfall and not finishing until three or four a.m.

But, in terms of having shot all shots of the nine parts of Transmissions:

1. Transmission 1 - Done
   
2. Transmission 2 - Done
   
3. Transmission 3 - Done
   
4. Transmission 4 - Done
   
5. Transmission 5 - Done
   
6. Transmission 6 - Done
   
7. Transmission 7 - Shooting until Thursday
   
8. Transmission 8 - Done
   
9. Transmission 9 - Three shots on Friday morning

Granted, it's far from over. But I've been working on this since July, so it's definitely been a long time living with this project day in, day out for months.

Progress report

One weird thing about shooting:

There's a lot of downtime where I'm moving stuff, hauling stuff, carrying stuff, arranging stuff, or doing something that doesn't require 100% of my brainpower. What usually happens is that I get a song stuck in my head. Random songs. In particular, I end up getting songs I barely even know caught in my mind; and furthermore, since I don't know these songs well, I make them up as I sing along. Obviously, this is a bit of a moot point, since I don't have any audio files to demonstrate this strange occurrence... nor would I really want to share said audio files.

A small selection of said songs:

• The Beach Boys - Wouldn't It Be Nice
  
• Blitzen Trapper - Not Your Lover
  
• The Fiery Furnaces - Tropical Ice-Land
  
• The Hold Steady - The Chillout Tent

Also, the end of shooting is in sight. Right now I'm doing a long sequence that happens, more or less, in real time. So when I get back to shooting at around 2 p.m., the scene takes place at 2 p.m. in film-time. I won't have to keep changing my watch or clocks! And shooting in the daytime is better than waiting for nightfall and not finishing until three or four a.m.

But, in terms of having shot all shots of the nine parts of Transmissions:

1. Transmission 1 - Done
   
2. Transmission 2 - Done
   
3. Transmission 3 - Done
   
4. Transmission 4 - Done
   
5. Transmission 5 - Done
   
6. Transmission 6 - Done
   
7. Transmission 7 - Shooting until Thursday
   
8. Transmission 8 - Done
   
9. Transmission 9 - Three shots on Friday morning

Granted, it's far from over. But I've been working on this since July, so it's definitely been a long time living with this project day in, day out for months.