Tech Writ
Dead Reckoning Distribution Challenges
This morning I woke to another notice by Oneload.com that I'm in violation of their terms of service. I say "another" because it's the second time I've had this happen, the first being Dailymotion.com because we had a web link at the end of our video. I'm guessing that's the reason this time around but I'm waiting to hear from them about that. Next season, we're converting everything to a one hour talk/interview show on the web. We're going to break each episode up into individual segments. Each segment runs about 15-20 minutes long and each week will have 4-5 segments. This by itself limits the channels because only a handful of channels allow for videos that long, in that amount. An obvious solution is to self-host everything using Amazon S3 or something, and put out trailers and teasers and hope to drive people back to our website. This isn't something we want to do because one of our goals is to be where the people are and the people are on YouTube, Facebook, etc. The other major problem as I started out with above is that most of these outlets won't let you upload a video if there's a …
Read moreNo Distributors Welcome Here
The title of this post is rather tongue-in-cheek. It is in fact somewhat true though. In addition to some of the doc development I've been doing and networking and building partnerships for the film stuff, I've partnered with long-time friend and theologian Dr. Brian Mattson to launch the brand Dead Reckoning. We did some searching and interestingly enough, nobody had any specific brand associated with it so we filed our trademark application and started producing content. The content has no established distributors or established audience. Here's the deal... The particular content is two Christians doing a combo of entertainment and serious discussion around cultural engagement. We started with a 5-7 minute web commentary at the beginning of the year on Christian theology and its applicability to culture. When feedback started coming in that people wanted to see more interaction, we decided to try our hand at a podcast so we sat down over the course of a month and put a podcast format, content and guest list together. We finished episode 3 of the podcast last week and it's been very well received. Between Brian's educated pedigree and my lack thereof and off-color remarks and commentary with a mix of …
Read moreProduction & Post for Dead Reckoning.TV
I'm producing a new webseries for Red Futon Films called Dead Reckoning.TV. It's a pretty straight-forward web-commentary. From a philosophical point of view, we wanted the online audience to feel like they're sitting at the table with us right next to me so Brian will look back and forth from me to the camera. I'm the only one doing everything but I think the results are outstanding both for the content as well as the medium. I originally wanted to do a dual take single cam shoot on the Ikonoskop but my Canon T2i finally hailed on a wedding photo shoot so I picked up a Nikon D800 and then opted to do a dual camera, dual take shoot with a buddy's 5D2 kit. Brian's camera is the D800 with a Zeiss ZF 50mm at F/4. The wide open/close segments are the 5D2 with a Zeiss ZF 21mm at F/2.8. We chose the location for the background as well as to maximize the natural light coming out of the large window'd garage door on Brian. To assist with the natural lighting, we've got a Nori reflective bounce off the window on to mostly Brian as well as an LED off a Nori …
Read moreReflections on the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival
This is a rather long post, but I have lots of relevant thoughts worth noting I think. I won’t lie, I probably wouldn’t have gone had I not been a semi-finalist. I’m glad I went though for a few reasons the foremost of which is I met some really great folks, the foremost of which was director Brian Ivie who’s outstanding film, The Dropbox won Best of Festival. It was great to know him over the course of a days and I look forward to the opportunity of collaboration in the future. As a Christian who grew up in most of this circle but since have ‘grown’ out of it for lack of a better term, I was skeptical about the fare being offered on the screens. To put it nicely, the Christian market hasn’t been known to put out exceptional work. The films here only had a few exceptions to this assumption. Of course, there was The Dropbox which I went into this highly expectant to see and wasn’t disappointed. Another was Ru: Water is Life. A twenty-minute, dialogue-less short doc that ended up taking home the runner-up category for best doc. I wasn’t surprised after I watched this earlier in …
Read moreA Split Life
I feel like for good and for bad that most of my professional life is split. In this corner is my specialty finance business and it's related startups. And in this corner is my film studio and creative work. These two rarely battle each other and while there are very close similarities, they are also the equivalent of being on two different planets. This is only highlighted by my recent move of the finance business from Google Apps to Microsoft Office365. I'll highlight these comparisons below: Similarities: Executive management creative and business roles Identify market gaps and develop solutions to fill gaps Identify talent and build relationships to fulfill above Differences: Studio is almost exclusively Mac, Finance almost exclusively PC Finance is exclusively MS Office, Studio is Google, Neo, Office for Mac or whatever works Studio has tiny, if any ROI, Finance has huge ROI There are others, but you'll notice that the differences are primarily technological. Because the finance world is my bread and butter, I've moved entirely to a Microsoft mobile platform and consequently, nothing I do for the studio side of things has apps, or functionality on a mobile Windows platform so I end up maintaining a …
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