Registration Confirmation!

I just registered for the 2012 Minneapolis 48 Hour Film Project. We did it last year and it was fun, I think this year will be even better! Who's in?

Big Week.

The 5by5 podcast network recently had a website redesign. While perusing the site, I noticed that a picture of me sporting my 5by5 shirt made it on to the donate page! For those who have heard me start oh-so-many sentences with, "I was listening to this podcast and ..." you may understand why I am so excited about this.

While I'm talking about podcasts, I thought I'd write some quick reviews of my favorites on 5by5:

Back to Work (demographic: working people, humans, nerds)

It may be a bit of a stretch, but you could call Merlin Mann a modern day philosopher, though he is more prominently known as a productivity guru. He and Dan Benjamin delve in to priorities1, workplace issues, motivation, and monospaced fonts. To limit that list to four topics is pretty unreasonable as their discussions follow all kinds of tangents. If you're reading this site, my bet is that this is the podcast that you would like most of those I list. Try this episode. Also, this is a great piece written by Merlin that I feel compelled to link to.

Build and Analyze (demographic: geeks, working people, detail-oriented)

Marco Arment is one of the founding members of Tumblr and the creator of Instapaper; both are great services. His show started off more on development topics, but has since evolved to cover a wider range. Among them: coffee, raising kids (Marco is having a son soon and Dan offers plenty of advice about the wonders of raising children), technology, and start-up business culture. Marco has a knack for articulating things that, once said, are totally obvious. A lot of smart things get said on this show. Try this episode.

Hypercritical (demographic: geeks, nerds, detail-obsessed)

John Siracusa is a geek's geek. I don't have a whole lot to say about this show except: If you like hearing someone who can dive into the minutia of nearly anything (typically technology) and raise really good points about things you hadn't considered, this show is amazing. You have to be a pretty high-level nerd to enjoy all the shows (the most recent one was about file systems), but I think everyone can enjoy a show that goes into the deficiencies of toasters (talk about toasters starts at 0:54:47).

The Talk Show (demographic: Apple geeks, designers, movie buffs)

John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, is one of, if not the top Apple pundit in Tech news. This show is about Apple. John and Dan discuss other companies, sure, but if you can't stand Apple talk, this show isn't for you. That said, John has great insights into the tech space. This is a guy who cares deeply about design and can see the big picture in technology better than anyone. For a while, he and Dan were going through each of the Bond movies and discussing them (they finished them and we're still awaiting the next series of movies). If technology is your thing, try the most recent episode. If not, try this episode and start at 1:24:20 to hear the analysis of a View to a Kill.

1Spoiler: You probably don't have as many as you'd think.

I've never tried making a mock-up of an iPhone app before, but I was inspired to because I really want an app that allows for quick entry of location-based reminders. Since Apple introduced iOS 5 last Wednesday, I've been using the heck out of the location-based notification feature in the Reminders app. However, it takes between 9 and 11 finger taps in order to create a reminder. Too many to be really useful.

Due is an app that I have long been using to create quick reminders that alert me at a specific time. I emailed the developer to see if he had any plans for adding location-based functionality, and he said no. I think that if I had Siri on my phone I wouldn't have such a desire for a quick-entry location notification app, but as it is I think the market is lacking in this area. So, as I said, above is my mock-up of what I would like to see for an app. The UI is largely influenced by Due, but oriented toward locations rather than times. I think 9 settable 'common places' is more than enough. I actually had some difficulty coming up with 9 for examples. Let me know if you have any thoughts or comments on the concept.

Research has finally shown that John with an 'h' is 85.87x better than Jon without one.

You can make a cool visual of the words that show up in your twitter stream. As you can tell, the new Kindle Fire was announced recently and has a prime spot. If you want to make your own, you can follow the instructions here.

via Brett Terpstra

Great song. Fun video.

Please enjoy the online premiere of Blinded, a 48 Hour Film Project.

Our film screened at the Riverview Theater, a single screen theater with a whole lot of seats. I would guess that there were between 200 and 300 people at the show. Our film was shown in the middle of the pack, but I wasn't sure exactly when it was going to show which helped prevent me from being too nervous. Once I saw our team's name on the screen, I was surprisingly relaxed at first, but quickly felt butterflies as the film started. We got a laugh at Les' slogan on the magnet and few, ohs at the reveal of our bad guy, which was hands down the most gratifying part of the night. The people who show up to the screenings of these films are all great and watch the films with a positive mindset, ready to laugh at the jokes, cheesy as they may be. The atmosphere was one of low pressure, which was wonderful for me and I'm sure for other first-timers as well. The premiere went great and it was surreal to see my project on the big screen. Our film definitely wasn't the best, but I think we had a respectable showing. A big thanks to everyone who went to see our film including my parents, Michael and his friends, and Cory's parents (especially considering that her dad had not been in a theater since Apollo 13). Again, I'd like to thank the cast and crew who helped me make this film:

Cory Thomford, Michael Dashner, Justin Sevold, Steve Nelson, Justin McLaughlin, Sarah Woessner, Kelly Larson, and Christina Schneider.

You were all great.

Cory and I at the Premiere 

At the 48HFP kick-off event

My 48 Hour Film Project Story: 

Blinded was created for the Minneapolis Film Project by Bow Tie Video. Our team randomly selected the genre, Superhero and all entrants were given the same elements to be included in their films:

Character: Les or Lena Olinger, Driving Instructor

Prop: A Magnet

Line of Dialogue: "Tell me about it."

We had 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit a film including all three of these elements. This was the first time anyone on our team had done anything like this. In fact, I believe it's fair to say that one maybe two of us had any experience making films at all. We received our genre and elements at 7pm on Friday night then proceeded to write the script until 3:45am.

Cast and crew arrived at my apartment the next day at 8am and we were shooting by 10. As the day wore on, we started losing crew members to various obligations until it was just four of us (Cory, Justin, Michael, and I) shooting until midnight at my company's office.

Sunday started at 6:30am for me and about 7am for Cory as I dug into editing the movie together and Cory sorted through the audio. The biggest issue we found on Sunday was that we hadn't created a good method to link an audio file with its video file. We had a slate to get them in sync, but we didn't know which audio file went with Scene A4 take 3, for example. Cory labored for over 4 hours determining which audio went with which video, for which I am very grateful. However, due to time pressure we weren't able to use the higher-quality audio from the external mic for about 90% of the film. As for video editing, we took a relatively bold risk using a green screen with which I had built 2 days prior and had practiced with once. I think it turned out alright and there were relatively few hiccups getting that to work (except for all the damned rendering). After 11 hours of me not moving from my desk chair, we started to export the movie to the various formats to turn it in. We were on the road to the drop-off site by 7:05 and had dropped off the movie at 7:17pm. After which we grabbed dinner then went to bed. A special thanks to my mom, who had her Birthday that Sunday and allowed me to sleep instead of celebrating with her, which is just an example of how great a mother she truly is.