Do some work on camera gear and finish refurbishment of an 1850s twin-fusee pendulum clock. Need to fit in shooting a model for a doco sequence. But this isn't the hair flicking type---more the plaster and paint geological type of model.

I get to edit some really neat stuff we shot for the Seattle International Children's Festival: a French oud player and his ensemble telling/singing the story of Sinbad the Sailor (in French); an hour-long "cowboy" act, consisting of a Texas cowboy singer, a Mongolian herder, a bull-whip cracker from Oregon and a gaucho from Brazil; and a really exciting dance and music performance by the Mongolian National Dance Ensemble.

We''ve just finished putting together a DVD of the gala celebrating the 20th year of the week-long festival and will be running off copies of this too.

Jack

Trying to track down somebody in a no-kill animal shelter in Wisconsin that takes in feral cats for a documentary on the subject. Everyone in that crowd's really skittish about being videotaped, and I'm having a hard time getting calls returned. My buddy and I have lots of interviews with people with all kinds of opinions about feral cats, but so far, no footage of cats. Arggh. If anyone knows anyone in the Wisconsin area who has a lot of farm cats, let me know...

Shooting a wedding Saturday night, then off to the airport at 5:30 am Sunday morning for a week at DisneyWorld / Universal Studios. Whoo hoo!

Shooting race cars and alcohol fueled funny cars, along with CBR-style for the grand opening of a multi-track race track. Allegedly it's the first race track to also have a retail car lot associated with it, they will be selling high performance street cars. 560 acres in this place, monstrous. Noisy.
Wish I had John_Cline here to help. He's a NASCAR guru.

Shooting the band Jimmie's Chicken Shack (actually had a video on MTV years ago called "High") in a pretty good venue, The Recher Theatre, here in Baltimore.

Spot:

Is this a pre-sneak preview of Miller's new track? I've seen the billboards about a public sneak preview on June 10...

As far as my weekend, the snow's finally melting off, so I can get started of household projects (deck rail repair, roofing work, start splitting wood for next winter, etc etc...)

Oh yeah, I also need to finish a family vid - mix of digitized 8mm film, and stills - committed to finish and put to DVD in a couple of weeks...

Bailing my son out of two high school video projects that he failed to realize the scope of.

One is the senior class video.. a pan and scan music montage with stills and video plus now I find he also has to author the final DVD for the fulfillment house which of course he's never done. Due Monday.

Two is his AP English video project which he just told me is due Friday or he fails English and oh by the way "I think I'm going to scrap my script and just shoot it." So he's got to shoot "something," and edit it all by Friday.

Oh and BTW I also have my own end of school year Track video due for the award dinner a week from Thursday before I jump in the car Friday morning and drive to OH for a wedding.

All of this for my passion to make video?..... for free.

All personal stuff:

1. Encoding the John Lennon documentary that I grabbed off HBO. Doing my usual of serving out of Vegas into an AVISYnth script that removes the pulldown, and then encoding 23.976 in the external Mainconcept encoder.

2. Same thing, with the Big Sur 1970 concert. Never seen it, and quite a gas to see what our place looked like back then (I live nearby).

3. Encoding all sorts of home movies that have backed up while I've been doing other things. Does anyone else but me actually take movies for their own family?

4. Encoding another off-the-air DVD from the OLN hockey series. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Chicago, and Stan Mikita was my only boyhood sports hero.

If I have more time I may finally get around to the 17 cans of film that I finally tracked down from my championship high school football team. I have finally finished my real-time film-to-video transfer unit and its time to tackle this project. Just talked to a patent attorney again, and can probably get a patent. Just a question of whether it's worth the $$$ just for the vanity of saying I have a patent.

Nursing an infected thumb's nail-bed! Seeesh this is painful!! Thumb looks like it's giving birth to ANOTHER thumb! Blown up 1/3 extra in size. Seessh, this hurts ..

Putting feet up, resting, as client saw my latest and was very pleased with my efforts. 1300 clips! Longest I've done. Libraries and celebrations . .love it . . Going to British Library mid June . . 20 mins of grazie genius .. . lol!

Nite!!

Grazie

This weekend, like all other weekends, I'll be editing and posting my weeky techo-gadget blog. Come take a look....

http://www.neo-fight.tv

Best,

Benjamin

going to shoot a promo for a new product / invention - a pizza oven that sits ontop of a barbeque.

had to sign a nd, for a product i haven't seen, and shoot it with no rehersal etc.,

i just hope that it does good pizza.... or it'll be 'throw another shrimp on the barbe...'

leslie

Editing a shoot I was on last week around the Current River in Missouri. Local Youth Pastor took about 15 teenage boys (mostly fatherless or troubled) camping and boating for the weekend and wanted something to present to parents/youth for next years trip...if there is one. He didn't figure on the partiers that go down for the weekends and throw a keg and a bag of M80s in a canoe and lose their clothes on the river. Not quite what he wanted these boys to experience. So, I'm taking about 4 hours of footage and molding what is mostly a "Girls Gone Wild on the RIver" into a "Baptist Boyslife CampnCanoe".

Same...Editing my own version of footage I shot on a boat down in Key West last month for the World SailFish Championship tournament. Plus gotta figure out a few clips to downrez the HDV to send to the tournaments other hired Video Co. to put on thier DVD.
So the new Cineform 3.0 purchase will come in handy. : )

mr.beebo,

I grew up not to far from there. I used to go tubing on that river almost every summer. It was a load of fun- always cold though b/c it is fed by an underground cold spring. I haven't been there in years- I don't remember it being so polluted with people though.

j razz

Finalising the edit of the infamous Hill Climb, I've now got my mate with 20 years editing experience giving me a hand. Finally getting an understanding of the creative part of editing, way more time consuming than I realised.

On top of that duplicating 60 DVDs and transferring 10 hours of audio from 1/4" tape to HDD.

pizza oven that sits ontop of a barbeque.

Pizza on the BBQ is awesome. If you have gas, you can turn off the center burner, put your toppings on a "Bobili" crust, and have "from scratch" pizza in about 15 minutes. Add a few smoker chips and ...

Editing a wedding on Saturday, then heading up to Toronto Sunday afternoon for a Monday training visit to Digital Rapids. Should be quite enlightening.

Pirate festival. Attending, not shooting or editing.

Aaarrrrr.

j razz

We're Illinoiers but I can never get enough of Missouri. Osage, Branson, etc. We travel down 6-8 times a year on shoots/vacations. Beautiful state. Best 60 degree water I ever felt. Your are correct, the Current and Meramec didn't used to be that way. But it's a mob of tubers now, and I'll use very little audio from the campsite as they were surrounded by bands and stereos from sunset till breakfast and this was supposedly the "Old Timers" side of the camp grounds..

mr.beebo

I'm originally from mid-Missouri. Current River trips in the 70's were great, haven't been since. But most venues like that have the partiers now.

You might try a trip to Johnson's Shut-ins southeast of St Louis. Lots of beautiful non-canoe rapids, you just kind of float down the river through the mini-waterfalls. Of course, the partiers may have taken over there, also.

You might just go on a weekday.

I'm stripping, cleaning and re-staining a grand piano that someone sprayed with white house paint, including the strings, the hammers and the soundboard! And it wasn't even Liberace.

Michael