My Underseen Life

Raven Doodle WiP, originally uploaded by underseen.

A Test

As most of you from Sacramento know a cloudy day during the summer is not as common as a clear blue day, atleast... thats been my experience since living here. I woke up early this morning and caught a glimpse of the clouds so I took a chance and ran outside to take a few shots. Take a look and tell me what you think.

For the past 2 weeks ive been working on a project thru Access Sacramento for the California Dept of Health. Its a 20min bio compiled from 7 interviews we shot that were about 30min each, a couple hours of PSAs, too many and too few pictures, and other odds and end we were able to come up with and download from the internet ourselves.

You have no idea the amount of respect I have now for the amount of actual work that can end up going into such a simple sounding project. The shooting only took about 10hrs, and another 15hrs of other things in prep and post. But the editing ended up taking right around 100hrs.

SO heres what happened, Access was offered a job by DHS to produce a 20min "history of DHS" type biopic. The big issue with this project was it had to be completed in a little under 2 weeks. This sorta project im told normally woulda been a 3 month. "For the record even after finishing it Id say a month would be ok" But most of that time would be for revisions, script approvals, scheduled interviews, researching DHS to see what questions would be most approate to ask, etc. In any case, the reasoning for the 2 week deadline was because as of July 1st, today infact, DHS would be splitting into 2 depts. It needed to be completed by noon on the 28th for a "party" they were having at The Crest Theater.

Access decided to accept the project because they wanted the chance to break in and get more like this in the future. Access knew I bought a new camera recently and gave me the chance to break it in for this project, mainly cause it was more portable than most of theirs. I was teamed up with a Producer who was chosen from outside Access based on a Friend of a Friend reccomendation, or in this case, Wife of a Board Member :P but to an extent she did know what she was doing and a large part of the success of this project depended on the work she put in. She basically became the liason between DHS and Access, wrote the script, and was there with me for atleast 30 of the 100 hours of editing involved.

The First Interview was June 15, the last was on the 19th. I got 2 nice days off so the person I was working with could put together the script based on all the footage and interviews they had. On Friday the 22 we recorded the narration, and i began editing. It took almost exactally 100hrs from that Friday to the morning of the following Thursday to complete the project. It was shown the same day it was completed. Am I happy with the final result?, no, But I am happy with it based on the amount of time I had to do it in. I dont think I would have put it together much better without atleast a few more days.

The quality isnt great considering its a highly compressed streaming video, but for anyone who has 20 mins and wants to see the final result, here is a link you can view it at. Ill post a better link in the future once I figure out where. and find the time to encode it again.

http://archive.videossc.com/asxgen/gov/DHS.wmv

I welcome any comments anyone is willing to give.

So im moving in just over 2 weeks time now right...? well you wouldnt know it as things stand right now. I havent found a place yet, and was just handed a vary large and important project that has to be completly Shot, Edited, and Submitted before next Wednesday. You might be thinking thats a piece of cake right? well there are too many factors that have to fall into place. First I have to shoot the interviews of 7 very very busy individuals. Next I have to recieve the script before scheduling a time for a specific individual to read it. I have hours and hours of stock footage, news reels, and photographs that will have to be gone thru and digitized for incorporation as well. I am also limited to a timeframe of 20-25mins in total length.

This is a nice first workout for my new camera, but its coming at a really bad time considering id planned on settling on an apartment by the end of this upcoming week, and now i wont even have the time to look until 7days before im planning to move. And this job in a way just keeps getting worse. I agreeded to do it when I was only asked to just be the camera man. Thats it, end of story.

Its now to the point im basically in charge of almost every single aspect. Lighting, Set design, Audio, Editing, just to name the first few that come to mind. And to make matters worse yet again, im only getting my hourly wage plus a small stipend for the use of my camera. Usually we have multiple people incharge of these different things, so i really am feeling overwhelmed here especially with my move date coming up so quick and I havent found a place.

So as I said above... im skrued

While down in San Jose the other weekend for Fanime I was able to catch somethign id been wanting to since hearing about it a couple years ago. PLAY! is one of the many different VideoGame Orchestra groups deticated to playing music from video games. I was able to snap off these shots before being caught and almost kicked out :P

here is my top picks from saturday at Fanime, again these are unedited and not colorcorrected yet

The First batch of pictures from Fanime are now posted on my Flickr account, please take a look and comment on what you see :)

Ill try and add more this weekend but you can expect all weekends photos to be up by the end of the week

these are unedited/noncolor corrrected

but it wont be offical. Found out that I can just show up and walk, so ill be doing so with a few of my friends. Monday is my last overall final. I think my grade should be ok this semester :) I already know I got atleast a B in 3 of my classes, the others will be the wildcards. We shall see.

Wow, this semester has gone by in a flash. There is little more than 3 weeks left in this semester and as usual things are coming to a head very quickly. I am wasting valuable time right now procrastaning, to avoid the many assigments and projects I still have to complete in the next week or 2. Final Projects include a presentation on Internet based audio/video casts. Discecting an advertising campaign and writing a paper on its various elements. Animating a creature and then making its mouth move to follow some recorded audio. Writing a paper on internet piracy. and preparing for four final tests coming up as well. I think there is more but thats all I remember offhand.

On another topic, I qualified for one of my schools scholarships for technical advancment. Found out just the other day. Dunno how much its worth yet but ill find out later this week.

I have my video camera now, WOOHOO!!!! I finally settled on a DVX100B. I am very excited and cant wait for the free time this summer to finally work on a project ive had on the backburner now for months.

Im heading down to San Jose at the end of the month for Fanime-con. Taking it as a chance to decompress from working 4 drifferent jobs now as well as classes being done for this semester. PLAY Symphony, will be there that weekend as well. They are an orchestra that play videogame music. Expect plenty of Photos and Videos of the events to show up here once I get back :).

At this point I will not be walking across the stage at the end of the semester as I had planned... I may still graduate but because of the issues with the counsilors screwing me over this semester they refused to accept my application for graduation this semester since it was late. I am not happy about this but ive given up trying to fight it. Right now I am waiting on some paperwork to finish processing before I am able to find out if I even will get my degrees this year of if I have to wait another semester or more because of classes they will force me to take to finish. The information shoulda been back weeks ago but the counsilor keeps shrugging me off and noone else I talk to seem to wanna help. So I have submitted and await the final decisions.

I will be moving again this summer in anycase. dunno where yet but there is a high chance I wont be attending the college I live next to now and I wont be working on campus either after this semester. Im looking for a place closer to work and the other campus so I can finish up my degree I left off there, as well as any needed transfer and graduation requirments. See me again at the end of the summer and we shall see how that turns out