Open Letter To The Weather In Chicago

Seriously, you can get warm if you want. It is May.

Phudi Mart at the Abbey Pub

Phudi Mart at the Abbey Pub, originally uploaded by PinthGarnell.

Wow. So a while back a friend of Stephe's who runs the Really Short Film Festival asked us to submit a film. We submitted Phudi Mart because it was our favorite of the one's we've done. We shot Phudi Mart 5 years ago but we'ver never submitted any of our films to a film festival, they were all shot for use in various shows and are connected to those shows in various degrees and usually don't really stand out as their own story. Run Hanner Run proceeded Mark coming onstage at the Improv Festival 2002, Hotel & Casino played in the lobby accompanying our show, and Phudi Mart was supposed to lead into a sketch that had Brent working at McDonald's. But out of all of them Phudi Mart probably comes the closest to telling a full story. Also we use all Copyrighted music in our movies and you have to get the rights to the music to present them at a festival, which the RSFF didn't seem to care about.

The RSFF was last Saturday and everybody from the group was out of town leaving me the lone representative of the film at the festival, which I suppose makes sense because I shot and chopped it. But I wasn't really looking forward to watching it with a crowd, I've never really liked Phudi Mart. To this day I'm still very proud of the editing, which is still some of my best, but the reason Brent was taken out is just too simple, there's no lead up, and his demise, the major plot, is resolved within the same introduction the other characters get, which is odd, but whatever, after all it's Phudi Mart.

Also, I've lost complete perspective on Phudi Mart in five years, it's like looking at white paper to me, so I was very surprised when I saw it at the Abbey last Saturday. We got a great response from the crowd, even the mention of our names. My Mom noted that several people were elboing each other in a "these are the guys I told you about" sort of way. At leas that was her interpretation.

The big laughs came on Tony Smalek straightening the SoftScrub on the shelf (which always gets a good laugh), the three products he breaks to "damage them out", which the audience really got, Kate snorting coke, Wickerman trying to shove a banana in Tony's tailpipe, and Stephe, as Caleb smoking a joint with Wickerman, big laughs. It was just really good to see how that played with a crowd for the first time in years.

Thank you, everyone who attended and applauded and who continue to shove your support for us in the face of everyone else.

Shit, I Didn't Kick That Cold's Ass

Got too cocky, too quickly. Damn. Cough. Sneeze. Tired. So tired.

Episode #50 Movie

I just got an email from Justin saying how much he liked the Episode #50 movie, which is such a relief. If you don't know, I do all the documenting and editing of the webshorts for the website, and I'm always late and always under deadline and over the next month my life will get a whole lot more deadliney. I used to just get Stephe whatever I came up with, the day it was due, but now I actually have to tell the group ahead of time what I'm planning, which really negates my luxury of having no plan (I hate that), so ordinarily when I have a grand idea (like the Episode #50 webshort) and at the 11th hour realize I'm never going to complete it, I'll just cut-bait, grab a single-shot clip from the production of the show and slap opening and and end credits on it. But this weeks since the text for the newsletter was set stating that it would be a montage of moments from the radio show, I had to stick with that. The problem is, montages are a time vacuum, to get ONE random moment for the montage takes 15 minutes, the raw tape must be watched and a precious moment must be found, then put on the harddrive, then put in the timeline as a raw clip, this must be done over and over until you have a full timeline of bulky, long clips that don't sing at all, then if you want to make it easy on yourself you have to find a song to put the whole thing to. In the case of Episode 50 I never did. It was 3am and I stilll needed about 15 more clips in order to pick a song that had a reasonably fast tempo to it, but I didn't have that time, so I kept editing, lopping the excess of every clip down to their essence and putting them in an order that hopefully would suggest a song, which it never did. Also when your editing, especially documentary editing, you don't always have an idea of what the final will look like, by putting the clips together and lopping them off and mixing them around in different orders your hoping to "find" the film, and if you build up enough instinct as an editor you can find a new film and a new emphasis constantly, I'm not that good yet, but better than I was a few months ago. And I never found this film.

As a sidenote, there's a lot of reference to "Such Great Heights" in this weeks episode, it's us making fun of how popular that song is with the 20-somethings. So I initially put "Such Great Heights" as the music track, but you get a WAAAAAAY different movie, it began with a Justin pep talk first thing in the morning about that days recording and then went into slo-mo as we all walked out to the mics, beautiful...and a much better film than I had time to make in three hours. It will show up someday, but i had to decide early on that THAT was not the film I could make with my time. S at 3am I stuck "Happy Go Lucky Me" from the movie Pecker under the movie I had roughly edited thus-far because anything goes with that and his has the pace to support the paltry number of clips I had. It had to work because it was now 4am and I had to get up for work the next morning, so, very embarrasedly I sent it to Stephe, so flustered that I incorrectly called it Episode 49 because I made no short for 49 (which prompted Stephe to call me because he couldn't find 50 on the server...my bad).

I was waiting for the big thumbs down, but then Justin loved it, that was a huge relief, and the one compliment he had was on the one teeny little shred of the movie that I "found", the one element I found was showing the numerous arenas the show takes place in, almost every clip is in a different location. That was the only story element I found, and that was the only detail Justin mentioned. That feels good, it's still the worst film I've made for the site in two months, but for your worst to be passable is a good place to be as an artist.

Oh, and once again, the very last edit made is my favorite thing in the movie, the cold opening with Sandy and Kate is the best part of the whole thing and the last edit I made right before I exported it. The last edit made in Beautiful Intrusion was the shot of Martin Mull that shows up at the end, which is the best part of that movie. A decision I made, once again, RIGHT before export.

I Kicked That Cold's Ass!!

Somehow I have an amazing ability to kick a cold's ass. I woke up yesterday with that "uh-oh, I have a cold" feeling, and ended the day with that "Holy shit, I'm sick as hell" feeling, you know how the first day with any cold goes. Well my miracle cure is a combination of sleep, gallons of Cranberry Juice, and lots of garlic or Indian Food. Oh, I also take Cold-eeze, but we all know that shit doesn't work, I just take it for the placebo effect, but then again, KNOWING that you're taking something for the placebo effect kind of negates the placebo effect, so there's that. So here I am today at work and the cold is as gone as is physically possible, it still feels like I have a cold simply because the parts of my body that got damaged have to heal in a realistic timeframe, but I KICKED THAT COLD'S ASS!

The Ridiculously Complex and Unsimplistic Phone I Want

The Phone I Want, originally uploaded by PinthGarnell.

-Adam, why do you want this phone?
-Because it's got everything.
-What do you need with all that stuff? Your new blue phone calls people.
- I know, but this one goes on the internet.
-Your on the internet right now without the phone.
- But I can get my email.
-Oh come on, you can do better than that.
-Hey, fuck off, it's a gadget, I'm a gadget guy, I need gadgets, okay?!?! This is the king of all gadgets, this gadget could kill any other gadget with an finger stab to the jugular of any other phone.
-Wait, one thing I know this phone can't do is finger stab another phone in a jugular that that phone doesn't have.
-Yeah, but it could learn how to ON THE INTERNET.
-That I can't disagree with. Allright, fine, trade in your simplicity-in-blue for the this crazy thing.
-Can't, don't have the money.
-Then what are we arguing about?
-Whether I should.
-But you can't.
-I know, but I should, if I could.

My Completely Simple and Necessarily Uncomplex New Phone

My new Phone, originally uploaded by PinthGarnell.

So I moved into my new neighborhood and lost another phone, two phones in three weeks. I'm kinda bad that way. Actually, I lost my really nice cameraphone, that roundish blue flipphone that everybody has now, and when I lost it I just pulled out my first cellphone, the old piece of shit motorola circa 2001, and reactivated it. I was offered plenty of good deals on new phones that day at the T-Mobile store but obstinantly said no, my old piece of shit works, why get unnecessarily complex? Well, I really forgot how big a piece of shit my old piece of shit was. I understand some of the new phones can take pictures, calculate the minutes until you die, emit a soothing masturbation gel, and on some of the older models, call people, but I don't think a phone can be considered too complex by having an unbroken lcd, which was the dominant feature of my old piece of shit. I also forgot one of it's most endearing features, it often shut down when someone called, which really is purpose-defeating. So I woke up in my new place after sleeping off a hellish 20 hour move (shit I really am behind on my blogging) and realized I'd lost my shitphone, actually i may not have lost it, but I wanted it lost so I walked down to one of my new neighborhoods landmarks next to the Checks Cahsed place, the cellphone store. The choice quickly came down to the phone you see pictured, a phone with such endearing features as calling people, text messaging, and calendar. Um, yeah, that's about it, oh, and AIM, which I'm obsessed with. But that's it. The othe choice, was the other end of the spectrum...