What the HELL IS THIS?!?!?!

I’m open to any and all comments or ideas as to where to go from here.  Thank you.

NONSENSE

Last night, after a day of working on my Geocache with Mitch, I was lying on my couch reading Snow Crash until quite late.  My mind then began to wander.  This is usually my sign that my brain has had enough reading.  When I read a page from a book and my mind is picturing ideas for movies or past conversations or songs or what it would be like to be a rockstar or how much effort it would take to go make a fruit smoothie or how I wish I was snowboarding or any number of fantastical dream images – then getting any more concentrated serious reading done is probably a lostass cause.  So for a few minutes I embraced my wandering mind and though about school.

I was working as a cameraman this weekend on a video shoot and the guy in charge seemed to have much lower standards of quality than I am used to enforcing over myself.  We weren’t getting all of the proper angles needed and were doing things – though effective and definately workable – fairly rushed.  It was a two-camera shoot.  The whole point of a two-camera shoot is to have the different angles to cut away to in order to make the piece more than just a tripoded one-angle bore-fest.  The guy in charge actually said at one point, when Mitch (the other camera guy) brought up worries that we weren’t filming enough, “Guys.  Let me put it this way… I actually could care less if we use any footage from that camera at all.” – pointing to the handheld, off-tripod camera.

This surprised me.  He just doesn’t care if the video is interesting?  Doesn’t want more than one angle?  But then he clarified himself, “What I mean is this…  I was talking to a friend who has had success with this sort of stuff and his advice was ‘The best product is a finished one.’  We are doing well as long as we just get it done.“

So lying on my couch after working on homework all day and thinking about school I began thinking about this conversation.  I don’t fully agree with this mentality, because I have seen output by some people who do just ‘get things done’ and often I am very unimpressed.  Although – this is something that I have trouble with.

I often get hung up on tiny, and retrospectively meaningless details of things.  I am constantly saying, ‘what if I did [new digressing idea] instead?’  When it comes to making video, film, photography, animation, or I suppose just art, I believe I can benefit quite a bit from just getting things done.  Making decisions and sticking with them.  Not constantly second guessing myself to the point that progress of any sort is completely halted.  I understand that there are literally endless possibilities when it comes to making creative decisions in whatever I do, but rather than obsessing about making (what I believe is) the perfect choice I can instead make a very good one and learn from the eventual outcome – good, bad, or otherwise.

*DISCLAIMER* I mean all of this, of course, with moderation and will still continue to do what I can to not produce total shit at all times.  I don’t mean I won’t care to do well anymore, but I just don’t need to get so frustrated about all the small things.

I knew from day one that something about all this geocache stuff seemed oddly familiar.  I am very excited about our upcoming geocache project and even more so for the ARG – but for the longest time I could not figure out why in God’s great name I love this geocaching stuff so much…

So I looked through some old photo albums and it all came back to me!  I remembered that my family used to go and search out geocaches!  All the time!  In fact, I got them into it!  The reason it didn’t click right away was because we were pronouncing the word ‘geocache’ wrong as a family.  We always pronounced it ‘guy-o-cake’.  I have no idea why we thought that was how it was said!

Anyways, I found this old photo of me and my first Geocache find… I know I don’t look too impressed, but believe me – I was really, very excited.

My first find! So glad I found this photo...

A troupe of teenage drama-acting-theatre-singing-dancing-dream lovers are hanging out after a Friday night’s performance of their high school play.  I believe they were going to Boston Pizza, figuring out who would carpool with who.

A small group of close friends decided, or I suppose should say assumed that they would be travelling together.  This is because they always travelled together.  On the way out of the door, a mild acquaintance named Mark shout/asked, ‘Hey guys!  Can I get a ride with you guys?’ The closer group of friends, rarely hanging out with Mark outside of school-based socializing, was surpsied he asked but was absolutely more than happy to respond, ‘Of course!  Get over here you big goof!’

So the newly-shaped group got into the car and went to BP’s.

The group then joined the rest of the troupe and ate at a big long table with people from all different highschool grades and enjoyed the socializing outside of school and felt good about being allowed to say things like swears and liked pizza and the ones old enough got beers and everyone smiled and there were no smaller group distinctions and everyone was happy and at the end of the night Mark couldn’t find his wallet.

‘Hey guys, where’s my wallet?’ asked Mark.  No one knew, becase it definitely wasn’t inside of the restaurant.  ‘Hey, you mind if we check your car?’

The boy who drove him didn’t mind.

The two of them checked all over the car and the wallet was no where to be found, unfortunatley for Mark.  Mark seemed upset, but didn’t really say anything at all.  Mark was a very quite, but mostly just an odd guy.  No one ever knew what he was thinking – he was quite weird.  He was also about six-foot-three.  The wallet wasn’t found, and Mark was driven home by someone else, perhaps the person who ended up having to pay for his portion of the pizza.

About three weeks later Mark’s original driver was hanging out with some other friends and a girl sitting in the back seat found a wallet.  ‘Hey, whos wallet is this?’

‘Oh wow!  That must be Mark’s wallet!’ proclaimed the driver.  ‘Let’s go return it to him, I know where he lives.  He lost it about three weeks ago, he’ll be excited to get it back.’

They drove to Mark’s house and the boy driver and the girl and the other friend went to the front door and rung the bell.  Mark’s siter answered and said ‘I’ll go get him.’  Then Mark came up the stairs and came to the door.

‘Mark!’ said the girl, ‘Look!  We found your wallet!’

She handed him the wallet.

He vaguely smiled and said, ‘Thanks.’

There was a silence.

‘Well?’ said the girl, ‘We just found and returned your wallet!  Aren’t you excited?!’  To which Mark very cooly, and very smoothly replied,

‘Well, naturally…’

This is a very special moment.  It is my first new posting since re-inventing my blogsite.  So it’s super special because it is a special moment for me writing it right now, and also a special moment for anyone who reads it.  I’d probably compare this super special moment to opening up a brand new Harry Potter book for the first time and realizing it was actually now a story about a man named Robert Langdon who was trying to solve a code hidden in Leonardo DaVinci’s paintings.

Anyhow – here is my first new idea that was brought about through my experiences:

Today my friend Gab asked me to help him do some ADR sound recording for a project he is working on.  His assignment was to take a minute-length clip from an already made film, strip it of all of its sound, and re-create the entire soundtrack.  He chose a clip from the film Master and Commander.  He needed my help to be some of the character’s voices so the whole thing didn’t sound like Gab talking to Gab.  We set up the sound studio so he was in the mixing room with all of the recording controls and I was in the foley room with a monitor showing me the film which I would then watch and attempt to match the voice of the various characters.  It was great fun.  The characters all have British-ish accents so we both got to goof around and the end product was quite satisfying to watch the pieces all fit together into a well-synced, believable audio mix.

While this was happening, when we weren’t recording, I felt oddly compelled to be always making some sort of sound into the nice microphone that was sitting in front of me.  I could hear myself in the headphones and I knew Gab could hear me through the glass in the other room.  I felt like beat boxing or just talking or saying stupid shit non-stop.  Yes, I understand that this is basically what I do practically all of the time as it is, but I promise you when I had the microphone in front of me the desire seemed much greater.

So I asked Gab about it.  I was all, “Why do you think it is that when people get a microphone in front of them they feel obliged to just make noise no matter what?”

And Gab was all, “I’m pretty sure that’s just you, man.”

And I was all, “Aw hell no.  Think about it.  You hand anyone a mic, and they just begin making sounds – people love it.  People love the sound of their own voices.  Everyone does. You hand anyone a mic and it is fun and compelling to just use it as much as possible.  Like an obligation.”

And Gab was all, “I guess you’re right.  People love mics.  People love hearing their own voice.”

And I was all, “Yeah I know that’s what I said.”

So then I was thinking about this here blogsite and I got an idea.  It combines how much fun I had today doing sound recording with people’s love of mics.  Here it is:  I will make a sound piece next week based on people’s comments to this posting.  I will take what people write as comments, read them aloud, record them, and mix together a blogcomment sound piece.  Here are the requirements:

1. Everything you type in your comment will be read aloud – no matter what
2. Comment must be in by Thursday, October 23rd in order to be part of the sound work
3. There must be at least 8 different comments
4. (exception to rule 1) Unless you put something in brackets which can be any of the following directions:

• The accent I should read your comment in
• The tone in which you mean your passage to be read
• Any specific emphasis points
• Basically any direction you would like to give me in regards to reading your text

So now this is an opportunity for anyone who reads this blogsite to get something read aloud in the style of their choosing, and also an opportunity for me to have fun with mics.  I’ll post the results.

Bring it to my house…

So it seems I have been approaching this whole blogger thing all wrong, or at least partially wrong. The part that I was doing right – in regards to my class where maintaining a blog is a requirement – was the fact that i was, indeed, maintaining a blog. The (arguably) larger part which I have been doing incorrectly is in regards to the content of this blog. I was of the understanding that our blogsites were supposed to be about a topic of our choosing as long as we regularly kept them going with continuous posts, comments, and related content. In reality, our class blogs are supposed to be about class-related work, ideas, processes, and people. This being the case, and thus my now being aware of this case, I’ve decided – of my own volition – to discontinue my blog about what I do to procrastinate and re-invent this site as a place for me to force my opinions, thoughts, feelings, and ideas upon my required class-mate readers.

In essence, this blogsite will now turn into everything I didn’t want to blog about when I began.

That may sound a little negative, and I don’t mean for it to be so. This is just a new personal challenge to find the best ways for me to produce material (pictures, text, videos, links, etc) about myself and school that I don’t totally hate.

Now that sounds like I hate myself and school – which, I assure you (at least in the former’s case) is absolutely as far as possible from the truth.

I guess the best way to put it is this: Though this blog is shifting into a zone that is potentially far less interesting/fascinating than the fairly-uninteresting place it already existed, it will – however – exist now as a formidable challenge for me to not allow it to become absolutely terrible. So if I’m successful, eventually this site may be a not-terrible, semi-interesting, automatically-generated link on wordpress.com’s mainpage.

See you on the dark side.

PS: I suppose me (unknowingly) making a blog about procrastination was, itself, an ironic month-long procrastination from what I should have been doing.

In case that wasn’t clear….

I am embarrassed to say that I was expecting much fewer responses to my last posting.  I put the web-surfing public to the test expecting nothing, but to my great surprise 8 different people actually left a comment.  When you’re expecting a page to read, ‘no comments’ a week later and instead it reads ’9 comments’ – it’s a wild goddam success!

So at least for now, I will continue to write every so often about things I do to procrastinate.  This is thanks to the following people:

• Gab
• John the flashaddict
• Cam
• Pam
• Belle
• frixnus?
• redtea9, and
• taylor

You wildly fantastic people actually visited this blogsite about nothing, read it, and followed the simple and direct requests/instructions.  I’m wowed.  And I’m also now sudo-obliged to continue writing something on here at least every once in a while – so thanks.  Thanks tons for making me keep this up.  I’m honoured to be doing so – and loving it.  Loving every minute of it.

So this posting is about how maintaining this blog has actually become a form of procrastination in itself.  The time I spend cataloging my procrastination habits has often become time that could absolutely be better spent doing other, more important work.  Not that this blog isn’t a great intellectual challenge that teaches me about technology and the new/funky/crazy/goofy-ass ways people are connecting and interacting over the world wide web – it is.  This blog is actually 2008′s greatest contribution to the constant growth of my artistic and spiritual life.   So this blog and everything it means to me still is not my highest priority, therefore placing itself here, in its own blog, as a source of ‘wasted’ time.

If this is still not making sense, please listen to this song, and really consider what the lyric are saying.  This song continues to shape who I am, and hopefully once you inevitably watch it several times, it will start to do the same for you:

Keep on dreaming, dancing, living, loving, laughing, gaming, grimacing, peeping, pooping, and procrastinating.  God knows I will, and God knows best.

Hmmm…

This is half for curiosity, half for fun, half for certainty, and partly to fill my need for performing fairly-regular serious detective serious shit.

Did anyone read this?

www.imdb.com

The Internet Movie Database is my all-time favourite website.  Although I’m not actually sure of whether or not I can call IMDb a ‘website’ per say, because it is actually this absolutely massive network/database of pages and pages and pages of information on nearly every film or TV show ever created – and pages and pages of information on the individuals who created them.

90+% of reading I do on the internet – or not on the internet, for that matter – takes place on this website.  I love films.  I love TV.  My life’s plan is to work in film for the rest of time, so the more I know, the better.  When my procrastination leads me to IMDb – which it nearly always does – and I go on hour-long actor/movie/actor/movie/director/movie/actor…etc linking journeys, I always find a way to somehow justify it in my mind as research of a sort and it makes me feel better.  I actually always convince myself that any time I’m watching movies/television or reading about movies/television – what I’m really doing is good, hard work.  So perhaps this isn’t procrastination, it’s actually just work that often happens to seem/be more important than the majority of everything else I usually am doing.

Hmm.

This site really is amazing though.  Every film ever made is a link, and every person who has worked on a film that is up on the site has a page to themselves.  You can check out filmographies for actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, editors, producers, and so on and so on for every job on a set.  It is basically like reading the credits for any film you can imagine, and being able to click on anyone’s name and see everything else that person has worked on.  It’s fantastic.  I often will be on a page for a certain actor or director and think of someone else I want to read about, but instead of simply typing it into the search box, I play a little game with myself to figure out how to get to that page without typing anything.  I click from actor to movie to actor to movie until I can eventually get where I need to be.  Like playing online six-degrees-of-separation… except sometimes it’s like 100 degrees… that’s when it reeeally gets Hott in Herr! (Nelly)

Example:

Let’s say I’m on Al Pacino’s page and I want to check out Crispin Glover – instead of just typing in Crispin Glover, I can do this combination of moves:

• click on Ocean’s Thirteen
• click on Brad Pitt
• click on Mr. and Mrs. Smith
• click on Angelina Jolie
• click on Beowulf
• click on CRISPIN GLOVER!

Was that the most unreal-ievable thing you’ve ever seen?  Because sometimes I blow my mind.  That probably isn’t even a very good way to get from A to B – I bet there’s an even better connection.  But anyways, hopefully it’s clear how much potential for wild fun this site contains.

Other fantastic features of this database:

1. TONS O’PIX
2. Oodles of Noodles of Trivia on all the big names in acting, directing, producing, writing, etc.  There is trivia on films themselves, TV shows, everything.  Click on a movie or a person, and click on where it says either ‘Mini Biography’ or ‘Trivia’ to feast upon background information that will take you over, sideways, and under on a magic carpet ride (Aladdin).
3. Awards section – lists of hundreds of thousands of different awards where you can link to that award ceremony, year by year, and see what was nominated and won – OR – you can see every award any person or film has won ever.  Hold onto your butts (Jurassic Park), beacuse this section is as absolutely comprehensive as it can possibly get.
4. User comments – not really a great feature, but often hilarious to read how terribly stupid some (most) ‘users’ are.  Never judge a film by its user review star rating.  Am I wrong? (The Big Lebowski)
5. Goofs – section that details film-making technical mistakes noticed in films.  Sometimes interesting.
6. The best part about the website is that if I say it out loud it is an accurate proclamation of my initials:

I am D.B.

There is a lot more really fantastic stuff on the IMDb – it’s well worth the hours I have and will continue to invest in its endless, constantly updated supply of important film/TV knowledge.  But if you only will ever check out one page on it – if you only have the time or patience to make ONE click…. here you go.

THE BEST IMDB PAGE IN EXISTENCE

You’re welcome.