Toastmaster K - The Blog!

To those of you who I met today at the Comic-Con, here is the footage of the Lost Panel that I shot from the front row in both mp4, Flash, and Windows Media formats. The file size for all of them are rather large as this is a 50 minute video. Unfortunately, due to restrictions by Comic-Con, I could not film the special video clips that they showed. If you want to save these files to your desktop, just right-click and select “Save Target As…”

Lost Panel - Mp4 Version

Lost Panel - Windows Media

Lost Panel - Flash Video (.flv) - This may require a separate download of a Flash player. I recommend the VLC Media Player which is a free download.

Here is the whole panel video:

Also, here are a couple great pictures from the panel.

Also, here is a shot of some attendees dressed up as some of my favorite Nintendo characters. They’re only a few characters short of a Smash Melee!

UPDATED: Added links to mp4 and flv versions of the video.

UPDATED: Added Windows Media version.

UPDATED: Added embedded Google video

[tags] Comic-Con, San Diego, Lost, TV, photos, Harold Perrineau [/tags]

So it’s already April ‘07. Almost a year since I graduated?! Almost five years since I graduated high school?!?!?   It just seems crazy that a year ago, I just had finished shooting Yellow Lights, and we were making final plans for the Senior Week and the MotoSCOPE team was getting ready to go to Chicago to present our final version of Traces to Motorola.

Well, since I last posted about my life, my job, etc., there has been some fairly dramatic changes.  I finished work on Saints & Sinners, the crappy telenovela airing Wed nights on MyNetworkTV, and decided it was in my best interest to move onto better work.

After a month of scattered freelance work (which included shooting a music video for Nico Stai, being a Camera Op and Assistant Director on a week-long start-to-finish short film, assisting on a green screen commercial for the Disney Channel, and shooting a wedding), I finally found work for a very small production company in San Diego named Imageworks (not to be confused with the divison of Sony Pictures). There, my official title is Associate Producer but I am kind of a editor/pa/office asst and will be working mostly on private and corporate videos. Not the goal of working as a Producer on big budget movies, but I still feel it is a step in the right direction.

However, since the job with Imageworks is only part-time (~20-30 hrs/wk), I also just started work as an Assistant Field Manager for Image Quest World Wide basically hawking credit cards at San Diego Padres games. I managed to get the position of Asst Field Manager by using my experience working with confidential info in the Olin Office of Admission as well as my experience working as a Registration Supervisor for BOMA’s International Conferences to get a pay bump and essentially become a Marketing Rep . Last night was the home-opener for the Padres and thus my first night hawking credit cards. Within 5 minutes of pitching Padres fans of the wonders of the credit card and free gift that they would get, I felt dirty for becoming one of those guys that you just hate to deal with (telemarketers, door-to-door salesmen, anyone related to the IRS…). I’m just looking at this as a way to help supplement my income (pay is pretty decent) and a cool way to partake in the Petco Park ambience that I love so much.

So pretty much the two of those jobs mixed with some additional freelance work as a camera operator/assistant is what my life consists of right now.

I have come up with a potential title for the next movie that I’ve been working on, Perfect Attendance. I’m actually curious to see what imagery comes to the minds of you all readers from this title. Leave me a comment with what it makes you think of.  I’ve also parked the site perfectattendancemovie.com just in case this movie goes somewhere. I don’t want to give away any story details yet, but it’d essentially be a PG-13 comedy.

On a totally random note, one of the Wired bloggers used one of my photos taken from the 6th Floor Museum in Dallas as the graphic for a blog post about the JFK conspiracy. Very cool to see how many random places photos I’ve taken turn up around the web, including some foreign language entries in Wikipedia and a Dutch article about a new Web 2.0 company. I think the age of stock photography/footage is starting to die out as more and more amateur photographers/videographers post their content online with a Creative Commons license.

Hopefully, I’ll get back in the habit of doing more regular posting. Until then, Go Padres!

[tags] Imageworks, movie, Perfect Attendance, JFK, Wired, Padres, San Diego[/tags]

Last weekend I went to the Zero 7 concert at the San Diego House of Blues. It friggin’ rocked. I got there early enough that I was one of the first few in, so I got to be right up-front literally touching the stage. They had the speakers up nice and loud so I could feel the music.

Sia, a solo artist who is also one of the featured singers for Zero 7, looked like a cross between Gwen Stefani and Bjork and sang like a mix of Fiona Apple and Imogen Heap, a haunting yet intoxicating voice.

They played a two hour set with a 30-minute opening act from Jose Gonzales (pic below). He has a great voice and is an amazing guitarist, but all his solo songs sounded very similar. He was much better when we accompanied Zero 7 on the songs he had performed from The Garden.

There was an amazing song that they did where they recorded Jose singing a few notes, mixed it, looped it over and over added different reverb and SFX to it, continually adding more instruments until it built to a climax and then transitioned into the next song.

The only thing that kept me from giving this concert a 10/10 was the encore took way to long to get started and they ended with a song that dragged on and lost the energy of the audience.
Check out all my pictures of the concert on my Flickr page.

If you haven’t yet listened to Zero 7, I’d strongly suggest that you check them out.

[tags] Zero 7, concert, San Diego, House of Blues, music [/tags]

For the last 4 days, I’ve been volunteering and attending the San Diego Comic-Con. It has been a lot of fun and I’ve gotten to see a lot of cool promos for upcoming movies. The trade show took up the entire bottom floor and apparently walking every aisle is about 3 miles in distance.

On Friday, I went to a Bryan Singer panel where he talked about Superman Returns and the strong possibility of having a sequel made for 2009. He also showed some hilarious bloopers from Superman Returns.

Steve Sansweet gave his annual “State of Star Wars” speech where he announced that the all-CGI Star Wars TV show would hit the networks in 2008 and would be like “nothing you’ve ever seen before”. He also said the live-action show is still being developed and should hit networks “later this decade”.

The best panel of Friday was by far the Snakes On A Plane panel featuring Kenan Thompson & Samuel L. Jackson. They also showed 10 minutes from the movie, which confirmed that the movie will not be by any means a “good movie” but features a hell of a lot of Samuel L Jackson being one bad mother-f***a. They definitely recognized the importance of their fan base in the possible success of this movie by showing a montage of the songs, posters, images, etc that fans have created and posted online. The director also admitted that they were not making a trailer for Snakes On A Plane because they didn’t want to give the whole plot away. You can watch a funny response from the Q&A session by clicking on the pic of Samuel L Jackson below:

On Saturday, I went to a Lost panel in the morning where Jorge Garcia and Daniel Dae Kim (Hurley and Jin on Lost) were there as well as the executive producers. They answered a lot of questions about the future of the show including that they plan to have around 4-5 seasons total for the show, and that Season 3 will focus on relationships as well as getting into more of the science of the island. They also did their best to quash rumors such as the entire show takes place in Vincent the Dog’s brain and that the word “clones” will never be heard in Lost.

Partway through the Lost panel, Rachel Blake from The Lost Experience alternate-reality game grabbed a mic and started accusing the producers of being murderers and hiding the truth about The Hanso Foundation and The Dharma Initiative. I enjoyed this a lot because I’ve been playing along with the online game this summer and getting to be a live part of it definitely makes feel more involved with the show.

Quentin Tarantino got asked if he’d ever make a kid’s movie to which he responded “it’d be like no kids movie you’d ever seen” and that he’d let his kids watch it. Seeing Quentin in person makes me find him even more annoying. I enjoy his flicks, just not hearing him talk.

Kevin Smith was caught in traffic so his panel got bumped to the end of the day and shortened. Although Rosario Dawson did come on stage near the end to answer some questions about Clerks 2 and even called Kevin on her cellphone to have him talk to us through her speakerphone.

Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes came to promote Ghost Rider. I am not too familiar with the comic, but the trailer looked awesome and hopefully the movie will not turnout like Daredevil did (it’s the same director). Cage came out with these big glasses and a few of us thought he might be trashed based on the way he was talking.

For the Spiderman 3 panel, Sam Raimi walked out on stage and then announced he had pretty much the whole cast with him! They answered questions and did their best not to give plot points away, although Kirsten accidentally let slip that Topher as Venom will capture her at some point in the movie. They also played a rough version of a trailer that should hit the theaters during the holiday season that looked amazing! Especially the shot of Venom at the very end as he springs directly at the camera.

Finally, Kevin Smith came on and answered questions about Clerks 2 as well as his plans for other projects. He said he doesn’t plan to sequalize any of his other movies and he also advocated ass-to-mouth for everyone. I saw Clerks 2 on Friday night, and while I enjoyed sequences of it (Star Wars vs LOTR), overall I wasn’t too impressed with the film. When asked if Kevin was planning on doing The Green Hornet, he said he couldn’t make action movies like Bryan Singer can, and if he did make the movie, it’d pretty much just be The Hornet & Kato leaning against a car talking about sex and movies.

If you get the chance to go to Comic Con next year (July 26-29), I’d strongly advise it as you’ll have a lot of fun and get to see a lot of cool promos and celebrities.

For all of my Comic-Con photos, visit my Flickr photoset.

[tags] Comic Con, San Diego, Lost, Clerks 2, Spiderman 3, Kevin Smith, Snakes on a Plane, Samuel Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Bryan Singer, Superman, Ghost Rider, movies, Hollywood [/tags]

So it’s now the middle of July and I still have not yet been able to find a job in film production. It’s not that I haven’t been trying to get one, cause I definitely have. It’s just that it’s been hard to convince people via phone and email that this guy who just graduated from an unknown engineering college is the guy you should be hiring for the position in film production that requires 2-3 years of experience.

I’m definitely getting more open to working in TV again so I can have a paying job, although I know that’s not where I want to end up working. I just think that it may be difficult for me to get out of TV and back into film once I start down that career path.

On another note, Yellow Lights is almost to the point where Tom and I can sit back and say that it’s completely finished. Tom is meeting with Brian and Sean to do some final music work tomorrow, and then we’ll have a day or two left of work and it will be finished! A month from today is the earlybird deadline for Sundance, and we plan to have the film burnt onto a screener DVD and in their hands by August 18th. With the 15-20 festivals that we plan on submitting to, we need to save costs wherever possible, so submitting early will definitely help.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be volunteering at the San Diego Comic-Con. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s the largest convention in San Diego with 100k attendees and showcases everything from comic books to Hollywood movies to Japanese animation. I’m looking forward to the panels showcasing upcoming movies and tv shows including: Kevin Smith’s panel (always entertaining), a Lost panel with the executive producers and the actors who play Hurley and Jin, a 20th Century Fox sneak peek at upcoming movie releases in late 2006 and 2007, and a bunch more.

I decided to dig up some short clips that I shot at the 2003 Comic-Con of Halle Berry blowing me a kiss & Hugh Jackman singing both parts of Summer Lovin’ from Grease. Enjoy!

[tags] Yellow Lights, San Diego, Comic-Con, Comic Con, Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman [/tags]

Hey Everyone,

Happy Independence Day! I hope you all enjoy having the day off. (Gabe & Ramey, sorry you guys still have to go into work.)

Here are some pictures I took from the fireworks show at the Padres game last Saturday night to help get you in the celebrating mood:

[tags] fireworks, 4th of July, Independence Day [/tags]

This post is coming to you from sunny San Diego where it’s 62 outside and gorgeous right now. I just finished doing some reading while laying out and it was definitely nice to have a contrast to the relatively cold spring that we’ve been having in Boston.

Sadly, my time at home in San Diego for break is already quickly coming to an end. I’m only here until early Friday morning and then I’ll be flying back to Boston. It’s always nice to see my friends from home and see how things have slightly changed.

I haven’t really done any posts in a while because I’ve been so busy at Olin with things for Yellow Lights or for SCOPE or for CORe stuff.

To be more specific, in the last 2 weeks before break, my SCOPE team ran a 22-person focus group spread all over the Boston area involving cellphones with a program that we had developed. We had to coordinate all of the meetings as well as providing technical support for the buggy software that we had written. Luckily, the program was working decently for a majority of the ten days that the focus group was going on and we feel like we received a lot of justification for the decisions we’ve made to this point, which was good to hear.

In Yellow Lights, we’re slowly winding down with filming. We’ve got about 8 scenes still to film, 3-4 of which have dialogue, and we’ll hopefully be done with filming by the end of the first weekend in April. We’ve already begun the tedious editing process and so far we’re happy with how things have turned out. We may need to do some dubbing for the outdoor scenes, but luckily no complicated reshoots.

Last night, I was thinking about the fact that I only had two months left until I would be graduated from college. It’s still weird to think about, I guess.

Oh, one other thing was that I finally got to see the 2006 RX-8’s in person and I’ve picked the color and model that I’m going to order tomorrow! Here are a couple pictures as well as a link to all the pictures of the Phantom Blue RX-8 that I’ve taken.

[tags] Yellow Lights, RX-8, RX8, Olin College, San Diego [/tags]