7,534 Producers, Data Management, More Interviews

Woke up early and did an interview with the nice folks at Live 88.5. I was too tired to be nervous, so it was nice. Radio interviews are weird; you are just talking to some people on the phone, and it's hard to imagine that lots of other people might be listening to the conversation. I think they are going to air it tomorrow out in Ottawa... hopefully we will reach a few new Canadian Producers. :)

Then, since I was up at a ridiculous hour, I went running with Sarah Peters. Sarah is Levi's wife. Levi is my loft-mate. Levi also directed frame #11, and is helping to trick out our school bus. Sarah had been up north at school, but she is back now for the summer, so we have a full house again, and it's pretty fun. Sarah is trying to get me to excercize as I have been working too much on the computer. So running was good.

Juli came in today and continued to coordinate press. There is another interview tomorrow, I think with a radio station in Australia. So the word is starting to get out. We had 15 new prducers today! Including a new Executive Producer- Arizona Claude Edwards, who chipped in $101 from Alpharetta, Georgia. Thanks Arizona from Georgia, and everyone else who donated! :) Little by little, we are getting closer to having enough to buy a bus for our Road to Oprah... we have about $2,800 in our bus kitty.

On the bus front, Levi and I are driving up to Fresno on Thursday to lmeet a guy named Patrickwho has what you could call a 'serious passion for busses.' I'm looking forward to meeting him; the reports from Levi are that Patrick might have a bus for us. I can't wait to get a school bus! we are also meeting with some art supporters on Wednesday about a possible place to keep the bus over the summer as we fix it up. There are lots of logistics...

In tedious production news, Mike B. came over today to help organize our data management. We have about 50 hours of video footage digitized on a hard drive (a Lacie 1 Tb), but the drive crapped out on us and we can't get any of the footage off. This is one of the reasons we haven't editied together more video updates and trailers. I think I am done using Lacie drives as this totally sucks. We have been shooting in mini-HDV for the past year, which is a harder format to turn around quickly; it takes more drive space and memory to process, and all of our computers are slow and getting outdated. We also have our digital files spread here and there, with no central simple spot. So Mike is helping get everything structured, and eventually backed up. This will be an amazing step, and will help remove one of the many production bottlenecks we are facing.

Mike took the bad drive to a friend of a friend's who is a data recovery expert and has offered to look at the drive and recover what he can. Once we can use the footage, I really want to put together an Intro Video for our homepage, as well as some other footage that we have been collecting.

One of the other bottlenecks is the new Road to Oprah website; Jason and I reviewed the site needs today and came up with a new plan of attack. Jason is working on it inbetween his other commitments- hopefully will have something up before the end of this week. We will soon only have 10 weeks before our Road Trip...

A funny little thing we did today was record some audio for a film out we are doing of The 1 Second Film; this is for our MPAA screener. Yes, The 1 Second Film is being submitted for an official rating! The MPAA said that considering the length of the film, they don't think it will take too long to get the rating. :) Mike is going to output to a 35mm print, with audio. This will be for a special pre-screening we are planning before we launch out Road Trip. More on that later, as it develops...

This turned into a pretty long entry. I'm headed back to the grind.

best to all,

n