Category: CD-Trip

New store and stuff

Heyo, life has been stupid lately, but I thought I’d pop in and give a quick update on some things I’ve been up to.

First of all, CD-Trip is now public on YouTube, so feel free to watch it (if you haven’t already)!

The other big thing I’m working on is a new and improved online store. It’s not quite ready yet, but it’s going to have a whole bunch of new products like CDs, CD-Trip Bootleg VHS, and zines. Most complicatedly I’m going to start offering digital downloads – of films and music.

I’ve been thinking about setting something like this up for a while, and all of the news surrounding Bandcamp’s various takeovers has only served to motivate me further. Also while Bandcamp is pretty great for music, but I can’t find a suitable equivalent for film. Vimeo offers the ability to offer rentals and downloads but it is prohibitively expensive. For a small time indie like me, it would be ideal to pay for file hosting depending on how much things get downloaded, not a big flat monthly rate. So after much research I think I’ve got it figured out. I’m to host files on Google Cloud Storage – I’m not necessarily a fan of supporting the tech giants, but at least it’s not Amazon and it’s going to cost me next to nothing.

Will these digital downloads be of interest to people? Time will tell, but it seems irresponsible of me not to have them somewhere as an option. I know most people stream music from Spotify and stream videos from Youtube, etc. but thinking long-term, I think it’s important that there’s an option to purchase directly from the artist and have the media to hoard forever!

My plan right now is to offer mp3 and flac audio, h264-encoded mp4 videos, and as much bonus material as I can come up with. I might think about some sort of video rental system later, but video rentals for short films seems a bit ridiculous. Anyway, should be ready soon, and we’ll see how it all goes!

Free postcard

When Slamdance was still set to be an ‘in-person’ festival I was planning on getting a bunch of different promotional items to give away… I still would like to do something like that, but at this point I just have these postcards / lobby cards. Since the festival has gone virtual I thought it would be fun to offer to mail these out for free.

So let me know if you want one! You can just email me your address, or you can head over here and fill out the little form.

Thoughts on blog and general update

CD-Trip is complete, and had its world premiere at Film Maudit 2.0 a couple weeks ago!  And it’s now playing at Slamdance! 

I feel like I’ve neglected this blog a bit, but there’s nothing worse than starting every blog post with some variation of “looks like it’s been a long time since I posted” so I’ll refrain from doing that.

I’ve been thinking a bit about what the point of this blog is, and what it should be.  My original intention was to document the creation process of CD-Trip – which I did to a certain extent, although there were a lot of things I could have written about that I didn’t.  I’m not sure how useful this kind of information even is to anyone but myself, but looking back at my posts, it’s interesting to have the things that I did write about documented.  There were definitely things I had forgotten about, and I think documenting your process is good practice.  Both because it might be useful to refer to later (maybe you’ll run into a similar problem and forget how you solved it) and because going through the effort of explaining a situation gives you a chance to look at it with some objective distance.

Moving forward, I think I’ll continue writing this blog, but I plan on changing the focus to be more general (obviously, since I’m not working on CD-Trip anymore).  Also will probably update the styling of the website.  It’s starting to bug me.  Not sure if I ever really liked it actually.

Also I intend to post more often, but no promises.

Anything you’d like to see?  Anything you’d like me to do differently?  Hit me up!  Are any humans reading this?  I’d love to know.  Pretty sure spam bots are the majority of my readership right now, judging by the sheer number of them constantly trying to hack this site.  But I’m onto you, spam bots.  I see you and I’m onto you.

Updates and whatnot

Well, a lot has gone on since I’ve posted last! I thought it would be a good time to check in and take stock of where things are at with CD-Trip and other projects.

CD-Trip:

Post production has been extremely slow. Put simply, I underestimated how much work the sound was going to be. With most of my previous projects I recorded a lot of sound during production, and that does a lot of the heavy lifting. Even if you want to replace a sound (say, a door closing), at least you’ll have a reference. But with CD-Trip, almost none of the footage has sound. I really only recorded sound when there was dialogue, and there are only a couple of lines in the whole thing. Most of the sound with dialogue that WAS recorded I can’t even use because the sound of the camera is too loud. (Luckily my sound recorder Geoff had the idea to record all of the dialogue while we rehearsed. I’ve been able to match up most of the dialogue with sound recorded during rehearsal. That was definitely a good idea!) Anyway, all of this is to say there was quite a bit of foley to record (95% of which is now done), which was particularly difficult because I didn’t have a soundproof room to record in, and my house/street is really noisy.

Recording foley tends to be more of a technical task than a creative task, so it’s kind of a chore to get through. But the real thing that’s gotten me stuck is the creative part. Creative use of sound can really shape a movie, and it’s going to be a really important part of CD-Trip in particular. So I’ve been working on creating more abstract soundscape kind of things – the thing that is hard is figuring out how I want it to be.

CONTENT (new short film):

I got pretty burned out on CD-Trip after a while, and came up with a comedy short that I could put together quickly to change gears for a little while:

It took me about 40 hours total, which felt extremely breezy. (So far I’ve logged 390 hours on CD-Trip…. which doesn’t include most of the preproduction.)

NEW MUSIC VIDEO:

I also made a new animated music video for Muzzle Tung (music video starts about 7 minutes in):

That took me about 80 hours, which was pretty fast for animation. I have some other ideas for animation, and thought it would be a good chance to try out Unity as a platform for video (I already have quite a bit of experience with it as a game engine).

If you’re interested in more details about that process I made this little BTS video:

So, those are some of the things I’ve been up to! Progress on CD-Trip is continuing, and I hope to share more details soon.

Post Production begins

I have my footage back from the lab, so CD-Trip is now in the post production phase! It’s been a long road.

The first thing I did (well, after looking at the raw footage of course) was to throw together a rough cut. Basically I just took the script and lined up the shots in order. Later in the editing process things may get taken out, switched around in order, and fine trimmed. But for now, this gives me a good idea of where the project is at – if I got all the footage I meant to, how it looks and feels.

The rough cut is about 15 minutes, and I have about 35 minutes of raw footage so my shooting ratio was roughly 2:1. That’s pretty good! That number is typically very different when shooting digitally. Because I was trying to be as economical with the film as possible, I didn’t do very many repeated takes. This is going to make the editing go much faster. The process of selecting which takes to use can one of the most time consuming parts of editing. And I’m pretty much already done with that part of it. Many shots I only got one take of, and for those that I did more than one, it’s a pretty clear choice.

Now that I have the rough cut, it’s time for the next time consuming part of the process. Gathering sound! With the exception of a few dialogue scenes, there is virtually NO sound. I need to create everything myself or get it from a sound library.

I already had a list of sounds I thought I was going to need (which I prepared from the script). But after making the rough cut I went through and added sounds that I didn’t anticipate needing. Now I’ve got my work cut out for me. After I have all of the sounds in place I’ll move on to more editing and fine tuning.

sound list

Crowdfunding – Indiegogo or Kickstarter?

I launched my first crowdfunding campaign (on Indiegogo). Check it out here!

I’ve been busy putting together perks – in particular I’m putting together a Blu-Ray with a collection of my past works, as well as new restorations of Dream and Untitled #1. There’s a lot to say about it, but I’ll save that for another post. For now, here are my thoughts on why I chose Indiegogo:

First of all, I decided to keep my goal pretty low – I really only need about $600 to finish the project, and I’m only dipping my toes in the water here. I’ve never tried crowdfunding before, so I want to try it out on a small scale to get a feel for it.

For crowdfunding, there are pretty much four options that I know of: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, and skipping a platform altogether and soliciting directly or on your own website.

The advantages to using a platform are:
1) They are established, so people feel relatively comfortable with them, giving credit card info, etc.
2) They make it easier to set up a campaign than doing your own website, and they handle all the credit card transactions.
3) They provide ‘discoverability’, that is supposedly strangers might browse their way into your campaign and decide to contribute.

The disadvantage is:
They take a fee.

In the future I may decide to skip a platform altogether – so far ‘discoverability’ seems not to be a real thing, and I can set something up myself. But for now, setting up all the creative content was enough work, so it wasn’t worth it for me to do extra work to avoid a small fee.

So what are the fees on the different platforms?

Kickstarter – 5% + payment processing per pledge of 3% + $0.20
Indiegogo – 5% + payment processing per pledge of 2.9% + $0.20
GoFundMe – 0% + payment processing per pledge of 2.9% + $0.20

They all have pretty much the same payment processing fee (which would apply even if you skipped the platform and did it yourself – accepting credit cards just always costs something). And currently Kickstarter and Indiegogo have the same 5% platform fee, while GoFundMe has no platform fee.

GoFundMe seems to mostly be used for personal expenses – medical emergencies, things like that. It feels wrong to use it for this kind of project, so I decided that I better not.

As far as Kickstarter vs Indiegogo, a big part of it is that Indiegogo allows you to do ‘flexible funding’, which means even if you don’t make it to your goal, you’ll still get to keep the contributions, whereas with Kickstarter it’s all or nothing. In my case, I’m going to finish the movie no matter what, but I need all the contributions I can get, so flexible funding is a good choice for me.

Indiegogo also lets you keep the project active, accepting contributions after the campaign is over.

As far as ‘discoverability’, Kickstarter has a higher profile, but Indiegogo seems to have a good reputation with film projects.

So all things being (nearly) equal, I decided to go with Indiegogo.

I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, if you’re able and willing to contribute, please do so! I would very much appreciate it.

All right, I have to get back to putting together perks!

Shooting is done

the final shot

I finally shot the last bits of film this week!

It’s really nice to finally have all of the film in the can, but I’m bummed that I can’t send it in to get processed right away. I need about $600 that I don’t have right now. I’m still figuring out my income situation, so I’m trying to decide how to proceed. I can wait until I have more income and do it then, or I can take the irresponsible option and just send it in right away and charge it to my credit card… I’m also thinking about doing some kind of crowd funding. I’ve never tried it for any project. I’m not totally sure why – I guess I don’t want to start calling in favors until I REALLY need them, like for some future project. But I need to think about it some more… $600 isn’t a huge sum, and I could probably raise that.

In the meantime, there are a lot of things to work on:

  1. Learning color grading

    Ideally I would hire a pro to do this, but since I can’t even afford to process the film, you know I can’t hire a pro at this point. I have done lots of color grading on my previous projects, but I’m definitely still an amateur. I’m starting to learn DaVinci Resolve, and I might even end up using that to do the editing. I have the test reel to practice on, and I also got a couple of my student films scanned, so I’m going to get those graded and finished up in nice HD versions.

  2. Recording/designing sound

    I didn’t record very much sound during film production, so there’s going to be a lot to do here! It’s weird to do it when I don’t have footage to look at, but there’s still quite a bit that I can do.

  3. Composing music

    Likewise with music, it’s odd to not have some sort of edit to look at. When I wrote the movie, I was thinking it might have NO MUSIC at all, but now I think I’m going to have something, but something pretty subtle. There’s also a scene with diegetic music, which I’ll probably make myself.

  4. Title design

    I’ve already started working on this, and I’m really excited with how it’s turning out! Title design is pretty important to me, and I’ll probably make a separate post about that.

Stuck again — & new projects

Well, CD-Trip has sort of been on hold for a bit. The main thing keeping me busy lately has been busy dealing with trying to get income. For the past couple of years I’ve been making my living by doing freelance iOS app development. Freelance work can be kind of stop and start though, and it’s gotten especially dodgy for me lately and I’m running out of money to live on. So I’ve been trying to figure all that out which isn’t very fun. Looking for a proper job while doing other side gigs (like selling things on ebay) to pay the bills. You know, reality.

But I do have a couple of other interesting projects I have started on.. One of them is still in early stages, and I don’t want to announce anything about it quite yet. The other project is a soundtrack for a sort of experimental documentary that my uncle is making. It’s been really fun to work on someone else’s project for a change! The project revolves around climate change issues, particularly related to animal extinctions. So there’s a lot of room for horror-type music, but I’m branching off from that a fair amount. I’m definitely using a lot of synths, but also some piano and maybe some woodwinds. I think the album will end up being an interesting progression from I Have Fear.

Anyway, I should get back to talking about CD-Trip and why it has been stuck. This seems to be a recurring problem for me, especially with film projects. It’s hard to tell if the problem is myself, or if it’s about external factors. It’s probably a bit of both.

When I do music, for example, I usually am not depending on other people for any part of it. But with films it’s almost always necessary to get other people involved. So you have to coordinate schedules with other people’s availability. There are also often things like ordering costumes or props online and having to wait for them to arrive. Money is a big external factor too. I don’t currently even have the money to get the film processed once I finish shooting, so that makes me in less of a rush.

But even with the problems of external factors, there’s almost always something I can work on. There’s always something else to figure out before a shoot. Where to shoot, production design, what shots, etc… These are all things that I can and should be working on, but somehow I always struggle with making them a priority. It’s easy for me to move on to a project I’m less invested in. The stuff that I care about the most becomes kind of precious. It’s like unconsciously I don’t want to expose it, keep it safe in potential, in my mind. I almost always slow down when I’m getting to the end of a bigger project. But on a conscious level at least, I love finishing projects!

For now, the external factors are lined up again, so I’m planning on finishing up the shooting this week. Then, it will be a waiting game again until I can raise the money to get the film processed.

Wish me luck!

Alternate Reality Games

Lately I’ve been researching ARGs, or “alternate reality games”, because they have a bearing on CD-Trip. An ARG is a “game” (or puzzle of some kind) that attempts to interact with real life in some way. It needs to pretend that it isn’t a game – that it’s an actual mystery, or some real world situation for the players to figure out.

Many are marketing tie-ins – there are ARGs related to The Dark Knight and a Nine Inch Nails album for example. And they often involve the Internet – streaming video, online forums, etc. – but not necessarily.

I watched a documentary (The Institute) about this “organization” that operated in San Francisco. The “Jejune Institute” posted flyers around town advertising far-fetched science fiction concepts. An automated phone message led people to an actual building with elaborate decor. Visitors watched videos and got invited further into involvement with the institution. Slowly, they unraveled a complicated mystery.

I just watched this talk by one of the designers of this thing, and I thought it was pretty interesting.

He talks about the idea that, as adults in society, certain ways of “playing” are off-limits – frowned upon, or just plain unthinkable. He created this “interactive narrative adventure” as a way of providing an opportunity for people to interact with the public space in a new way.

This makes a lot of sense to me – there’s an element of adventure or fantasy missing for adults in the world today. I think that probably has a lot to do with the popularity of conspiracy theories, as well as video games and other forms of entertainment.

Furthermore, I find the idea of questioning the parameters of society to be really interesting. I think the Internet, especially in the early days, can be a tool for this. The Internet was a way for people to communicate, interact, publish, and explore in ways that weren’t sanctioned by society. Because it was new and developing, there weren’t many rules and conventions. It seemed to be asking you what you could do with it. It was like an alternate society – outside of the real society – that gave us an opportunity to rethink it.

Now things seem more settled down. The Internet has shaken the world up in many ways, but has become a conventional part of life. There is a wide variety of activities to take part in online, but most of these fall into categorizes sanctioned by society. First, consuming “content” (social media, streaming video/music, news, education/self-help). Second, creating “content” – as social participation and/or in hopes of eking out a living by monetizing it. Third, to use tools for general and commercial purposes (email, cloud software, etc.).

By and large, the Internet doesn’t seem like it is beckoning with opportunity anymore. But, I think it actually does have potential. It just doesn’t seem like it because it’s so integrated with society now.

It seems to me that society wants us to treat the Internet like a souped-up television – our usage should either be passive or in service of commerce. I think we should be questioning that idea, even if the usage is as trivial as “play”.

Almost there!


That’s a thousand feet of film in the can! (Not including the initial 100 feet roll that I’ve already had processed.)

I still have a few more things to film: one more tiny scene, a sort of B-roll effecty shot, and I also need to figure out what I’m going to do for the titles (film them, or do them digitally?). I have one more 100 foot roll of stock left, so I’m going to have to fit everything I have left onto that. But all of the main scenes are done!

One of the things that’s nice about working with a physical format like film, is that you can actually see your progress and hold it in your hand. It’s much different than just looking at a computer screen and seeing a percentage of hard drive filled.

I’m hoping to fully wrap up production within the next couple of weeks, then it’ll be time to send it to the lab, wait, and hope that it turns out looking good! ??