I guess it's because I'm busy. I've started up a new project with Abso Lutely Productions on a Comedy Central series called John Benjamin Has a Van. It stars John Benjamin (Archer, Important Things with Dimitri Martin) as a roving news reporter looking for slice of life stories. Think, This American Life meets... well I don't know. It's hard to describe. It's surreal and hilarious, very dry, very dark and very very funny. I always love working on projects that I would watch even if I wasn't working on them. 

I won't go into details about what I'm working on until I know it's ok to talk about but I'm really looking forward to getting off the set and into the computers because it's going to be fun. A big challenge, but fun.

Stay tuned....

I got to know Chris when I co-directed a video (below) for them back in 2003. It was a ton of fun and when Chris asked if I could share my thoughts a ton of great memories came rushing back. Its still a project that I'm immensely proud of. I think it was the second best thing that Bruce and I did. (behind 405 of course.) And we even did it in the vain of 405. Low budget, minimal crew, anything it took to get it done. 

This of course reminds me of all the projects I have sitting on a shelf in my brain, dusty, because I have a list of reasons why I can't do them. This video is a reminder of what I can do when I forget the reasons why I can't do it.

Anyway, head over to Chris Neal's Rockonomix and read my recall of how it all went down.

To circumvent my own occasional ineptitude and all too common hardware failure, I back up everything religiously. For some reason I've always done my own IT. At the beginning it was out of necessity. As a small business owner I just plain couldn't afford it. But as the years went on I learned more and realized I knew more that a lot of the guys I was hiring. Plus I'm a control nut and my data is my life. It's hard to let someone else mess with it.

My workstation's hard drive is cloned every night using the amazing app Super Duper. The internal video RAID is backed up as needed to an external drive. My one weakness was always my main server. I had it on a double-drive redundant RAID but it was always too large to back up easily. I would break out in cold sweats with the idea of having to increase the size of the raid or do any maintenance. I really got lucky over the years that I never lost anything. 

About 4 months ago I started getting corrupt files on my RAID. I backed up, rebuilt the RAID, basically spent 4 days trying to understand what was wrong and fix it. This is when I realized that I am not an IT professional nor do I want to be. So I decided to upgrade. After a lot of research I bought a Data Robotics DroboS. I outfitted it with 3 terrabytes to try it out. After a lot of issues (none of which were the Drobo. It was all Microsoft's issues. Why do I still run a Windows 2003 server?) everything was up and running. I felt really confident. I now had a main storage system that could be upgraded on the fly AND I had it auto backing up every night to my old RAID systems....or so I thought.

Fast forward 4 months to last weekend. I went to Vegas and upon returning to work that Monday, couldn't access my main storage. I hustled to my server room and noticed my Server was off line. No problem, I have UPS and it probably shut everything down due to a power failure over the weekend or something. I rebooted and in 5 minutes everything was back up. Except I still couldn't access my storage. Long story short, the Drobo was dead. I spent 20 mins on the phone with customer service and they decided to send me a new one. I was sure that when I popped in my drives to the new enclosure all would be right. In the mean time I would work from my backup. Everything was going as planned. My back up strategy was working!

That night I realized that I had screwed up. For some horrible reason I had stored all of my photo and video files in a folder outside of the main structure. Basically, I had a huge amount of data that wasn't being backed up. No problem, it's all still safe on my redundant Drobo drives. I just had to be patient.

The new Drobo came and I popped in my drives, fired it up and everything was great. This is where I screwed up royally. For a reason I still don't understand, I didn't immediately back up the data that wasn't backed up. Instead I started to reconfigure the drive mounting and letters through disk management. I've done it a million times and never had a problem. Until now. Half way through the renaming process everything froze. I had to reboot the machine and when it came back, Windows told me I had to format the drive. WHAT?! the drobo software was telling me everything was still there but there was no way to access it. Right away I knew what happened. Somehow the Master Boot Record got corrupted and windows had no way to see the data on the drive. My heart sank and I wanted to throw my entire rack out the window.

I have now spent the last 72 hours trying to access and restore the data that was on that drive. I refused to let the universe teach me a lesson AND win (i'm ok with the lesson part.) And I was successful. After unsuccesful attempts to rebuild the MBR I went to trying to rebuild the data from the drive. After an unsuccesful attempt I stumbled on a program called Zero Assumption Recovery (ZAR) It take a LONG time, about 2 hours per 100 gigs but it worked perfectly. Found and restored every single bit of data that I hand't backed up.

I figure I have another solid day of rebuilding the Drobo, restoring from the backups and then reconfiguring it all back to how it was WITH a new set of back up rules in place. phew....it's been a long weekend.

Which brings me to this website. I had some down time so I decided to revamp it. As you may know, a temp splash page has been up for quite some time now. Well, I decided that having a working but not fully completed page up is better than a simple splash page so here we are. 

There will be a lot more video uploaded someday, as well as photos etc. The demo reel is in dire need of a complete redo as it's about 2 years out of date. I guess being busy is good. 

Jeremy

Newcastle: SDM Shop Dog

In the mean time, I hope everyone has a relaxing few days off and comes back ready for a great 2010!

I was named Executive Director of Backhausdance. No, I'm not quitting my day job at SDM. I'm a fan, labor of love, etc.

Did a few shots on the upcoming film Tekken. Yes, it's based on the video game.

My loyal dog Newcastle started bleeding out of his butt. Not a little blood. More like the prom scene from Carrie. Scary and surreal. He's fine now after a weekend in doggie hospital. I guess it's something that can afflict dogs randomly. Don't take it lightly if it happens to your dog. Take 'em to the vet right away like I did. It will save their lives.

Bid a few movies, a TV show and a commercial. None of which are likely to happen.

Prepping for my 10th annual Halloween party. If you've been, you know of what I speak. If you think you should be invited, let me know why and I'll see what I can do. Ask anyone who's been, Best. Halloween. Party. Evar.

So thank you Mr. Draplin, for a fantastic product, fantastic blog, fantastic work and an envelope full of free stuff. Made. My. Day.
 Exciting day at SDM
Pile of Awesome
Super Green

So..to be clear. 2am, Sunday July 12. Headbangers Ball. Save yourself some headache and just tivo it. On my cable it's listed as "MTV2 Headbanger's Ball"

Once it's officially debuted I should get permission to put it up here too. But watch Headbanger's Ball...it's good for you.

50,000 Unstoppable Watts

Total Run Time - 3:41:11
Edits - 221
Frames per edit average - 30.05 (right around 1 second per edit. MTV at it's finest)

91 VFX shots broken down as follows:
29 Monitor Burn shots for a grand total of 100 screens
36 (Major) De-Noise shots. Thank God for Neat Video and Furnace. Perhaps  I'll talk a little about those shots in the future and how this video was put together.
24 Beauty fixes. I'm hesitant to call these beauty fixes. More like "There wasn't enough low fill light" so I     had to soften some shadows. But I'm a perfectionist so while I was at it I fixed some other stuff...
2 Matte Paintings. Actually 1 painting used twice...I try to cheat every chance I get.
8 Programs used: Final Cut Pro, Color, Fusion, Neat Video, Furnace, Lightwave 3D, Compressor, Photoshop. Love everyone of 'em.
1 Camera: Canon 5D Mark II
4 Lenses: 50mm 1.4, 15mm Fisheye 2.8, 24mm 1.4, 100mm 2.8 Macro
1 Guy: Me.

I was thinking about this the other day. Other than my actors and the band, this is the first time since my very first project in film school that I have done everything, soup to nuts, on a project. Concept, shoot, edit, post, VFX...everything. Inevitably you need help and the talent of a bunch of other people as your projects get more and more ambitious. It's hard to say which way I would prefer to work. I like the challenge of having everything on my shoulders. And even though I do this for a living and have sat in front of these magical boxes called computers every single day for the last 12 years, I still get blown away by what you can do with them. For instance this is the first project that I sat down and got proficient in Color for. We just didn't have the budget for a final tape to tape color session so I had to roll up my sleeves and do it myself and I'm damn proud and thankful that I did. I think it turned out great and I won't hesitate to go that route in the future.

Finally, an interesting side note: that first film school project I mentioned earlier...Guess what band I used for the soundtrack? Yep...Clutch. Funny how life works.