Here's to Hope

I'm going through a weird time at the moment. It's pretty dark and no fun, but I've been through similar times before and know they're not permanent. So instead of leaning into despair, I'm down to lean into hope this morning.

There's a young gun here in OKC named Colten Sikes. He's a filmmaker I'd met a few years ago and kept following from a distance. This past weekend he'd posted about his recent Emmy win for a project he'd done with Scissortail Media for the Weitzenhoffer School of Musical Theatre at the University of Oklahoma.

One: it's a great piece. I dug the story, the edit, the sound design; the footage was fantastic. Freakin' kudos. Two: more than anything what caught my attention was the openness Colten expressed in being hesitant to even share how excited he was about his success.

"I felt guilty for wanting to celebrate or receive praise." - Colten Sikes

Holy eff that's incredibly relatable. Not sure if you and I live in the same world, but we're in this position where you're only good as your last thing. You're not important unless you're working. You're not important unless you're putting out greatness. It goes completely against reality, especially in our current circumstances. Being on the receiving end of someone else's self-praise is exhausting and never a replacement for good and great work. We're drowning in self-promotion, so humility is a breath of fresh air. Thx dude.

Here's a few other bright spots from this week:

Time is Still Broken (I checked)

We're starting the second week of school for Saint Anne the Wife and our older boy. Honestly this past week felt like it took a month to finish. On Friday I spent a solid portion of the day with our realtors and a small army of home inspectors at the 98 year old house we're looking to buy here in Oklahoma City. Again, it's hard to believe Friday was only a couple days ago seeing how time still has that wildly bent and warped thing happening during this surreal time.

Soon enough I'll get back to working behind a camera again. If social media is to be believed, I'm the only one not shooting film stock and/or an Alexa Mini and saving humanity on some courageous and impactful commercial campaign or meaningful art project. That whole "comparison is the thief of joy" idea is coming in hot while I'm sitting behind a computer screen and trying to buy a house in a city I'd never expected to live in again this time four months ago.

Here's a few hot takes from the week:

Actively Looking for the Silver Lining

Look, there's no question these last 150+ days of living in our version of the upside down have unquestionably sucked. The bottom of my family's world fell out around March 13, 2020 and no question it's easy to complain about the garbage happing right now. This whole thing still feels like a bad dream and I'm hoping to wake up soon back in our Brooklyn apartment with my fever finally broken.

That being said and knowing I'm actually awake, my small act of rebellion today (and most days) is pulling out the telescope in search of some kind of silver lining. I'll keep it short this week and just to be difficult, I'll break the rule of threes:

  1. I've got a younger buddy here in Oklahoma City who's taking some big swings in trying to up the production value of local commercials. I knew he'd been nibbling away with a group called Studio Flight in the years before I'd left for NYC, but I'm crazy proud and excited for what he's doing now. By all means keep an eye on him if that's your thing.
  1. No question I'm upset, mad, and angry about not getting more time behind a camera right now. We've got a lot going on at the moment and I just can't get out to shoot, but it seems like that pent-up energy has sprung a leak into (possibly) better and more writing and (possibly) better food coming out of the different kitchens I've been hiding in. You'd need to talk to those who've read and eaten what I've made to confirm those bloated assumptions.
  1. With what's going in the world Saint Anne the Wife and I have been crushed by the weight of our family responsibilities, especially considering we've been semi-homeless since leaving our NYC apartment. Over the weekend we moved from my parents' place south of OKC to her mom's on the far northwest side to be closer to her new job. No question how this nonsense has impacted our two boys has been weighing heavy on us. Sunday night's silver lining had us seening a bit of Dr. Jekyll in our younger Mr. Hyde when he helped to comfort his older brother who'd smashed his knee into the doorframe and burst into tears.
  1. The NY Times came out with a semi-hopeful article today about "What if ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Closer Than Scientists Thought?"

No Shortage of Stress

There's seriously no shortage of stress these days. Yes, I'm preaching to the choir over here, but good Lord.

Saint Anne the Wife and my mom are back to school for the fall. The students aren't back just yet, but will be next week. Our little one is back at the preschool we'd left before moving to New York and I've been schoolmarm'in with our older boy. Seriously it's a hot mess seeing the two teachers in my immediate family crashing into their additional responsibilities as web programers as they try and build websites for their remote teaching classrooms. My simple Squarespace site is the Tesla to whatever salvaged title Ford Pinto their schools are having them use. To say it feels like schools are seemingly on their own and stumbling around in the dark in working out how to handle all this is absolutely an understatement. There's also the recent report about how "At Least 97,000 Children Tested Positive For Coronavirus In Last 2 Weeks Of July."

"If there is good news in such a report, it's that, in spite of the uptick in child infection rates, the data also show that most children do not get critically ill with the disease and that, among the states that reported hospitalization data, the current hospitalization rate for children remains low, at 2%. What's less clear is how effectively children would spread the virus in a classroom setting, not only to friends and classmates but to teachers and school staff." - npr.org

We're also in the process of buying a house here in Oklahoma City. No question buying another house here was no where in the plan five years ago – or even April 2020 – but things change. Still, that doesn't make the process any less stressful. If there's any kind of silver lining, interest rates are ridiculously low. I'd bought my first home in 2008 and thought I was king of the world with a home loan at 6.5%. That bone swinging monkey wouldn't know what to do with himself seeing the 2.5% (and a bit lower) space stations of today. Still, we're staying a bit grounded after being pre-approved knowing that we'll need to put off buying a second car till we close on our loan.

Another close to home train wreck from this past week was thanks to a collision in Portland of my current and past lives. I'd connected with a photographer at a coffee shop in Portland while on a job last year. She'd posted a link about a Christian leader holding an event in her town dubbed "Riots to Revival." Turns out to be Sean Feucht, the same dude I'd known and toured with way back in the day. Even in trying to write this I'm nearly boiling over at how selfish, self-centered, and self-destructive this whole thing is. What is happening?

I'm incredibly embarrassed knowing how deep I was in this wretched Christian world at one time. The last few years has had me furiously wrestling with my faith knowing how the loudest voices with the biggest soapboxes in Christianity by default represent the rest of us. Stoked to know other believers weren't having it with this nonsense in their city.

Tools of the Trade

(I've absolutely been punting it lately regarding my weekly blog posts. Surely this'll reflect poorly on my Blogger Hall of Fame application down the road. I'll just make a donation to their non-profit to sweep it under the rug and we'll be good.)

Feels like I've barely touched my cameras since being in Oklahoma the last few months. Not intentionally, but it's been a thing. My RED kit went out on a rental a couple weeks ago and on it's return I spent a couple hours and an unhealthy amount of Clorox wiping off the airborne death I'm hoping didn't come back with it.

"What we're seeing today is different from March and April," [Dr. Deborah] Birx said on CNN's State of the Union. "It is extraordinarily widespread — it's into the rural as equal urban areas." - npr.org

I'd kept it clean while we were in Brooklyn during all this nonsense. Giving it a solid scrub the other day I noticed how much crap and crud had built up. The screws were dry and crusty. There was dust and dirt from God knows when and where. There's some fancy mechanisms involved with the camera hardware that had long seized up, but I was able to get in there with a toothbrush, canned air, and some WD-40 and that nonsense feels good as new. I'm not dumb enough to try and mess with any of the electronic bits, but I did notice the Clorox wipes I'd been using to kill off corona had over time left little bits behind. The beach is great and all, but you never come back without sand where it shouldn't be.

The last few years my stills camera has seemed to morph into something else. The Canon 5D Mark III I'd bought years ago to replace my 7D for video work has nearly the same importance now as my Moleskine notebooks and black pen. I'd for sure like to have something a bit smaller to carry around, but there's about five to seven thousand reasons why I don't at the moment.

Both of my main cameras have done their fair share of work over the years and paid for themselves many times over, but more than that they're a means of practice, experiment, and getting out what I can't say or write. In time those tools will need to be replaced, but the big deal is what they've allowed.

It's incredibly comforting to me just to be holding a camera. A few weeks into lockdown I built out my RED kit and just had it sitting on my desk because it brought back some sense of normalcy.

There's no telling how many rooms I've been in and places I've been to that I'd have not been allowed otherwise. During yesterday's history making Nasa/SpaceX event, the most interesting thing to me in SpaceX's Hawthorne mission control room was the camera operator and his Alexa Amira setup.

No question I've been paying attention to the protests around the country, but I've been hit especially hard knowing how the press has been targeted by local, state, and federal law enforcement. The local TV reporters shot with pepper balls, the dude in Lafayette Square blindsided for a ridiculous photo-op, and the veteran photog covering the Portland protests who got shot through the plastic eye hole of his gas mask after he'd walked away from the demonstration. In his Facebook post following the event, he said,

"In urgent care, the doctor left the room multiple times as the pepper on me caused her to cough uncontrollably. She wore a respirator to stitch my eye."

Oh, and this whole thing concerning Homeland Security Shutting Down ‘Intelligence’ Reports on Journalists is absolutely on par with the rest of the dumpster fire happening at the moment:

“The Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged that its intelligence reporting system, designed to combat terrorism, has instead been misused to target journalists who were reporting on the controversial activities of federal law enforcement officers,” she said in a statement. “It is imperative that D.H.S.’s investigation determines how this happened and ensures it does not happen again.”

But don't mind me. I'll just be here, keeping my gear clean and hoping to use it soon enough to shoot another mayonnaise commercial so I can try and pay bills, make up for the last few months, and keep my family from having to cash in my life insurance policy while we're living through whatever this is.

Surreal Enough for Clown Core

Absolutely blaming the surrealness of our current world for me totally missing my weekly post. Ideally I'd like to share some good news or at least something light hearted, but those dopamine hits feel few and far between these days. At this point I'm way past trying to use this blog for anything related to my professional life.

Right now, many of the patterns we know and love have been obliterated... “My wife actually said this to me just a couple of days ago: ‘It's like there's no future,’” says [child psychiatrist Fredrick] Matzner. What she meant was we can’t plan for the future, because in the age of the coronavirus, we don’t know what we’ll be doing in six months, or even tomorrow. We’re stuck in a new kind of everlasting present. “And so everything seems completely otherworldly,” Matzner says. - "Why Life During a Pandemic Feels So Surreal", Wired

Honestly, what's been helpful these days are a handful of gems I've found on YouTube. Here's a few of my favs:

Back (-ish) on Set

This past week made for my first legit dip back into our coronavirus infected production world. I'll leave the project and client details to your imagination because the important thing was that I was actually working on a set again with people who aren't my immediate family.

It was a typical talking head interview shoot, but this one was run by three remote producers on the other side of the country via an iPhone Zoom call. We filmed the two camera interview at the talent's house and there were three of us on set (talent, camera, audio). The talent's spouse stayed in another room the duration of our time there. Audio had their own equipment and the camera gear was shipped in via the production company.

With the basics out of the way, here are the main takeaways:

  • Good Lord it was exhilarating to be working again.
  • Give yourself even more time to setup than you think you'll need.

Obviously safety for everyone was a priority. Production sent out a Covid questionnaire, required a temperature check before arriving on set, and provided surgical masks and rubber gloves.

It's been a minute since hulking around heavy equipment cases and though I'm absolutely "Team Mask," that surgical mask wasn't as generous in helping me catch my breath after a couple flights of stairs as I'd hoped. Turns out too that gaffe tape isn't super friendly to thin rubber gloves. I shredded two pair of the client provided hand condoms in the first ten minutes of setup before tapping my own supply. I'm still working through a box of medium duty gloves my parents shipped us a few months ago.

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I mention the whole "give-yourself-even-more-time-than-you-think-you-need" bit because the camera setups had to be approved by the remote producers. After deciding on the better of two rooms in the house via iPhone pics, we did the whole video chat thing in setting up the camera positions along with sending stills of the camera monitor. No question a slower process than I'd expected and we went through a multiple rounds of revisions before settling in for the interview.

Though there were only three of us, I absolutely know how unusual/unnatural it's going to be to not crowd around a camera monitor like we've always done. I was the one getting notes, reference images, and updates on my iPhone from the producers during setup and had to politely remind the other two in the room about not standing over my shoulder to try and read off my phone. No question those responsible for running a set will need to modify how they communicate and coordinate with the people they're working with (and yes I ended that sentence and this post with a preposition).

Did I mention it was freakin' fantastic to get back on a working set?

Digitizing Old Journals

There's small heavy duty cardboard box near the desk I'm using at my parent's house filled with the notebooks and journals I've been keeping since the mid-nineties. The early ones are spiral notebooks from high school plus some fancy leather bound ones. Thankfully I've settled into the Moleskine family of notebooks, specifically the black soft cover pocket-size with squared/grid pages and a solid pen.

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I'd love to say I'm writing the next great American novel, but mostly it's me hashing out the moody hot-mess of my self-centeredness knowing no one else will likely ever read it. Surely there's some gold in them there hills, but there'll be mountains of incredibly selfish, petty, and self-destructive nonsense to sift through not to mention terrible, terrible writing.

Seeing as how I'm not "working" like I was during the before time and how incredibly easy it is to go through a full day of our new normal without actually accomplishing anything, the mindless task of scanning, flipping to the next page, and organizing the new digital versions of my journals has kept me from the slow spiral into darkness – at least this past week.

It feels incredibly defeating having so little control of our current lives. Anything I can do to fight back is welcomed.

In so many aspects the idea of setting goals has been taken away during this pandemic. Some of the major goals we'd set, invested in, and attained in recent years have been taken out at the knees. The goals I'd set for 2020 have mostly been sloughed away as we've had to reassess our situation. Thank goodness for little victories each day simply keeping us buoyed.

Are the two house fires alive, fed, and clean before bed? Yes.
Are Saint Anne the Wife and I still married and friends? Yes.
Am I still journaling most days and maintaining a weekly blog post? Yes.

So back to this digital archiving of my notebooks. I've been meaning to do high-resolution scans of my journals for years but never got around to it. What I'm doing with my nonsense – at least this round – is based on some Google searches, specifically advice from the Missouri University of Science and Technology and the National Archives:

  • Master Files - color scans at 600 dpi and saving the files in an uncompressed TIFF format.
  • Access Images - smaller versions of those Master Files I'll put together a PDF by journal.
  • Organization - Not sure it's the best means of organizing, but I'm setting up file folder by year_month/quarter (2020_01), the individual scans by year_month/quarter_page (2020_01_001).
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I'd Googled something like "digitizing best practices" and "standards for digitizing paper journals" to somewhat prepare for future use. There's a ton of other options that I'm sure I'll attempt in time, but for now I'm trudging through 25+ years of journal entries and trying to not read each page and gag as I scan it in.

Out West

Saint Anne the Wife and I were able to dump our two house fires with their grandparents a few days last week and head west. The twenty-seven hundred mile road trip through eight states was all kinds of good for the soul. Did I mention we bought a car like two days after getting back to Oklahoma City?

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Over the years work has had me through most of the US, but several of the states on this trip were a first for Anne. We made a big loop through Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and back through Oklahoma. The whole "global pandemic" thing is still raging and we did our best to avoid anyone else.

Turns out there's a whole lot of nothing out west still. Rocks, lots of rocks. And lots of wide open space with a healthy seasoning of mountain to taste. You'd pass a city now and then but it was only there because all the wide open space didn't want to come across as too greedy.

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Anne honestly hasn't had much of a break from the boys since we'd moved to New York in December 2018. I was hustling and trying to do the thing and she ran the house like the hero she is. No question she's the glue that kept us connected as a family as well as to the fantastic friends we'd made during our short time there.

Being just the two of us for a few days on the road was wild considering we were more "adults" and able to talk to each other and less "parents" in trying to keep our children from murdering us. Still, most of our conversations in time turned to the boys and how we're trying to navigate what's happening in the world and pretending to know what we're doing; we've decided to keep both children.

Outside Trump's Tulsa Rally

Seriously one of the most difficult pieces I've shot and cut together. Not sure I've ever been more considerate and intentional about the decisions I made with what I had to work with. People were looking for a fight. People were bursting emotionally and looking for an excuse to get into it. The whole event felt like a loaded mouse trap you couldn't trust to not break your finger.

Obviously I'm hoping the edit stands on its own and is thick enough for viewers to watch it more than once. I could go into details about gear, how I approached everything, and why I made the creative choices I did, but none of that is anywhere near as important as what actually happened that day and what's happening in our country.