December 42, 2020

We're now 42 days into the December of a year that won't let up.

I don't want to write about what happened Wednesday at the US Capitol building and the ones immediately following because so much else has been said about it. I have nothing else of worth to add. The stories and images coming out of the event are incredibly powerful and tough to not sit, stall out, and gorge on. So instead, thank you to the satirists who help explain our world.

And We're Back

So... How's it been? How's it going? Happy Holidays by the way.

It's been a bit and I'm totally fine with that. I'm normally not one to jump on the "new year new me" thing but I'll typically write up some goals for the year. The first week of January 2020 I'd started a spreadsheet to help plan out blog post ideas for the year. Needless to say things changed a bit.

Saint Anne the Wife and our two boys are masked up and back to school today following the holiday break. Obviously I'm glad they're getting a chance to see friends/co-workers and get back to things, but below that silver lining is the current world and reality we live in. Positive cases are continuing to go up and to the right and I can't keep writing about it without bashing poor leadership and getting angry. My immediate family is still healthy but this stupid game of Battleship is hitting closer and closer to home each day.

After months of renovations that are somehow still not quite finished, we're finally in our own house. That fancy new bathroom down the hall still doesn't have a vanity mirror – you'd be surprised what it's like to not see yourself on a regular basis – but just being back in our own place again has brought some much needed calm and stability after basically couch surfing with two house fires and a dog since June.

Work-wise I've been swamped these last few months. Seems like it's usually around this time of year when work slows down a bit and I freak out, but again, this nonsense is cyclical and work picks back up. If there is a bit of a lull, I'm hoping to get back to some personal projects.

There's also a pile of books on my night stand I'm hoping to get through. I'm about 200 pages into Barack Obama's A Promised Land and hope to finish reading that mountainous feat before the second volume comes out in the next few years. Mid-December on a work trip I landed at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi and asked about local authors. The staffer handed me an armload of books and I ended up buying a couple, including Kiese Laymon's How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Anne and I escaped to New York a couple days after Christmas and we picked up a couple books at Strand, so now I've also got Iain Reid's I'm Thinking of Ending Things impatiently waiting on me like I'm a tourist who doesn't know how to use a MetroCard. Meanwhile, Saint Anne the Wife has been plowing through stacks of books during the break like they're nothing.

Speaking of plowing through things, I ended up getting a QNAP 4-Bay NAS setup and it's embarrassingly fast compared to the tower of external hard drives I've been using for years. I quickly learned I'm not an IT professional so it took me a bit somewhat figure out how to set the thing up. Hopefully I'll have more to share about it down the road, but I'll for sure say it's sped up my editing workflow tremendously.

Please Stop the Train

Twenty-one days later and we're back. How's it going? How's it been? You still living at your mother-in-law's house too with your wife, two kids, and a dog while your house is still being renovated? You still living through a raging pandemic with little to no federal (or Oklahoma state) leadership while also trying to keep your personal and mental health in check plus keep that professional life together?

Being in house renovation mode is something I'd not recommend for mere mortals. We're going to have a fancy looking bathroom and some freshly painted rooms once all this nonsense is over, but damn... No one needs that Covid Badge of Honor. Seems we'd be more likely to get Oklahoma to vote for a democrat before this house gets finished.

Oh, and Q3 taxes (corporate and personal) were due to my CPA. All kidding aside, those incredibly qualified heroes out in Long Island are rockstars who I can't say enough nice things about.

It's seemingly impossible to get things done professionally considering everything else requiring immediate attention. In the process of trying to get this post written, I'm on FaceTime and the phone helping my wife pick out bathroom lights and drawer pulls while she's also trying to keep our two house fires from burning down both Lowe's and The Home Depot. That and working with one of the general contractors – who may or may not have Covid – on problems needing to be fixed due to their subcontractors – who may or may not have Covid.

It's only Monday morning and I've not even finished my first coffee.

This has been Anne and my life during Covid. We're ready for this infected and feverish train to stop so we can get off. Thanks to recent news, I'm 90-95% sure there's light at the end of the tunnel, but fully aware there's still quite a bit of tunnel left.

Seeing as how there's been certainly a reason (or two or ten) I've been on radio silence the last three weeks, I figured it's time to check in before getting back to my actual responsibilities. Work has been crazy busy and keeping me on my toes. Two days had me on a film set and wearing a still photog hat, then on to a commercial trying out my AC legs, and then back to tempering my one-man-band calluses running camera and audio while also gaffing, DIT'ing, and managing a remote setup for shoot here in the Oklahoma City area. We might as well add PA to my list of professional credits on this project considering the Airbnb they rented and had me responsible for plus a surprisingly grueling FedEx run to ship out the project hard drive.

Kinda nerding out a bit on some gear from this project: the whole remote director thing worked better than I'd expected. That and this iPad slate I'd found was super helpful in this specific situation over my tried and true traditional dry eraser number.

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The director was on lockdown in London and would be conducting the interviews via Zoom. I'd taken care of that nonsense on other remote shoots, but this director also wanted the camera picture with timecode. It took a bit of Googling and YouTube research to figure out a workable solution, but I was able to land on using a Blackmagic Ultrastudio 3G Recorder. The little gray box converted my camera's SDI or HDMI signal to Thunderbolt 3 so my laptop could accept the signal. There's some kind of software issue not allowing audio to be included via SDI and HDMI, but we were still able to use the laptop's mic. That whole setup worked like a charm through the interview portion seeing as how we were planted in one spot, but being tethered to my laptop during b-roll was a hot mess. That'd have been a great time for a wireless signal via Teradek, but turns out those cost money we didn't have in the production budget.

The free DigiSlate iPad app was perfect for what we were doing. We ended up going through a dozen or so different topics and each needed specific slate information. WAY easier to type in what I needed instead of forcing an editor I'll never meet to try and decipher my hieroglyphics. I wasn't in a spot needing timecode to match up exactly with my camera and audio, so I can't speak to that, but I'll for sure being using this iPad app again.

Get Tested

Monday Monday Monday. It's Monday afternoon and I'm waiting for proxies to render and looking back to last week in New York. Certainly there are more important things to worry about – like making sure you've voted - but why not watch me gladly suffer through two of the three Covid tests I've taken in the last week or so. Thank goodness they've all come back negative and not taken any noticeable part of my brain with them on their way out.

No one needs this hot mess, but unfortunately it's part of our lives and will be till we get things figured out. I still feel much safer regarding Covid safety in NYC than I do here in Oklahoma City. It's not hard to get tested in Oklahoma City, but for sure easier in New York. Still seems like most people in NYC are on the same page with safety while the majority Oklahomans are more concerned about their four and no more.

To date I've had four tests. The first was a few weeks ago when I was actually having symptoms, but thankfully it came back negative. The other three were just to make sure I wasn't asymptomatic.

OU is doing free tests at the medical center near downtown OKC. You call, setup an appointment, and stay in your car. They're doing that deep explorer nonsense and it feels like they're getting a running start at it. The video above is from my second test and it went WAY better than my first one a while back. Still uncomfortable, but not soul wrenching.

I got tested at the LaGuardia airport without an appointment and it only took a few minutes. I got tested twice – arrival and departure – and results were available the next day. Those tests were much less invasive, but apparently still do the thing.

Knowing I was traveling and would be around people outside my normal bubble, I made sure to do the thing. Doesn't hurt too that the AC I was working with this week pretty much required me getting tested before she'd commit to the job. Crazy thanks to Stacy Mize for making my life that much easier this past week.

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Good Lord: Wear a mask, do the social distancing thing, get tested. Don't be the dumbarse who accidentally kills someone else's grandparent or gets some kid's teacher sick because your too cool to be "inconvenienced." Grow up and look out for other people.

228 Days Later

How 'bout that... It's been another two weeks. Things are pretty fast and furious with my work and around the Herriott household. We've been cutting loose things that aren't absolutely necessary or at least immediately important when we can. It's wild to consider how drastically things have changed in the last few months with so much of our lives spinning back up to our current "normal."

It's almost quaint thinking back now to late March and early April where you could FaceTime someone you'd not spoken to in months knowing they were also not busy and stuck inside. I almost miss being uniformly terrified about touching anything without first drowning it in bleach and tripping out because you couldn't find toilet paper or hand sanitizer. Hopefully it didn't show, but do know internally I was smug AF about being ahead of the sourdough curve when that nonsense got going.

As of today, Tuesday Oct. 27, 2020, we're 228 days from when Quarantine got started for us in NYC. 228 days. Saint Anne the Wife and I are still living in Oklahoma City with the two house fires at my mother-in-law's. Yesterday at a Post Office in Sea Girt, New Jersey, I dropped off a check to pay our first monthly mortgage payment on a house in Oklahoma City we've yet to move into and never intended to buy. It's not like we "accidentally" bought a house, but it's 2020 for goodness sakes.

This week has me back in the greater New York City area for a documentary project with a non-profit who'd reached out back in late May. Seriously, the world has yet to stop drastically changing and the 2020 of now would been unthinkable even then. Our list of priorities and storylines for this short film looks completely different than the proposal I'd written back then. Still, I'm incredibly thankful to be working and getting a chance to partner with this group.

In addition to our NYC/NJ shoots, part of the project will include interviews with people in multiple cities over Zoom. Obviously video calls are now as common as breakfast and dealing with your kid's remote learning, but I'd not done the whole thing of producing and directing remotely just yet. We had our first one over the weekend and should have a couple more by the end of this week. Crazy thanks to the internet and YouTubers who've already figured out some best practices in making the most of this hot mess.

Traveling & Working During a Pandemic

Traveling for work during this nonsense is...something. The last week of September I was out in central Wyoming and back in New York City the next. Do understand that I'm stoked to be back on the road, but there's new adjustments in doing the thing.

It's weird to admit feeling spoiled by New York City Lyft drivers compared to using the app in another part of the country. In leaving for my flight to Wyoming, the Lyft driver wasn't wearing a mask until I asked about it from behind my own. She fumbled around a bit before putting on her mask and then started blasting old school country music I'm assuming to remind me of where I'm from.

The process at the airport was pretty much normal short of most people wearing masks and just about all the food options and most stores being closed. The OKC airport traffic was way down, but my layovers in both Denver and Houston felt like business as usual. The only time I whipped out my eye protection while flying for my Wyoming trip was in the Denver airport. It's not like I was having to avoid people trying to lick my eyeballs, but the place was nearly shoulder-to-shoulder packed in some areas. Just wearing another layer of protection at that point seemed more responsible than dealing with an unnecessary panic attack.

With most of the food options at airports closed, I figured my salvation would be behind the walls of the United Club. Nope... After piecing together a dinner of chips, a cheese stick, and a vodka tonic I re-joined the masses at the airport Chick-fil-As and Shake Shacks. Nothing says "luxuries of travel" like sitting on the floor, facing the wall, and eating fast food out of a paper bag. Oh, and don't forget to brush your teeth any chance you get; those KN95 masks aren't forgiving.

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An unexpected benefit at the moment is United Airlines lowering the requirements with their MileagePlus policies. Currently I'm Silver and somehow most of my flights had me upgraded from economy to First Class. Being at the front of the plane during Covid isn't the same as what it was like in the Before Time (masks, additional fear of death, etc.), but I'm absolutely not complaining about the perks especially considering how full my flights have been. Still, I'm absolutley using that airline provided alcohol wipe to disinfect my seat and tray table.

Now granted, the flight attendants and pilots were only wearing the basic blue medical style masks and no eye protection. I felt ridiculous wearing goggles, especially with them fogging up the entire time, but more than anything I was wearing them to help me calm down when I needed to. Nearly everyone had a mask on at the different airports and most were wearing them properly. It was odd seeing people in those full on splash guard style face shields like they were about to deliver a baby, but I'd rather be doing the thing next to those people vs. the True American Heroes not wearing a mask at all.

In terms of actually being on set, things weren't dramatically different. I've seen a multiple things about the Covid safety preference of using a shotgun mic to record audio, but both my shoots used lav mics. By all means I'd stress the importance of having multiple monitors on set so everyone else isn't up in your business trying to see the image. We didn't have one for the Wyoming job and we should've. For my NYC shoot, we were able to have one for the client and an additional one off set.

Out in Wyoming we shot almost entirely outdoors. There was plenty of space to spread out so social distancing wasn't a problem. At one point I stepped in to help the talent fix the placement on her mic. I'd kept my mask on and she said, "Oh don't worry, I'm not infected. I'm a nursing student and get tested all the time." I kindly replied, "But you don't know that I'm not. I'm not from here and I've been around a lot of people I don't know." Her eyes widened a bit and you could tell she understand my caution.

New York felt completely different. Each of the Lyfts I took while in the city had drivers in masks and a plastic divider between us to stop the spittle. I'd not ridden the subway since mid-March, so it felt like home stepping down into the sights and smells of that underground world even though I – along with everyone else – was wearing a mask. For my shoot, we had to fill out a Covid questionnaire beforehand, wore masks, had plenty of hand sanitizer, and weren't allowed to have food or drinks (other than water) on set.

Several friends of mine living in NYC have talked about how the city somewhat feels back to normal – short of wearing masks and using hand sanitizer all the time. One mentioned how it seemed like most people there were on the same page about masks and fighting back against Covid. It sucks that the rest of the country isn't.

Out in Central Wyoming

It's a bit of a squished week considering work and travel schedules and all that. This past week I was out in central Wyoming shooting a story with Brandon Smith for Lakewood Church. Looking forward to seeing how his edit turns out. If you ever get a chance to head out to that part of the world I'd highly recommend it.

Most of my time in Wyoming was spent shooting scenics and interviews with Brandon's two Blackmagic Pocket 6k camera packages and DZO Pictor Cine Zoom lenses. By no means am I trying to give a legit product review, but honestly I was pleasantly surprised with both the camera and lenses considering I'd not shot with either. The BPCC 6k needed to be fully kitted out with a cage, monitor, battery setup, and some other nonsense to make it useable, but I'd shoot on it again. The two DZO zoom lenses accomplished what we needed to do. I've done a TON of documentary and run-n-gun work with the Canon 24-70 & 70-200 lenses, and I'd rather use these similarly priced DZO lenses. I'm shooting later this week with the Angenieux EZ-2 15-40mm and Angenieux EZ-1 30-90mm lenses so it'll be nice to compare the two sets. Ooh, and I'm shooting with the new-ish EasyRig STABIL arm.

No, I'll not become a gear review guy. Dear goodness no...

I'm becoming a fan of these weekly hot takes. Here's what I've got for this week:

Good grief I'm a fan of Charlie Kaufman. This thing was weird and quirky AF, so absolutely fun. Makes me want to make weird art movies.

ALWAYS a fan of Jared Hogan, so obviously stoked to see his new Joji “Your Man” music video. Again, makes me want to make weird art movies with friends.

Plenty of Moving Parts

There's a ton of moving parts these next few weeks and it's starting to feel something like full-speed again. We're still living in the upside-down, but more and more it's just feeling inconvenient instead of insurmountable.

This past week had me booking travel arrangements for a couple upcoming projects. No doubt there's more thought going into the seat I'm choosing on a flight. There's also the whole thing of making sure I'm taking safety precautions more seriously. Some buddies of mine who are already flying have been using a combination of KN95 masks with medical style masks on top while on the plane; some are also using eye protection. The KN95 masks I'd found on Amazon seemed hit-or-miss, so I ordered a 50 pack from West Coast KN95 in southern California. They seemed legit and had their certifications in order.

I also ordered some eye protection off Amazon, so I'll be the cool guy wearing these safety goggles through the airport and on flights like a zealot. There's been situations where I needed eye protection on set, specifically earlier this year when I'd shot in a raging dust storm only to be rinsing and fishing trash out of my eyes the next few days.

This week's hot takes:

Expect me to be spending MUCH less time on social media. Anne and I watched The Social Dilemma the other night and had some solid conversations about our social media usage as well as how we're approaching this nonsense as parents.

No question Volvo makes some of the best commercials. This one was making the rounds this past week and absolutely worth your time.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1972. She became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School before moving on to the U.S. Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court. Credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times

Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1972. She became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School before moving on to the U.S. Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court. Credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times

"Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.' But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow." - Ruth Bader Ginsburg

"Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you." - Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Not All Doom and Gloom

Well, it's not a gloom and doom today. Sure I missed my self-imposed Monday deadline, but I'm totally fine with it considering I was on a shoot and actually working behind a camera. Not going to lie: it's been a minute.

A group from London reached out early last week looking for a DP for an upcoming shoot in Oklahoma. We ended up filming an incredibly heavy interview yesterday under some trees in a disc golf course. No clue how Mongoose Pictures found me, but I'm glad they did. Not exactly sure when the project I got to work on will be released, but surely I'll post about it when it does. No screen grabs or BTS stills from the day, so it up and look at the weeds (sunflowers?) I shot on the side of the highway heading to the shoot. By all means I hope to work with them and director Josh Baker again down the road.

Thankfully too I've had some additional work come in. I'd mentioned some potential projects last week and a couple others have popped up since then. We've also finally landed on a closing date on the house we're looking to buy, so hopefully that'll add some much needed stability in this time of widespread dumpster fires.

Here's a few hot takes from the last week:

Starting to Spin Back Up? (don't jinx it)

It's been a while since I abandoned hopes of a return to a Before Times normal. One of my fancy pants spreadsheets reminded me this morning that it's been 179 days since the bottom of the world fell out on March 13, 2020. 179 days, good Lord. With that in mind, some things are starting to spin back up to speed and I'm trying to keep up.

Thankfully more work is starting to come in. The last week had several job inquiries and another project I'd bid on months ago got "pre-approved." Not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds better than "denied." There's another kinda-sorta favor/personal project with a tiny bit of funding in the works, so that's one more thing to add to the welcomed treadmill that's slowly getting faster and faster. Don't get me wrong, we're still talking "slightly faster than a crawl" but I'm smart enough to know I can trip over my own feet.

Speaking of being head over heels – SEGUE – Saint Anne the Wife and I made it past the eleven year mark this past week. She's still the hero of our family and easily the brightest part of my life. To celebrate, we dumped our two house fires with their grandparents so we could look for major appliances, tile samples, and landscaping by ourselves and not drag along two angry drip torches in car seats. Obviously this hopeless romantic is practical and we're still in the process of buying a house.

Here's a few hot takes from this week:

  • I'm loving my slow spiral into the absurdity of The Eric Andre Show.
  • Somehow I got into an early private screening of Tenet last week. Stoked to get back into a movie theater and I absolutely felt safe with the safety protocols the theatre had in place.
  • Got to pop off some moody cloud pictures thanks to an attention hungry storm that moved through OKC early in the week. No question I miss being behind a camera, so crazy thanks Mom Nature for the good light.