Oh, I can NOT wait to tell you about what I am planning right now.

I just renewed WhalingShipStudios.com, which means this site has sort of existed for a year, now. Let’s look back on this time, shall we?

• Mike starts this blog as an assignment for one of his classes at OSU.
• We discovers XLNTAds via OnlineVideoContests.
• Mike writes and animates the brilliant A Grand Discovery for a Nestlé assignment via XLNTAds, which is selected as a finalist, earning Whaling Ship its first legitimate commission.
• We flirt with various cameras: the HV20, the HVX200, the RED (oh, if only).
• We develop a taste for WINGS? YEAH!
• Mike buys an HV20, and I make my first appearance in the blog.
• Our good friend and colleague Jonathan searches for love (alas, to no avail—at least professionally).
• We spend a few months playing with ideas for a Klondike commercial (for their ridiculously-exorbitant video contest) and after writing like five killer scripts, end up with…something. I think this was finished like a month after the deadline, too.
• We complete pre-production on a ten-minute short involving real, live, grown-up actors and are ultimately forced to call it off due to scheduling constraints (though I do hope we complete this project soon—I’ll let you know, I promise)
• Mike takes some time off from school, I take some time off from school and move to California, exploring some ancillary career paths, I grow tired of writing this list.

I’m here to tell you that this birthday couldn’t come at a better time. We’ve been kinda dormant for a long time, but Whaling Ship is back. Look for more from us (including a spankin’ new website) in the weeks to come. Yeah! Whoo!

I spent most of yesterday browsing DVXuser and I've got the bug back. Zak Forsman has convinced me that the D90 is not such a bad thing. All that Jellocam nonsense really turned me off but I can think of one shot in the combined past works of Mike and I that would have suffered such torment. I think the pros definitely outweigh the cons, even if it means soft focus and shouldn't-be-HD compression (that's what Mr. Forsman says, anyway).

Not making any immediate plans (and still holding out for more info on the GH1) but I definitely see some more filmmaking in the near future. I haven't even written since like, December, though. Whoops.

By the way, I'm going to NAB this year.

Mike wrote, shot, and edited this. I did sound, and scored it, too. For a contest (of course!) for Chanticlear Pizza, a pizza chain in the Twin Cities. I like it!

Life update sooner or later (probably later). I re-re-launched my personal website and have been focusing more on live goings-on lately, but I'm also planning a major film project for late August. Maybe Mike will update us on what he's been doing, too. Oh Mii-iiike…

Things get busier and will keep getting busier. I meant to write about the Nikon D90 a few weeks ago, and how upset I am by its rolling shutter; the amazing new offerings from RED, and how masterfully they have abstracted the idea of a “camera;” and many other highlights from the cinema tech (cinematheque?) world. However, I saw a (not so recent) post on ProLost today that pulled me aside and gave me a stern, but loving, talking-to about going gaga over the ever-shrinking gap between prosumer video and professional celluloid.

Many videographers find their first experience with a 35mm lens adapter to be quite a cold splash of water. The images from these rigs can look amazing—but it just became a whole lot more work to make them even acceptable. Your system got a whole lot less agile, your solution more brittle. The ways to mess up a shot grew in proportion to the potential for greatness.

He goes on a for a good, long while about something I keep forgetting: the DOF, the resolution, the dynamic range are never as important as the overall quality of the experience. Read the whole thing. It’s all this good.

On a personal note, Mike and I are working on his NYU film and it’s coming along really nicely. I’ve noticed a very repeatable trend in our workflow: Mike comes up with a great idea; I write some things to make that idea unwieldy and almost always throw in some wordplay (I’m all about wordplay); Mike takes the stuff I've written and simplifies it, so that it will be watchable; Mike then composes shots that will make that simply powerful content look perfectly natural; I hold a microphone on a stick. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

More soon.

I half-forgot about this blog.

Things are kinda slow recently. I'm back in Manhattan, Mike is working on his application film for NYU for next year, and we're still collaborating at full force. We're going to have a few spec spots to show you soon for another contest.

Additionally, just to update you, we were planning to shoot a short film with real, live, adult actors in July. We were just about all of the way through pre-production when we simply ran out of time. I left for a short vacation in California, and flew from LAX to JFK a week later, so things have been at an impasse with that project since. We're hoping to pick it back up in December (but our cast doesn't actually know this yet). It's a great script, I think (I wrote it), and we're all pretty pumped. I really want to see it happen.

I finally revamped my personal website. I like it.

I'll leave you with this. I saw it a few weeks ago on 1000dollarfilm. It makes me feel tingly.


Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

CeltX finally released their 1.0!

And it's still free!

And there are page breaks now!

I'm excited. I've been writing furiously the past few days and this just seems like some sort of validation for my work.