Posts tagged how to be

Dead Letter Office

Today I created a new folder on my desktop:

In the United States Postal Service, the Dead Letter Office is where undeliverable mail goes. For R.E.M. The Dead Letter Office was an album of B-Sides and rarities. On my desktop, The Dead Letter Office is where never-to-be-seen projects go to die.

My job at Crossroads is largely creative communication - take our given topic for the week and brainstorm about some funny, unusual, interesting way to supplement what our teachers are talking about. I create a lot of videos to this end.

This week we’re talking about relationships and how important it is to own your part of a problem. My idea was to do a Sesame Street style human/puppet interaction. As a kid we learn a lot about relationships from puppets - so maybe it would be funny to create a Sesame Street style video, aimed at an adult audience; surly puppets, adult reactions, that kind of thing.

So, I wrote a script, shot it, and started editing.

Somewhere around the first rough cut it became obvious that it just didn’t work.

The script was okay. The acting by my buddy Caleb was spot on. The pacing worked okay, I think. There was something when you put it all together, though, that just didn’t work. I showed it to someone else. They were very polite and positive about the piece - but agreed that something in it just didn’t hang together right.

So, we pulled it.

It was hard at first because I kept wondering - could I keep tweaking this thing until it got to where it needed to be? Maybe. But maybe not, and then you end up showing something that isn’t very good and doesn’t do the job it’s supposed to do - and let me tell you, having something you made bomb in front of 2,000 people is not a fun way to spend your morning.

So, in the folder it goes. I’m not sure why I’m keeping it. Partly, I think, because it was a lot of work and I just don’t want to delete it yet. Partly because I want to look at it some more and figure out how I could have made it work. And partly because a folder full of never to be seen projects is a good reminder that everybody sucks sometimes. The way you stop sucking is by continuing to do the work. The more you work, the better you get.

As a closing note, beside all the work I put into it, I really hate putting it down because it contained a scene where a puppet throws a bunch of action figures in a blender, and I really really liked filming that.

Everything Is A Remix

I was excited to see this morning that part 4 of Everything is a Remix was up. Maybe it’s been out for a while and I just missed it - either way, if you are in any way involved in the act of creating, whether it’s music, film, software, or whatever - you need to watch these videos. Make the time! If you aren’t a creator, they are still entertaining and insightful, so I recommend them to just about anyone.

Taking the time to try and do it right

I’ve had my Canon DSLR for almost a year now and I’m embarrassed to say how little I still know about how to use it properly.

So much of what I do is run and gun stuff; interviews, B roll, etc. The kind of stuff that doesn’t always lend itself to sitting down and really creating a look in-camera. That’s how I’m rationalizing how bad some of my stuff has looked lately, anyway…

Today, though, between other projects, I was able to sit down and spend some time with my camera. Specifically, I took it outside (in preparation for a project I’m shooting for our Christmas Eve service at Crossroads) and really focused on shooting in sunlight.

The first thing I did was put a polarizer on the lens. From there, I spent some time on white balance and setting my ISO and shutter speed properly. All of this time spent tinkering in the camera was also helped along by downloading and installing Technicolor’s Cinestyle color preset, so that when I did start shooting, I’d end up with a nice flat image that would give me a lot of latitude for color grading.

Here’s a shot I took of my friend Tim:

Totally flat. Now, here it is after I’ve gone in and done some color grading:

The look of the second picture is pretty close to what I’ll be going for in my Christmas Eve project (and yes, it’s purposefully dark and un-Christmasy. You’ll just have to trust me on this one). Starting with a really solid, flat image gave me tons of room when it came to grading.

Nothing groundbreaking happened today and I definitely didn’t do anything I shouldn’t always do when starting a project - but when you finally do take the time to take steps towards doing something right, it feels good. So I’m putting this here to remind me; the next time I hit record without taking the time to properly set up a shot, I’m ultimately undermining what I’m trying to do.

How John Darnielle taught me to Tweet

As a staff Crossroads has been having a lot of discussions about Twitter lately. It’s obviously become a significant part of our culture and, as such, it’s something we want to be aware of and somewhat involved in.

And for some of us, it’s something we enjoy apart from any obligation we feel to engage people where they are.

I’ve been on Twitter for a few years now and posting my thoughts and opinions to the internet for well over a decade in some for or other. At times I’ve done so with very little in the way of a filter or good taste. In the last few years, being on staff at Crossroads I’ve started to realize that not every thought that comes into my head needs to make it’s way onto the internet - sometimes because I have a startling moment of clarity and maturity and sometimes because the boss makes his way down the hall to talk to me about something I’ve posted (never in a controlling way, or demanding way - always in the form of a conversation or concern). The fact is, on any given weekend I can find myself on stage talking to a couple thousand people - so all of a sudden my sphere of influence is a lot bigger than the small handful of people that read my blog back in 2003. That brings a certain amount of responsibility with it.

I’m fine with the responsibility most of the time. I bristle against it, however, when it comes to certain issues. Like politics.

For the past week, I’ve had some thoughts about the world we live in and the people who govern it that are burning a whole into my brain. I have written and erased twenty tweets about these particular thoughts. Every time I tell myself that I need to be mature and not post about politics because it might alienate someone, I hear this little voice in the back of my head saying things like, “Yeah, but this is important!” “This is truth and people should be offended by the truth sometimes!” and “Chicken! This church has neutered you!”

Clearly I’m conflicted.

This morning, though, I was reading an interview with John Darnielle, lead singer of the Mountain Goats, a band I’m very, very fond of. Darnielle would probably describe himself as a leftist, a feminist, and all kinds of other words Rush Limbaugh hates. When asked why he doesn’t write about politics in his songs, though, he had this to say:

“…as important as politics are to me, the life and the spirit of people’s emotions are much more important. People live real lives where they love and grieve and feel pain and joy and that is a whole separate sphere. All that political stuff, I believe in it strongly, but not as strongly as I believe that at some point you or someone is going to need a song to sit with and comfort them in a hard time. That’s important to me, and if during that song I’m telling you how to vote, I’m not doing my personal job as a songwriter.”

Now I would never compare any of my tweets to a Mountain Goats song (though, Darnielle is pretty prolific, so they’re probably pretty equal in terms of numbers), but he does make a good point - ultimately, when you’re expressing yourself, you have to figure out what is most important to you. I didn’t choose to devote my life to politics - I chose to devote it to trying to love, comfort, and communicate with people (none of which I probably do that well, but that’s another blog post). Politics are important, but when I let them overshadow my real purpose, or take away from it, then I’ve made them too important.

Darnielle is simply rephrasing an opinion that a few people have shared with me before - but sometimes you have to hear something from an unexpected source for it to really take hold.

I’m not saying we can’t talk about politics - but it’s probably better if we do it outside of Twitter and it’s limited character count and when you can look at my real face instead of at a tiny picture of me.