5 Weeks, or 35 Days.

The month of September is over and I apologize for being so bad about updating this. I’ve really fallen behind my “every week an update” thing. Sorry about that. So let me try to update you, without getting so excited that you, the reader becomes confused.

Things are better. The fear of not being able to pay rent was solved by a miracle (that’s what it seems to be honest haha) when my financial aid for the rest of my stay here came through two weeks early. In all my time dealing with CWU, this is the first time that it came in early, or even on time. Every other quarter it was usually a month or two late.

My classes are wrapping up. Currently I’m in my “spring break” and I would love to brag about our awesome heat and my righteous tan. Sadly I can’t. sometime last week I had a moment of homesickness and complained about missing home… well as punishment the Australian government sent me Vancouver, Washington-esque clouds to remind me that.. it’s not so bad here. But that was a week ago. I’m ready for the sun to come back. Once this week is over I’ll have 3 more weeks of classes and then I’m done with school forever. After which I’ll have the beautiful opportunity to celebrate with my beautiful girlfriend, who is coming to visit me in (see title of post.). But before then I still have two contests to finish entering into (more on those in a moment), a final 2000 word essay (ha I misspelled it and wrote easy. Maybe it was a Freudian slip.) and knock out a music and sound production final piece that is… making me a little nervous.

This project makes me nervous because it’s an aspect of filmmaking that I’m really bad at. Despite the time and energy I’ve put into it, I just haven’t improved in this field like I would like to. However I will not be deterred and I’ll make some sort of miracle happen. …Or I’ll fail. Which isn’t something I like. Even if this class won’t hold me back from graduation, or really hurt me in any way. I just don’t like giving anything than my best, and I don’t like being anything less than number one. It’s a competitive attitude that may not sit well with some. However, welcome to the business. Fight to eat, or find a new lively hood. :p haha

In my last few posts I’ve had a few pity parties about my disappointment in the schooling I’ve received. Not getting to check out equipment, teachers not being helpful, not having money blah blah wah wah. These are minor setbacks that, in the past haven’t stopped me before… so why am I letting them stop me now? I think at some point I became spoiled. Forgetting how to do things the cheap and dirty way. The thing that made me stand out when I was younger (my creativity and ingenuity… haha I’m so humble, right?) was getting rusty because I had all the equipment I could need, the talent pools to back me up and give me what I wanted. And I was forgetting how to do these things on my own.

This girl helped me out a lot here. Getting on my case and telling me I don’t need the fancy toys, I don’t need money. That everything I need, I already have. She pushed me to take things into my own hands a little bit. So I did. I began reading, and studying. Instead of perusing video game sites (ok… I haven’t done this recently. At all. Promise.) or peruse facebook incessantly (might still do this a bit. But not as much haha), I read blogs, learn from the people who do what I want to do: Philip Bloom (http://philipbloom.net/blog/), Chase Jarvis (http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/), and others. I’ve spent the last two weeks just diving head first into this sea of information that my school never taught me. a lot of it was refresher material, which was good as it led into the deeper more useful stuff. It’s inspired me to run around shooting whatever I can (as exhausting as it gets sometimes) and trying different settings, learning as much about my camera (Canon 7d) as I can. Learning new editing/postproduction/special effects techniques as I can. And I love what I’m doing. I’ve spent days doing this and hardly noticed. I’ve made equipment lists of things I’d like to have someday, and things I really should already have. I’ve contemplated how I can start working on these things as soon as I’m home. What projects can I do, get involved with, find? How deep can I get into this?

My father spent a long time while I was away at school helping to build up the Fort Vancouver Television station. It’s a public television channel. I never took it very serious before but after seeing what my dad has done, I want to be involved. I wish I could say I was involved in the cool changes, but I wasn’t. Now I’ll just try to take advantage of it and use it to benefit me and my developing skills. And hopefully make a few connections as well.

I’m entering some contests. I think I’ve mentioned them before. It’s been really difficult and frustrating to work through the footage on this old laptop (I miss my computer ☹… see! I’m spoiled!) but after just sitting down and working through a night or two… I’ve made some real progress and been reminded pretty harshly about the limitations I’m dealing with, and found ways to work around them. Even if I don’t win these contests, it’s more practice. And I need as much as I can. I have 7 weeks till I’m back in the states and I want to hit the ground running.

Some projects I’ve looked into doing when I get home (just in case you’re curious…):
Ninjas Doing Mundane Things… I really want to get this going again. The other ninja is interested as well. If you’re unfamiliar you can get to know their early work here:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ninjas-Doing-Mundane-Things/176119382623?ref=ts
rewrite, rework, and potentially reshoot some or all of Diaries. And finish it as well. Again if you’re unfamiliar with this project…
http://www.facebook.com/pages/EllensburgVancouver-WA/Intense-Entertainment/110464375638449?ref=ts
Intense Entertainment is my “production company” that I used for school projects. But now it’s going to continue as long as I can without getting sued by someone.
I have some old friends that I want to begin working on a webseries based on a team NERF players. Remember the cool guns that shoot darts and you always lose the darts? Yeah. It’s about guys who take playing with those too serious.
My old roommate kyle, and fellow ninja mentioned that his masters may be done as a documentary. Technically he didn’t ask me to help him with it. But hopefully that’s what he was implying by telling me about it. Regardless, I really want to do a docu.

I’m also thinking about starting a photography/videography group for weddings/senior portraits/family photos/special events etc, along with corporate videos and other things to help pay the bills.
I’d love to hop on leverage and work for them as well.
Please keep your fingers crossed, prayers praising, voodoo doll… whatever they do, or however you feel it is best to keep the support coming. I can use everything you’ve got. Thank you.

Oh, also… I guess I need to be a little more professional. So I’ve made a new e-mail account:
CarrJ.IntenseEnt@gmail.com
And Twitter (Search Race_Carr) which I should probably change. Haha
And I’ve also joined LinkedIn.com, so if you also use that, please find me and lets be contacts! Haha

Anyways, I’ll wrap this up. Thank you again for the love and support and the occasionally giant shove that gets me back on track. I’ll be home soon, ready and willing to spend time catching up amidst the giant stack of accumulated debt.
I love you. Even if you’re randomly reading this and don’t know me. you made it this far through the post and you’re still reading. So I love you too.

Take care, God bless and goodnight.
James

P.S. I’m heading to Sydney with my good friend Joel (sounds like Noelle, but with a Juh at the front end.) in a few weeks. Life is good.

And another PS. I have no cool pictures to post with this. I’m sure I do. But I think they’ll wait until I get home and have a week to just run amuck through all my pictures. Where I can also edit them and make them pretty and stuff. Then I’ll post a blog with a lot of pictures. After which I’ll turn “the wizard of aus” into something more… “Vancouver”esque.

Ok I’m leaving now. Bye!

I know what i want to do in my life...

there was a guest speaker who has done some relatively large scale productions here in australia. Scorched and Storm Surfers are the two major ones. storm surfers is entirely web based (although moving to the big screen) and scorched is the reason why i'm writing this message.

scorched was about a "what if" scenario. with all of the droughts australia keeps having this filmmaker decided to do a film series about "what if sydney (biggest city and largest producer of food in australia) had only 8 weeks of water left?" the film was researched and backed by incredible amounts of research and the end goal was to make a television 2 hour event... kind of like a mocumentary showing how people would react and such. but they realized they could do so much more in a multi-media event. 6 months before the release they started a vlog on youtube about a girl named cassie who has dreams. she has dreams of a drought and the devastating effect it has on the country. this is all dated for the future mind you... 2012. this girl is the protagonist of the film. but nobody knows this. intercut in the vlogs are split second cuts to their website scorched.com. and as time got closer they started to release (with the help of their sponsors... the major news networks here) false news reports that for all intents and purposes seemed real. with one month before show time, the site launched. the cat was kind of out of the bag, but they had 1.3 million viewers online (australias pop is 22 mill) and they had created websites for the bad corporation behind all of this. and gotten real anchors and weather men not only to help write segments of the film, but to take part in it. they created this complete and engaging world. when the tv show finally aired, it far exceeded what was expected and set this guys career on fire.

this is what i want to do. i feel like i wanted something like this (though i was thinking on a much smaller scale) for diaries (my senior project at CWU. if you haven't had a chance to check it out, please do: http://www.facebook.com/pages/EllensburgVancouver-WA/Intense-Entertainment/110464375638449?ref=ts). but i want to create something almost like world of warcraft creates for gamers, or LARPing creates for the even nerdier crowds. i want something that takes on a life of it's own. and what was interesting was how the story changed as viewers got involved, and talked in forums. and it essentially became fed by the audience.

haha i don't think i'm content to just make films. this guy really fired me up (even though when i went and talked to him he was extremely cynical and didn't give a shit about actually talking to me unless i was buying his dvds haha). this is what i want to do. lol if i spend the next two, three or even five years building up the research and developing the world of... whether it's diaries or something else (i'd probably want to rewrite and reshoot if i go with diaries...). and while i work on that just work on other projects, building contacts and getting my finances in order so those don't eat me alive.

THATS what i want to do though. i want a universe. narcissistic? probably. but i want to create in my audience that excitement i felt when i saw star wars or jurassic park for the first time where all i wanted to do was be apart of that world. and i don't think anything would hook your audience members faster than if they feel they have some say in it.

College Gruel

although this looks like something you'd be handed in an internment camp. this was pretty good. and so i thought i'd share the recipe.

you'll need a pack of ramen noodles, 4 eggs, can of tuna in oil (i like this better than water) cheese and some sweet chili sauce.

start by grilling the tuna until i'ts nearly burning pour on some sweet chili sauce and stir it around. then dump your scrambled eggs on top. start boiling your water. as the eggs start to fluff around the tuna add some more chili sauce. once your eggs are about done, throw on the cheese. your water should be boiling by now. do the noodles the way you like. pour out most of the broth, and mix in the flavor packet. once that's all ready throw it in a bowl large enough to also put the nasty looking pile of much you made in the other pan on top.

sit down and be surprised. it's shot to nabby. haha

that's what i made today because i didn't have other things in my fridge. but necessity inspires creativity.

time to do my last midterm!

Ping my podcast