Thursday, May 21st, 2009
One Week After Film Club It's been a little over a week since Film Club wrapped up, and I've been so busy that I've had a hard time finding my way to Humzoo. I tend to check out the front page a couple times daily at least, but I am totally out of touch with what's going on. Hopefully it's chugging along just fine.

Work has been crazy busy as usual. One project I've been working on, which I just wrapped up shooting for today, is a video guide of rules and regulations for Sandburg Elementary School. We're basically taking their paper student guide book and bringing it to life. The students wrote scripts for various situations, and for a couple weeks we've been filming all of these situations throughout the school.

It has been a blast working with elementary students. At the first meeting, they were quite shy and wouldn't say much to me. By the time we finished our little wrap party tonight, they were basically clinging to my legs. Kids are the best. We got done shooting a little early tonight, so we came up with some intentional bloopers for our outtakes reel.

Another project I'm working on is a new logo for the school district. I've always struggled with logo design. I have a very good understanding of the fundamentals, but that doesn't mean I can design a good logo. After playing around with it for weeks, I have picked my favorite, which I think is being presented to some administrators on Friday. I believe we're going to work on rebranding to some extent this summer.

A fun new project is a class that I will be teaching with Steve in a couple weeks. Some middle school students who are taking their MacBooks home for the summer will be attending a series of classes to show them some awesome things that they can do with their computers. Steve and I are going to create, shoot, edit and complete a movie all with what's available to these kids on their MacBooks. These computers have built-in cameras that we'll shoot with, GarageBand to help make music, built-in mics to record sound effects, iMovie '09 to edit with and iDVD to export on DVD.

We haven't planned out the movie yet, but it's going to be a good time. I don't think we'll have time to work with the kids hands-on so they can make their own movie, but that's what they can do over the summer. We basically just need to show them that it IS possible, and we need to provide a good example of how to go about the project from start to finish. Hopefully we will be able to post our movie here on Humzoo.

Allison (from Film Club) and I were kicking around some ideas for a new movie idea, and today it all came together. We have the start of a really cool short movie that would be a ton of fun to make. It's just in its infancy now, but it has a very solid foundation of storyline, a very clear protagonist/antagonist relationship, a simple conflict and a gratifying resolution. What more could you ask for?

Hmmm... what else have I been doing... I'm working on podcast #100. I have been planning for this a long time mentally, but it's going to be a lot of work. Basically I'm going through all the source footage for my first 99 podcasts and pulling out the best parts and best outtakes. I'm going to mash them all up with some new footage into one long video that will likely be one of the most entertaining podcasts I've done in a long time. It's extremely tedious though, seeing how I have each podcast backed up on DVD, with some podcasts taking up 2 or 3 DVDs. I've gone through the first 18 though, so that's a good start.

Geez, I'm busy just after typing all of that. Better go get something done. Goodnight Humzoo.