We haven’t had much trouble with the process of shooting aside from a brief moment of fear that we were going to be stuck using Final Cut X to edit with and earlier today for about five minutes the camera refused to to turn on for some reason. Luckily with a little persistence we were able to coax it back to life and captured our last interview for the day. I don’t anticipate any real issues popping up in the editing stage, although we have noticed some inconsistency in the sound volume when working with the wireless microphones we were loaned out for the festival. The more I work with wireless microphones the less I’m inclined to work with them in the future. Wires may be more cumbersome, but they tend to be more reliable as well.

In any case the film should be finished and ready for everyone to see come Saturday.

For the third year in a row we have been selected as one of five teams to compete in the Mobiflicks competition. Starting tomorrow we will be heading out to tell the story of Chico, a good friend of ours here at Rogue Bard Media, who was diagnosed with cancer early last year and how he was able to beat it and get back on his feet. We’re looking forward to putting this video together and sharing it with the world, hopefully bringing hope and inspiration to others out there facing the big C  themselves. With enough positive energy and a will to live it is possible to beat it, it’s  all about believing and finding the right place to get treatment.

In it’s place there are actually two new pages. The first is a page to promote the things we have available for sale. Right now what we have to offer is primarily art prints, T shirts, and some stickers designed by Krystal. There’s about twenty different designs up there right now and she adds new things pretty frequently. In addition to that we also have our first DVD, “Basketball Basics with Dan Brooks” which was produced in conjunction with Dan Brooks, assistant coach for the women’s basketball team at Madonna University. I’m not a huge player of basketball, but the guy definitely knows his stuff and the students he coaches on the side often go on to spots on college teams. If basketball is your thing it’s well worth taking a look at.

The second page is our demo reel and a list of some of our recent clients. We’ve needed a demo reel for a long time and I finally got around to putting one together and putting it up for the world to see. It doesn’t include any of our live event work, but really that’s secondary to what we really focus on.

In the next few weeks we’ll be jumping back into production of “Can’t Get No Play” again. Thanks to “Deathwatch” we really got derailed on this project and way off the release schedule I originally had planned. I can’t say I’m surprised really, a feature film is a huge project, there really wasn’t any room left over for working on anything else during that span, and afterward we went on vacation and got tied up in PAH Fest. Next thing I know it’s almost August and I’m trying to figure out where the last four months went. I know Dave ‘Captain’ Walker has been eager to start shooting again. Hopefully shooting will be wrapped up in the next month and we’ll be well into editing the series by the end of August. Ideally we’ll be looking at releasing the first episode around mid September.

Here end’s the wall of text.

Yes, I know we aren’t exactly ‘regular folks’ but you know what, we have stories to tell too. If they didn’t want us here they wouldn’t keep asking us to come back.

Anyway, there are a lot of different competitions at PAH, and I couldn’t tell you what any of them are, but the majority of them involve shooting a couple minutes of video using either cell phones or flip cameras with little to no editing. The sound is rough, but it’s usually pretty interesting to see what kids come up with. For the last two years we’ve been too busy with the Mobiflicks to have time to see any of what else is going on around here while we’re locked up in a suite editing and running around like crazy shooting the video.

Mobiflicks is a week long competition which only five teams are selected to create a video with a duration no longer than six minutes. Last year it was pretty rough on us, but thanks to Diallo of Awakenings Movement, we do that shit on a weekly basis now. In other words we got done plenty early and if I wasn’t sick on Thursday we probably would have been done even sooner. Anyway, we got our coach, we got our gear, we got some dope beats from Lucius McManus, and we rolled out to show people that Detroit isn’t the warzone the rest of the world believes it to be.

Of course we didn’t win, and I’ll be honest I’m not really surprised, but even though we didn’t win we did get a very strong reaction from the crowd, which is all we could really hope for. It isn’t about winning and losing, it’s about telling a story and moving people, and everyone who participated accomplished that. Congratulations to the winners, and good job to all the others out there. We’ll see you next year.

[Insert dramatic pause here]

Fortunately our good friend Mike did and since we didn’t get in ourselves we’ve been drafted to his team. What are we doing? A documentary of sorts about the good side of Detroit. Sound vague? Yeah I thought so too, but there we are. We’ll get it all figured out at some point over the course of the next few days just in time to kick things into high gear and drop some knowledge. Either that or we’ll spend several day chasing our tails and flounder badly. Now would be the time to start taking bets, sit back, and enjoy the crazy.

Let’s be honest here. As crazy goes we’ve done crazier in spades.

Following us on the Facebook? If not we’ll forgive you if you follow the link and like us.

We’ve also been neglecting ‘Can’t Get No Play’ due to this momentous film. As such we not only missed our intended release date, but are still only about half way through production and have made zero progress in post.  The new goal is to have the first few episodes ready to go live at the end of August.

Fun stuff going on all around, but I’m definitely looking forward to the vacation time coming up in a couple weeks. These last few months have been a nightmare cluster fuck of production from concept all the way through to finished assignments in the space of about six weeks. The important thing at this point is that we learned we can do it, and we will repeat it all over again next year. Hopefully next year we’ll have a bigger budget, some real actors, and most importantly of all 2-3 additional weeks to work on it.

We have exactly 12 hours before we hit deadline, so I think there is plenty of time to get the music and plug that shit in.

Tomorrow night after pulling this all night-er we will be off to the Creative Arts Center in Pontiac to cover Chico’s Blues and Muse in a brand spanking new venue. I’m not sure who is lined up for that, but the house will no doubt be rocked.

Sunday evening at 7:00 pm in Madonna’s Kresge hall PAH Fest will come to a close, including the judging of the various contests that have been running this week. I don’t even care if we win, I’m just glad we put together a great entry that I finally think it reel worthy material.

I think one of my first priorities after PAH Fest is going to be to start doing a regular vlog with Dan on a weekly basis. It’ll give us a chance to sit down and really discuss what we’re working on with each other, while putting the information out into the hands of viewers/readers. We’ve got a lot of ideas floating around right now and we’re really just trying to decide on what to pursue in which directions, buckle down, and get to it.