Or, SRSI methodological debriefing.

As you may recall, I shot a bunch of documentary footage over the summer as part of Broken City Lab’s Storefron Residencies for Social Innovation. When I was wrapping up there, I started writing some posts about how the documentary-tech side of things went. However, with a summer and fall full of huge life events, I never posted them, and indeed work on the post-production for the doc ground to a halt. I’ve been getting back into it though, and figured I’d post these with some updates.

As my equipment setup wouldn’t have been possible even three years ago, the thoughts below may be helpful to those exploring video DSLRs for documentary production. Others may want to hit snooze, but there ya go.

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People have been asking where I went.

My father died two weeks ago, the funeral was last week. This week I am back at work and trying to adjust to normal life, which right now, quite honestly, feels like trying to get interested in meaningless busywork. Twitter, facebook, this site, they all seem a bit silly to me. But I know I want to get out of that headspace as it’s all stuff I liked to do before this went down. Right?

So, I’ll ease back into things. I’m away in Windsor for the weekend shooting some stuff and hopefully having fun. Then I have next week off for TIFF, which theoretically should also be fun, and is (in theory) a good excuse for some film reviews up in this bitch.

Here’s a track from my dad’s play.

Miss you, pops.

You know, whenever I post one of these “I won’t be posting a lot” posts, I wind up posting a lot. But be prepared for a lack of such ironies – for a cold, hard, earnest absence of posts. Milady and I have purchased a house, and there are a lot of house-related-type-stuff things to do, and I don’t think they will be particularly fascinating to write about. (Also, the internets aren’t hooked up in the house yet.)

See y’all in a bit.

Let this just be a teaser for something I’ll share with you next week.

So, a redesign. It’s been a while. More about that, in case you care.

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Mo’ feeds, mo’ problems. I guess the links aren’t showing up very well in the feeds. The URL they are associated with is going to a permalink on this site instead of the link URL, and then half of the time that throws up a 404. Needless to say, this is not the intended behaviour, and if I had minions, they would be slaving away in 36-hour shifts. However, there’s only me, and I barely know what I’m doing.

There is this attitude in film and television, completely antithetical to the general position of the blogosphere, that you do not talk about your ideas. A great deal of this is the fear of others stealing them. It’s easy to say that the important thing – and the hard part – is execution, but unfortunately in film and other industries with more money than ideas this is not the case. Someone can take your idea, pay people to execute it, and even if the end result is shoddy, prevent you from executing YOUR vision of it. “Oh, the film about the leper fashion show?” the financier will say as he thumbs his blackberry, “we already did that. It bombed.”

This partially explains how projects that are important to me, and take some substantial portion of my time, find no representation on this blog.

I will attempt to remedy this shortly.

To those following the site via RSS – I’ve temporarily botched the AngryRobotAll feed, that normally would give you a list of both blog entries and links posted to the site. Right now it’s only showing blog entries. I’m definitely going to fix it, but I don’t know how quickly – might be a couple days. In the meantime, you could subscribe to the new links feed on pinboard, which is where I’m posting my links now, or manually check the site, or (more reasonably) enjoy a refreshing break from notifications of internet trivialities.

Here comes some serious under the hood talk, so unless you’re into making websites, feel free to skip this shit.

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Dear Robot Readers,

I could use your help with something. I have a film in this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. (I admit it, I’m a huge nerd.) It’s called “Bad Day For Vader”, and I’d love it if you voted for it. It’s only a minute long so that part ain’t hard, but you may have to register on atom first – not sure. You should be done in a couple minutes regardless.

Those of you with weblogs, newspapers, megaphones and/or skywriting businesses, I’d also appreciate your help spreading the word.

Voting stops at noon on friday, so if you could, make haste!

Here’s the link

Thanks and I owe you one.

I just finished importing most of the archives of d/blog. It was my blog before this one. My personal publishing history goes like this:

• April 2001, start Bloggus Caesari
• July 2001, start d/blog, begin d/blog glory months
• Sept 2001, combination of 9/11 and full-time employment ends d/blog glory months, alienates readership, wrecks shit (not really)
• July 2004, move from Movable Type to Textpattern
• for a while, nothing happens. (At least that I have archives of… working on that)
• Feb 2007, start Angry Robot, as new personal blog; sankey.ca now just a portfolio site, and archives taken offline for reasons now not entirely clear (Human error? Shyness? Epistemological quandary?)
• July 2007: caught up in the enthusiasm of others, Angry Robot becomes video games blog
• Sept 2008: Angry Robot returns to its roots, grand commitment to excellence &c.
• Present: in powerful act of healing, d/blog archives added to Angry Robot.
• Future: robot stomps on enemies, kicks them into sun; A.I. remake symbolically returns shitty Spielberg film to Kubrick; 3D camera perfected, sold at massive profits; plonkism established as viable philosophical school; moment of imminent nostalgia reached; Maggo’s Secret Blog: The Restaurant opens to great acclaim; gristle-sack bird finally found, tranqued, tagged, tamed. Dreams become reality.

Until then, I’m certainly happy to have the archives back. It’s really more for personal symbolic reasons than an expectation that people will find them useful. I know there are tons of dead links and so forth, and the lack of an archive page makes navigation challenging. But this is where it starts, or this – in the backwards logic of weblogs, on page 126.

Jesus Christ, I’ve written a book.

I’ve had to turn off comments. I’m totally bombarded by spam comment notifications, and it’s driving me insane. At the same time, no humans are commenting, so there’s not much of a loss.

I’m of two minds about comments in general: while I like the democratic ideal of everyone being able to weigh in, I also admire sites that concentrate on doing the thing they want to do, without too much concern for other people’s opinions. We’ll see how this thing shakes out, I guess.

So you will have noticed some posts from Matt over the past week, pointing out some great stuff. Matt’s a good friend, bidne$$ associate, and all around Chief of Awesome. He’ll be continuing to post things, which I’m looking forward to greatly.

I’ve also got a couple interesting posts from my friend Duiker, the first of which I’ll post shortly.

That should be pretty obvious to all except feed-followers.

I loved the old design, but it was really suited for what the site used to be, and not what it is now. I returned to this site’s original design, which was based on Phu Ly’s Simpla theme, and then took it from there. And here we are: a simple, 2-column blog design that hopefully doesn’t spit in your eyes and is displaying okay in your browser (let me know if it ain’t, okay?). I’ll gradually add things back in when I have the time, but it seemed baked enough to let it out of the oven.

That leaves the question: what is this site now? I’m reluctant to answer that; I’d rather find out gradually. There’s an aphorism about butts cashing cheques that applies to mission statements from people with full-time jobs. But the general idea is to write about things I’m doing and things I love. Which hopefully will overlap somewhat.

So yeah, sorry for the radio silence there. I was away, but that’s only really part of it. What has this site been for the past year or so? It’s been a video game commentary site, with a handful of contributors, fancy podcasts, videos etc, and the intention of profitability at some point, access to review copies, etc, even a planned TV show. What is it now? Certainly not that; and I have no interest in returning it to that state. In fact, what I plan on returning to is what this site started as: YAN personal site, maybe a little self-involved in that regard, but of value to at least one of us, and owing nothing to the ‘marketplace’ or ‘audience’ or any other semi-imaginary external group.

I’ve got lots of things I want to do in this world, and while playing video games is one of them, it can’t be the only thing, the thing that eats up all my time so I can no longer make films, record music, take bike rides, chill with my lady, or go get drunk. (Yeah, it was really cutting into my drinking time.)

So, dear reader, what can you expect? Better things, more kinds of them, albeit fewer in total number. Stick around, or don’t, and I wish you well. Here’s to all of us making better things.

I will be up north in Canada’s great northern northlands for the next week, and completely off the internets – all of them. So have fun everyone, and the site will return in August!

If you are reading this… you are very patient. There are brutal server issues again, resulting in long page load times. I have no time to migrate servers, which is what it would take to resolve these problems. I apologize, and hopefully all this will be a faint memory in a couple weeks. In the meantime, I can suggest you do not purchase hosting from Joyent.

File under site news: as you can tell, this site is now back to a blog format. The idea behind the reshuffling we did when we redesigned was to make sure the in-depth stuff wasn’t getting bumped down by less significant blog posts, and thereby ignored. What the logs tell us now though is that the blog posts themselves are now getting less love than before, as they were bumped down and often ‘below the fold’. Man, just can’t win, huh? Anyway the new solution we are trying is: back to a blog (all content, newest first) on the front page with anything ‘featured’ still above the fold, in one of the sidebars.

Oh, while I’m at it with the site news….

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Ouch. As you may have noticed, the site was down for a couple days there. Which is bad. And yes, you may also notice that it’s now up, which is good. Anyway there were disk problems at our host Joyent and the entire server went down and couldn’t get back up. Some files were lost, which is even worse, but I’m thinking I’ve got most things back up now. You may notice some missing images here and there though.

Hey, shit could get weird around here. We’re rolling out a new design, so some things might break or look wrong. Bear with us though, it will be sorted shortly.

(Actually, I think I mostly posted this out of desire to use a shitty old “under construction” animated GIF. Of which there are many on this page.)