Things Other than Business School

Got to make and do some stuff that wasn't directly related to business school over the last few weeks, so that was great. I had some time off following the second module of the fall semester and I ripped through something like nine rolls of medium format film both here in Oklahoma City as well as a few days in New York. I got to sneak up to NYC for the Cinematography Salon Holiday Party and then back a couple days later with St. Anne the Wife and the two housefires for a holiday trip. Crazy, crazy thanks to Jeremy McDaniel for letting me crash at his place in Brooklyn for a couple days.

UPDATE
The good folks at Cinematography Salon released a recap video from the December Holiday party in Brooklyn. If you look closely, you'll see me in my nonsense along with with Jeremy – well, our backs at least – checking out the motion control and Phantom camera setup at about 0:02 into the video.

 

BOOKS I'M INTO AT THE MOMENT

I also plowed through a few books the last few weeks. Know I'm trying to dodge talking about school stuff, but in addition to a load of solid Harvard Business Review articles, I got to read Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek for my Advanced Leadership class. There's a few solid takeaways in the book, but the stickiest one to me was the idea of how abundance destroys value.

It’s not when things come easily that we appreciate them, but when we have to work hard for them or when they are hard to get that those things have greater value to us._

…it’s the struggle it takes to make it work that helps give that thing its value._

The two non-business related books I worked through were Poor Things by Alasdair Gray and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I wanted to read through the book before seeing the film version of Poor Things by director Yorgos Lanthimos. Honestly I'm glad I did considering all the changes they made from the source material. I enjoyed the book and the film was WILD. I'd seen David Fincher's film version of Fight Club years ago like just about everyone else in the western world but never read the original book. I'd read Palahniuk's Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread in late 2021 and it's wild. Looking forward to the next Palahniuk book I get to read.

I've also started reading Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert. Dune: Part Two by director Denis Villeneuve is coming out this March and I'd finished reading the original Dune book before the 2021 movie came out. I've heard the third movie is already in the works, hence me making sure I'm ready for that glorious nonsense.

Digital Bread Crumbs

I'm supposed to be studying for another exam right now, but my head is still mushy after a nearly three hour midterm earlier this afternoon. So instead I'll ramble on about how these last few months have been a blur with me still trying to balance work, family, and grad school responsibilities.

There was a trip out to Indiana a few weeks ago where I ate a tiny octopus, lost another fancy pen, and chased high school theater kids around. Then a few days dodging weather delays and scheduling issues with a good crew and a camera package I mostly enjoyed. Out in Connecticut I ate well and closed the rings on my Apple Watch each day before 10a while working with a bunch of younger student athletes. Don't forget that other shoot with the Cherokee Nation and their rad XR studio out in NE Oklahoma before that quick trip out to Shreveport so I wouldn't miss our younger monster's birthday again. I believe there was a film festival and an U.S. military air show in there somewhere too, but I was much younger then.

I have these photos on my phone that act like a trail of bread crumbs to remind me of where I've been lately. Forget actually trying to make something interesting looking, I'm just trying to remember what happened.

What's kinda wild is that my bread crumb photos have all sorta started looking the same. I wear the same blue collared shirt when I'm traveling by plane to a job and airports for the most part all kinda have the same look and feel. Then there's the black collared shirts I'll wear on set in trying to look like an adult. Well, unless I know I'll be working mostly outside and then it's the safari outfit with the green bandana to subtly let others know I'm down for women making their own decisions. Then there's the "Where'd I park?" and "I should take a photo of this lighting setup so I can remember what we did" set of photos. Not too long ago I'd mentioned something to St. Anne the Wife about how normal it is in this line of work to be picked up from the airport by complete strangers, work with them like crazy for a few days, and then peace out at the end of the job never knowing if you'll ever see them again.

I know too I wrapped up a couple more MBA classes around the end of June, then jumped straight into two more. During the summer semester we've had each of those eight week classes essentially crammed into two, five-week periods. I keep telling myself (and the wife and kids) that this short-ish 18 month period of doing my MBA won't last forever and will be crazy helpful in the long run.

In time, things will calm down and I'm sure I'll be bored out of my mind along with thinking I'll never work again. At least during this round of crazy busy I'm not fighting off "stress induced physical pain."

A Quick Breath of Existential Dread

I had every single intention of keeping up with this wordy nonsense during this semester, but no. It's now five weeks later and here I am, trying to make peace with the fact things are crazy busy with family, school, and work responsibilities. This last week Anne and the kiddos had their Spring Break as did I with my own school work.

As much as I'd like to dig into my business financials and set up yet another spreadsheet to budget and forecast my variable and fixed costs, I'd also not be upset never thinking about the Managerial Accounting class I just wrapped up. My Investments class was interesting and I did well, but dang... I'd also really like to just pick up a camera and make something.

I feel like I'm coming up for a quick breath of air before plunging right back into the world I've made for myself. Towards the end of last week, Anne and I took the boys out to Bentonville, Arkansas. Turns out so did just about every other parent in this part of the country. Breakfast each morning at the hotel was like a drunken children convention with parents wading through their own existential dread. It was absolutely a "family trip" and not what you'd call a "vacation." What we did to deserve this and how civilization has continued all these years is beyond me.

Work-wise, the year is off to a slow start as usual. From the conversations I've had with my filmmaking peers, I'm not the only one who's been down work-wise since the last part of 2022. Even my stock footage sales have seemingly fallen off a cliff since November. My assumption is that it's due to the current economic climate, how much more expensive it is for businesses and organizations to borrow money, inflation causing additional problems, and...

...cue everyone's eyes to glaze over in boredom while I completely nerd out about economic and monetary policy. Still, it's been an interesting week watching the U.S. Treasury Bill rates bounce around following those recent bank failures.

Fun Haircuts and Superpowers

Bit of a grab bag this week as things are staying incredibly fast-paced 'round these parts (school, work, family, etc.).

St. Anne the Wife and I hit 13 years still married recently and Josh Thomas – second greatest person in the world (behind Anne obviously) – reminded me of this gem he'd made from Anne and my wedding weekend. Good grief that seems equally forever ago and last month at the same time.

Not only did it remind me that I once had a fun haircut and an ill-fitting white suit, but there's also a young wedding photog in there named Andrew Ryan Shepherd. That same Dallas-based still photographer I'd been absolutely enamored with basically blew up into the creative and directing powerhouse he is today. That dude, who's now making commercial and film magic in Austin with Camp Lucky, turned out to be much more distantly braided into my life than I could've imagined.

In other news, I'm still machete-ing my way through managerial accounting principles and random probability distributions because this creative must have some kind of underlying punishment kink. I figured I could "lighten things up" and picked up another book I'd been eyeing from afar called Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath and Karla Starr.

"This book is based on a simple observation: we lose information when we don't translate numbers into instinctive human experience."

"When experts are asked to communicate something they understand intimately...they wildly overestimate how much of their mental model of the world is shared by their audience."

"Math can reveal truths about the world that the human mind was never built to intuitively grasp. If you can use math, you have a valuable skill. If you can use it and make it clear, bringing what is obscure and distant into the range where others where others can see it and feel it-well, then you have a superpower."

It's not a terribly long book and it's a nice change from the incredibly dense (to me) grad school books I'm hacking through. I'm only about 20 pages in and I'm sure I'll have more to say about it later, but seems like being able to effectively communicate complex ideas is a superpower we'd all be better having.

Rip Van Winkle'd

Dang... I Rip Van Winkle'd this blog for a solid chunk of the summer. Last thing I remember was talking about a DIY case and then somehow slipped out this website. It's not like I've "not been doing the things." Freakin' far from it. That's probably what happened. That mysterious "work" came around and brought it's bill-paying elixir, only to have me fall asleep on trying to keep to healthy writing habits. Still got that 'ol Moleskine notebook habit going though. There's plenty in there from the last bit...

A quick recap on what's happened the last two months:

  • I've been back and forth to NYC twice now: once for work; another with fam (and more work).
  • There was that one day shoot at the Oklahoma State Capitol about a bounty (alive, preferably) on an Oklahoman Bigfoot. You'll notice I tried my best to dodge the news cameras.
  • Then there was a solid weeklong project with me cam op'ing on a network pilot shooting here in Oklahoma City; bulletproof vests and minivans were absolutely involved. Thank goodness for EasyRigs being stronger than 12 hour days and a full-kitted out Amira with cine zooms.
  • Finally another weeklong shoot full of 12+ hour days, but this time as a still photographer sweating my tail off in the heat on a feature shooting up in Guthrie, OK. I legit shot and had to cull through something like 10,000+ still images from the week.

With all that going, I've still kept at it with my rubber stamp doc. I'm three interviews deep at this point and sitting on about 1.4tb of footage. I'm actually heading out Tuesday for a cross-country trip to a rubber stamp convention in Washington, D.C. at the end of the week with the National Park Travelers Club. The drive should take about two days each way, so you'd better believe I'll be picking up some new stamps along the way. I've also super stoked about landing an interview with a guy out in Knoxville, TN, to talk about his world of rubber stamps and the mail art projects he's been part of over the years.

Out West

Saint Anne the Wife and I were able to dump our two house fires with their grandparents a few days last week and head west. The twenty-seven hundred mile road trip through eight states was all kinds of good for the soul. Did I mention we bought a car like two days after getting back to Oklahoma City?

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Over the years work has had me through most of the US, but several of the states on this trip were a first for Anne. We made a big loop through Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and back through Oklahoma. The whole "global pandemic" thing is still raging and we did our best to avoid anyone else.

Turns out there's a whole lot of nothing out west still. Rocks, lots of rocks. And lots of wide open space with a healthy seasoning of mountain to taste. You'd pass a city now and then but it was only there because all the wide open space didn't want to come across as too greedy.

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Anne honestly hasn't had much of a break from the boys since we'd moved to New York in December 2018. I was hustling and trying to do the thing and she ran the house like the hero she is. No question she's the glue that kept us connected as a family as well as to the fantastic friends we'd made during our short time there.

Being just the two of us for a few days on the road was wild considering we were more "adults" and able to talk to each other and less "parents" in trying to keep our children from murdering us. Still, most of our conversations in time turned to the boys and how we're trying to navigate what's happening in the world and pretending to know what we're doing; we've decided to keep both children.

This Week in Complexity

Did I tell you the one about moving my family across the country during a global pandemic while also dodging protests in every major city we drove through? Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City. The world was burning with a righteous anger over the death of another black man in police custody and I was driving a moving truck across the country with my dog sleeping in the passenger seat. Nearly everything we own was packed into that truck while Saint Anne the wife followed close behind in a rented SUV with our two house fires strapped into the backseat.

There's a tsunami of news, posts, and information about what's happening right now and trying to stay informed is like drinking from a fire hose. Honestly I'd much rather get into the recent release of a project I got to be on, but that blog post can wait. I'll not get into the weeds about the reality of institutional racism and police violence, but those four Minneapolis police officers killed that man. We left Brooklyn just hours before the protests broke out not far from our home and it's crushing to not be there during this time.

The past week or so here in Oklahoma City has had the wife and me focused on family and trying to adjust to life outside New York. Most of our stuff is now neatly packed into a storage unit that's six times larger and nearly a third of the price of what we had in Brooklyn. With all that's going on I feel like we're approaching Inception levels of our lives still being somewhat on hold. We're staying with our parents for a season before deciding what's next and there's plenty of room to sorta sprawl out compared to our small New York apartment; our boys are loving time with their grandparents. We even bought a car which is pretty much a must have in living here. The salesman looked at us like we had horns growing our of our face when we told him we hadn't owned a car in the last 18+ months.

In the midst of trying to get the dust to settle in our own major life event, I still strongly feel like it's important to not let what's happening in the world pass us by. Anne and I had a conversation about racism and police brutality with our seven year old. We stuttered and stumbled in our attempt, but we did the thing. Anne was eloquent as always, but what was helpful for me was to sit down with him and go through some of the photos posted from the protests, especially the ones taken not too far from our Park Slope apartment. One of the major focuses of our move to New York was to make sure our family was around people and ideas that were different than ours. Different races, different faiths, different political beliefs. No question we'd have participated in the Brooklyn protests if we were there. Like the rest of this country, Oklahoma has to address and work through its own problems and history of racism. There have been protests and demonstrations across the state and I jumped at a chance to participate in a peaceful event this past Saturday here in Oklahoma City.

Again, it's wild to be here for now, especially without serious plans. Being back in Oklahoma is like being on another planet considering all we've been through in New York. Anne and our boys will be back in the classroom in a few months and I'll be spending a good deal of time commuting to NY and wherever else for work once it spins back up.

Shut it Down: Week Nine

"Coffee, water, coffee, wine, water, repeat." - my brain

It's Monday, Day 56 of Quarantine. Here's this week's roundup:

Nothing. Nothing new. I go to Whole Foods and Target on Mondays, and then the rest of the week happens. I attempted to read a book I'd had on the shelf to avoid looking at my phone so much, but then I had to look something up that I'd read and then two days happened. This Sunday was Mother's Day and the older kid suggested "we make breakfast in bed for mom," which means "I make breakfast in bed for mom."

I did have a bit of a meltdown (or two or three) this week. Surely that's okay considering it's WEEK NINE of this nonsense. There's the apparent mass exodus of young professionals leaving NYC for the suburbs, so that's as encouraging as the current unemployment rate. We're planning a trip back to Oklahoma City this summer, so that's something to look forward to.

Not sure why, but I've had a weird rash of wanting to spend money all this week. Obviously, production work dropped off a cliff months ago with my last normal job back in early March so it's not like I'm seeing any kind of disposable income at the moment or foreseeable future. Surely it's time to finally buy a car so we can escape the city now and then or get groceries without having to take a two-hour nap afterward. Then there was that loose Astera Titan I saw super cheap on eBay that'd go so well with the one I already have. Dana Dolly rental kits for sale at an additional $100 off? I'll say we did jump on the Disney+ bandwagon this week for $7 (or two lattes)/month.

Still, we're here. Safe, healthy, and dangerously stir-crazy. I've been taking photos of discarded rubber gloves and face masks through most of this hot mess with grand plans to make something out of it.

Shut it Down: Week Seven

In the world of small victories we finally landed a set of hair clippers. My mom shipped us the ones dad didn't want her using on him no matter how many YouTube tutorials she watched. Saint Anne the Wife and her varying levels of confidence gave the Herriott boys our quarantine cuts and honestly I can't tell you how good it felt to get a trim. That simple sense of normal is incredibly refreshing.

Here in our 700sq foot world we're mostly trying to keep our children from causing their parents an early death. As per usual Anne's running the show while I'm still trying to dodge parental responsibilities by filling up my journal and making pictures. Yesterday morning I sat down to write and within five minutes immediately had to deal with a seven-year-old's world-ending-meltdown and a two-year-old's potty break he didn't think I was qualified to assist. Thank goodness for afternoons when both Saint Anne the Wife and our second house fire tend to take naps while the first one is absorbed in God knows what in the other room.

How and what are we going to remember after all this nonsense? What are we doing with all the time we have while hiding from the outside? What's it like to live in New York City during a pandemic?

I'm pretty sure my personal journal entries and various still images using whatever distortion / distraction I could come up with that day will be my contribution to all this, but there are plenty of others here in the city making some killer art conveying what it's like to live through a pandemic here.

The “2 Lizards” videos have been “the most on-the-nose, accurate, what it feels like to be in New York City during this quarantine period” cultural product, said Rujeko Hockley, an assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art... “They make me cry.” - The ‘2 Lizards’ of Instagram Are Coronavirus Art Stars

By all means go to Meriem Bennani's Instagram and watch the other episodes.

Another solid find this past week has been "Shelter in Place," a short film by Matthew Beck (@plasticlunch). I randomly got to meet the filmmaker on a subway platform a few weeks back. He was using his camera flash through a random piece of transparent plastic he'd found in the trash and asked my usual "getting anything good?" We quickly got to talking about shooting through different types of transparent goodies and the results we were getting, but both of us were bouncing between trains and didn't have much time to talk. It's these chance encounters you only get by living here in the city that I absolutely miss during this quarantine.

UPDATE: Beck's "Shelter in Place" got picked up by The New Yorker and they did a nice write up about it.

There was also several New York Times articles that just felt right. First up was the Gabrielle Hamilton feature "My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?" Also, an opinion article "The Nude Selfie is Now High Art." Obviously there's a bit of NSFW involved so it's a "choose your own adventure" situation with that link.

Though the debate about art versus pornography has never been settled, a case can be made that quarantine nude selfies are art. Some of us finally have time to make art, and this is the art we are making...

Beyond our Wi-Fi, we don’t have much in the way of connection. Many of us are alone and live in small spaces. We lack the distractions we’re accustomed to and the routines we rely on. But some of the most famous self-portraiture resulted from a dearth of resources.

We are taking a risk at a time when we are not allowed to take risks, baring our bodies with no guaranteed reaction.

Can't speak to any nude selfies happening here at home during this time, but I'll shamelessly point to some of the nonsense I shot while home alone for a period a couple years back; Anne and the boys were visiting family in Louisiana for a few days. Good grief I miss having the space to setup gear and lights.

Can't say the images I'm shooting now are relevant and speaking to the current time, but I do appreciate the time and opportunities I have at the moment. This past week I had a stellar stoop find with a couple lens elements left on the sidewalk. I've been shooting through those two pieces of glass and for sure lean towards the plano convex one that's acting like a diopter. Both are just about the same diameter as my 24-70 lens so it doesn't always cover the image.

Shut it Down: Week Six

It's straight up nuts considering how life continues on while the world seems to be paused. Some good friends of our had their second kid the middle of last week; my cousin's dad died a couple days later from cancer. We're hiding out in and around our homes and trying to dodge an "invisible enemy." Meanwhile Saint Anne the Wife and I are on the tail-end of getting Kid v2 potty trained. There was a bit of a break last week with Kid v1's remote learning, but they're back at it starting today and seemingly with a vengeance. Curious as to how a student teacher will do during all this nonsense? Looks like E-town's classroom is about to find out. By all means, lets add more classroom Zoom calls to our 7-year-old's day considering how well the other ones are going.

I'll say for sure shooting has helped keep me sane through this nonsense. I got antsy about mid-week and got out to shoot outside my neighborhood. I'd been out the week before for a client project, but went out this time with my RED looking for whatever I could find. I started out taking a car from our place to Dumbo, then walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and finally ended up at Washington Square Park. There's more people getting out and doing the things they need to do. There's lines outside grocery stores (just like in my part of Brooklyn). Plenty of people wearing masks (again, like where I live). Oh, and the parks are pretty full (again, like my hood). More than anything I realized I didn't need to be out to "capture the look of an empty city." I ended up with a few shots I'm proud of, but then a whole load I'll not remember. Some of the footage is up on Filmsupply if you're up to check it out.

All in all I've got nothing really new to share. Looks like we in it for the long haul and I hope at some point we'll hit our stride. In the meantime, here's a few other favorites from the last few days: