Fire-Wired Blog

 A year and a half ago I had an idea for a short film. Between that moment and roughly a year later I turned that idea into an actual thing, No Shortcuts . That is probably the best thing in filmmaking; a match is sparked and if you've got the supplies you can get a pretty righteous fire roaring. Well my small fire came together this past March and TONIGHT in Burlington, Iowa at the Snake Alley Festival of Film , audiences will get the chance to warm their hearts and minds with it. Did that metaphor work? I'm not sure. Idea, production, creation equals match, spark, fire. Right? Oh well. I've been watching a lot of Justin Hawkins Rides Again lately so I'm prone to metaphorical and performative fun at the moment.  If you haven't been playing along, No Shortcuts is a one-man-band film I produced over the course of 2021 and early 2022. It's a mix of my 8 year-old self wishing he had the strength of The Ultimate Warrior so he could run a mile in 5 minutes and my 38...

Well it took 10 months but FINALLY..."No Shortcuts" is in the can. A one-man band short film I undertook in Winter 2021 to give myself a creative project when I had practically no free time is shot, cut, colored, scored, and ready to be submitted to a few festivals. Now looking back, I gotta say it was much more work than I was ready for. No Shortcuts has practical effects, computer generated effects, sound effects, compositing work and color touches that all together make it happen. Most films require a lot of post work, but science fiction requires an additional layer of care to make them work and not turn an audience off. Much of my efforts worked well, some will be nitpicked. But that's okay, I wasn't going for perfection. I was simply going. I will say I learned a lot about my tolerance for imperfection when tired and/or cold. I also cemented my belief filmmaking is meant to be a collaborative endeavor. Not only to produce a better end product, but get a grea...

Content wheel at ResponsiblyWild.com Maintaining an online footprint can be exhausting. Pretty much anyone who keeps tabs on their professional versus personal image knows exactly what that entails. As fun as it is to make snarky remarks on Twitter, are you comfortable with a prospective employer reading them? It can get especially frustrating when pretty much everything you've ever produced or will produce exists somewhere on the information super highway. That is scarily close to my situation. Virtually every news report, wedding video, podcast, graphic, fundraising video, tech column, music video, and everything else I've produced can be found online. Sure I upload a great deal of it myself, but I suspect for every four things I personally put online, a fifth item is uploaded with my name attached by someone else. Of course the major difference in these items is the fifth one is completely out of my control, such is the case for everyone; Someone uploads a nasty photo ...