I’ve been in Atlanta for about 4.5 years now and I have only recently began to get curious about Atlanta’s history. I visited the Atlanta History Center awhile back and before that I did a small bit of research on the history of the various neighborhoods here. There’s a lot to learn and I imagine I’ll keep researching as long as I’m here.
This morning I found this really cool set of images from the 60′s and 70′s of Atlanta. These are from flickr and I have no more information than what is provided in the captions. I just thought they were cool enough to share. (If there are no images below, it means the embed code from flickr broke.)
“Stranded alone aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Lee Miller fights to survive the stress of isolation and stay alive. But everything changes when he discovers something unexpected that allows him to travel through space and time.”
That sounds like a pretty decent plot, but it’s not really accurate in the sense that he doesn’t travel through time fighting bad guys or anything. The truth is he finds a journal from the civil war and the travels are likely in his head.
I’m not going to sit here and encourage people to watch it, as it’s a really unconventional film that doesn’t adhere to a linear storytelling arc. Most people won’t appreciate such a movie.
For example, here are a couple of reviews from netflix-
“Terrible. To elaborate more would take too much time writing, and too much time for you to read. The most simple way to review this film is in the next sentence. This is an embarrassingly bad film.”
“This movie was difficult to even understand, because it was pretty much just random videos that had no connection at all. There wasn’t really a set plot, and no background information was given. This movie was a waste of time, and the ending didn’t even explain anything. Do not watch.”
Most of the bad reviews of this film have legitimate gripes, but to me, it was like a beautiful cinematic poem. It’s more about the feelings it evokes than about the story itself. If you think you’d be down for that kind of thing, it’s on Netflix in the instant queue area.
This was on my list for quite awhile as the executive producer is Tom Delonge, one of my favorite musicians, and he and his band (Angels & Airwaves) also scored the soundtrack.
Evidently the budget for this film was around $500,000. That’s what makes this interesting! For such a low budget film, it is really really well done. Beautiful cinematography and a set that feels authentic.
This is obviously a passion project for writer/director William Eubank, a cinematographer by trade, and this seems to be his first feature as director.
He even built the main set in his parents backyard.
As you may or may not know, I’ve been working on building a website that bridges the connection between students and workshop producers/instructors for the last several years. It’s called Workshoppers.org, please check it out if you haven’t already. It’s proven challenging but in October of 2011, we officially launched and I’ve been doing some promotional work since then to spread the word.
I created this video to help explain and generate interest in our product and I think it’s fun, so I wanted to share it here. Feel free to pass it along to anyone you know that may be interested. Thanks!
A few months ago I noticed something strange on my bank statement and it was the final straw to lose me as a customer.
It wasn’t the debit card fees, or the increased account fees, or the very poor reputation, or the whole too big to fail thing… although those were contributing factors.
What was the final straw, you ask? Advertising within my bank statement. By nature of their service they have access to my personal information: where I shop, how often I shop there, how much I spend, and how much money I make. They use this data to target specific ads to me. The problem is that I want to be the customer of my bank, not an asset they sell.
I’ve decided Bank of America is not worthy of my business so I will be moving all of my money and all of my user data to another service that treats me and my information with a little more respect.
I haven’t posted in awhile because having a full time job and still taking on freelance work, leaves little time for updates. However, those two things and some thriftiness on my part have enabled me to completely pay off all the credit card I accumulated during and after college. This is a big personal achievement for me and I’ve been feeling pretty good about it lately. In fact I’ve been feeling pretty awesome.
And then today happened. Last night I accidently left my debit card at a restaurant and didn’t realize it until this morning as I went to pay the parking meter. I rummaged around and found a $20 in the glove box and fed it to the machine, only to realize as it slurped my cash, that the machine didn’t give change at all. So I paid $20 for a $6 spot.
Then I stop by the grocery store on the way home from work to pick up some dog food and other stuff, end up putting lots of items in the cart, get ready to check out, only to realize that I still don’t have my debit card, I forgot to stop by the restaurant to grab it.
As part of my debt reduction strategy I stopped using credit cards and removed them from my wallet completely and cut them all up. I Don’t plan to use credit cards anymore for quite awhile, so there was no other options except cash, of which I had none.
I end up just putting the stuff back (I’m too nice to just abandon the cart!) and go home feeling pretty silly.
My point is that there is always something to slap you back to reality every time you start getting a little too cocky.
In September I took a trip with the lovely @jenamiller to check out an area of the country I hadn’t explored yet, the Pacific Northwest. We went to Both Vancouver and Seattle and took a train between the two. It was a great trip and I’ve posted lots of pictures from that trip on this blog. However, I also shot some video while I was there and I finally found the time to edit something together. Enjoy!
December was the busiest month I’ve had as a freelance multimedia professional. It was awesome! I had commitments almost every single day of the month (minus the holidays, but you could also make a reasonable argument that those too were commitments).
Even though I was building momentum and developing a good client base, I wasn’t making enough money to pay down my debt and build up income. So…
I decided to accept the offer of a full time job at a company that prefers not to be mentioned online. You can check my linkedin profile if you really need to know (linkedin is ok).
I’ll be doing video production and photography in a well equipped studio and with budgets that are friendly to the creative vision. Unfortunately, I do have to dress business casual and show up 5 days a week. Hard adjustments to make!
I had very strong reservations about giving up my freelance lifestyle but after the first two weeks at my new job, I can say I’m very pleased with my decision.
I probably won’t post much about my work here but I will keep posting personal work and maybe I’ll get back into writing.
Recently did some headshots for Rachel B. in my studio. She just needed a professional one for her site, so we tried a few variations and came up with this one:
I had the great privilege of shooting some headshots for my friend Sarah while I was in Seattle in September. She’s an awesome actress and needed some new headshots for auditions.
I had been wanting to check out Seattle for awhile, as I’ve heard amazing things about it and I’ve got a few friends there that I haven’t seen in years. I was also there to shoot some headshots for my friend Sarah. I’ll post those soon…
Here are a few randoms from the first day hanging out in Downtown Seattle.
By the third day in Vancouver, we were a little worn out from exploring and we were being a bit lazy. We decided to walk to Stanley Park and see what that was all about.
Here is the lovely @jenamiller.
Here’s a guy waiting in line to get his hot dog from Japadog, a Japenese hot dog street cart.
Here’s the view from our hotel room later that evening.
