the story of: meeting chuck and how all this began

part one of seven [ one . two . three . four . five . six . seven ]

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post, but in my defense I do have a semi-excusable reason: six days ago I began writing a “short” story covering the last five years of my life. It’s over six pages long and I’m still not done, but rather than neglect the site for another day, I just figured I would break the story up into several “chapters”. So, here it is:


There isn’t a whole lot of breaking-news to report on the progress of the film at the moment – maybe a few little things here and there, but nothing too exciting. So, instead, I thought I’d take advantage of this downtime to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time on the site…

So much of this site focuses on the technical aspects of this project, on the “what, where and the when” and not enough of the “who and the why”, when that’s probably what people are most interested in – the personal side of a film, the side we most rarely get to see. I guess a good way to start is to explain how I got to this moment:

To tell the story of ‘project pedal’, I first have to tell you the story of “love at last sight”, but before I do that… I have to tell you about my senior year of graphic design school in Adrian, Michigan – that’s where everything started.

I took graphic design for two reasons, the first being; it got me out of school for three hours a day, and the second being; I loved art but hated my art teacher, Mrs. L’ – hate is a strong word to use, I simply didn’t get along with Mrs. L’, it was her teaching methods I hated. Even though this was my second year in the graphics-program, I didn’t know anyone in the class. I had procrastinated re-applying for the course my junior year and therefore; barely made the list for the evening class. It was hard to make new friends - the class only took in 20-25 students - 90% of them from the evening class the year before – everyone was all ready settled in their little clicks. The only downside to the class was the teacher, Mrs. C’, now unlike Mrs. L’, Mrs. C’ never taught or attempted to teach her students anything – and as strange and unbelievable as that might sound – it’s the truth, but this wasn’t the downside – if anything her lack of interest in her students was the class’s biggest asset, the downside was Mrs. C’s business. She ran a graphic’s sweatshop out of her classroom, forcing her students to collate thousands and thousands of pages of booklets for hours at a time; she even had a handful of brown-nosers designing restaurant menus, instructional pamphlets, etc., for a grade while she brought home the money. But this is all slightly beside the point – just an interesting background detail of graphic design, which is where I met Chuck, and Chuck is the person who started it all…

One day, months into the class, I noticed Chuck sitting quietly by himself at a table in the back, hunched over a large piece of poster-board – this was strange and out of place mostly because Chuck was never quiet or by himself, he was constantly the center of attention in the class; loudly cracking jokes or spouting off quotes from the Simpson’s - when I sat down next to him I saw he was using a meter-ruler to carefully draw very thin, perfectly parallel vertical-lines on the paper, it looked as though he had been drawing straight-lines for a few days – and he was only half-way done, it reminded me of Mrs. L’s mind-numbingly boring “art” projects, I asked, “what’cha doing?”, and those were the first words I ever said to Chuck.

Out of the 30 or so computers in the class, I had managed to stumble onto one that had the animation program, Maya, installed on it. Mrs. C’ couldn’t tell me why it was there or how to use it, but for whatever reason, everyday I came in the class and went straight to that computer – slowly teaching myself the program. After three weeks of baby-steps, I knew enough to begin a short project, I choose to animate a pod-race - despite my dislike for George Lucas, but that’s a different story for a different time - I choose the pod-race mostly because I couldn’t animate movable-objects [people] and I couldn’t figure out a way to rotate tires automatically on objects. So, I limited myself to solid-floating objects, and everyone just assumed they were Star-Wars pod-racers. After weeks of animating the project, I started exporting short QuickTime clips of basic wire-frames in action, it was then that people started to take notice in what I was doing – peaking over my shoulder as I scrubbed through the timeline, and it was then that Chuck walked over and asked, “what’cha doing”. This was the second time that Chuck and I talked during the class.

After that, we started going to SubWay after graphic’s-class, or skipping school all together to water-ski at Heidi’s, a girl I was interested in from class, the three of us became inseparable almost instantly. But still there was no open-interest in film between Chuck and I, most of our time was spent fearing graduation and discussing the “rest of our lives”. Chuck was always “committed” to something new, whether it was: Catholicism, zines, squatting, homelessness, train-hopping across the country, politics, Buddhism, running, stamp-making, growing his hair out for Locks-of-Love, vegetarianism, taking a vow-of-silence, aggressive-inline-skating, starting a sticker company, etc… and it was this eccentric characteristic that I was most drawn to in the beginning – but in the end it would be this characteristic that would drive a wedge in our friendship.


This was the end of graphic design school – the beginning of our friendship - and “the rest of our lives” - which brings us to “Love at Last Sight”:

not enough time in the day

I got the go-ahead with advertising on Bicycle World, this is extremely great news, the ad’ should draw in a ton of tour-enthusiasts to the project. I’ve been watching the stats start to climb steadily since mid-January – I’m eager to see how much of a faithful following this attracts to the film.

The other good-news is that stickers I received recently, were supposed to be thrown away by the printing-department, but they accidentally got shipped anyways – long story short, the [useable] stickers should be here any day now.

Sorry this post is so short, but I’ve only got until the 19th to submit an ad’ design to bicycling world, Ed, the co-operator of site, is leaving for China on business - which leaves me with very, very little time.

days go by

Sorry it's been so long since my last post, this past week has flown by, to be perfectly honest, not much worth noting has happened - things have slowed down a bit - which is fine, sometimes everything seems to happen at once, and sometimes you look up and several days have gone by in a flash.


Most of the past week was spent waiting – the stickers still haven’t come in the mail yet, those of you who contacted me about the stickers, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you, I will mail them out the day I get them…

I’ve been discussing some advertising possibilities with Bicycling World, that’s been going well, more on that to come…

Olivier, Olan and Quetin have been very busy shooting a music video with the new HDV35-kit, I haven’t seen any results yet, but they say the kit is working perfectly and the results look amazing, so I’m very excited about that…

I’ve spend a lot of time recently working out the kinks in the film’s fundraising letter, with a lot of extremely helpful feedback and expertise from Chris…

I’ve also been debating the possibility of a fundraising party for the film - an idea suggested to me by a great friend, Tricia, who has done similar events in the past to raise good-amounts of money for theatre projects – the only aspect of it that makes me nervous is the fact that I’m not the best at mingling in large crowds of people I’m not familiar with, I get very shy and reclusive, I hate to admit it, but it’s the awful truth. Put me in a room with four or five strangers and I’m completely fine, put me in a room with thirty strangers and I get the sudden urge to go hide in the bathroom, especially when a handful of the faces I recognize from tv shows… then it gets really weird. Regardless of any irrational-fears I’ll have to overcome, it sounds like a great idea, plus it’s the perfect opportunity to meet up with Eric Simonson again, the director of “On Tiptoe: The Music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo”. Months ago, I got to sit down with Eric and pick-his-brain about ‘project pedal’, I’ve been anxious to fill him in on the progress. There are still a lot of details to work out, but I’ll keep everyone posted…


[This just in] The stickers arrived a few minutes ago, that’s the good news - the bad news is; I can’t use them, to explain: when I originally sent in the order, I gave them a file with a misspelled word on it, but I realized this right away and, five minutes later, sent a follow-up email explaining what had happened with the correct file attached. The next day I got an email that assured me they’d check the files and take care of everything, but then days went by and I didn’t hear anything, after a week and half I sent an email double-checking if everything had been fixed, I got a reply that re-assured me they had caught the bad-file and it was being sent to film, but it had caused a slight delay. This was fine with me as long as I was getting stickers I could use. Well, tonight when I opened the package, they looked great, I was very excited and getting ready to sit down and send them out to people, that’s when I noticed a problem, it was the wrong file… two weeks later… and I’m still sticker-less… how frustrating.

misunderstood

I’ve been sitting here a moment, trying to find the right way to open this post – but I’ve only got an hour until I have to leave for work, so I guess I should jump into it. I’ve heard, through the grapevine, some “negative”, to put it mildly, comments on proj:pedal, well, the project itself is more of an innocent bystander, it’s really directed towards me and how I run this site.

To sum-up the criticisms; I’m coming off as a “taker”, and not a “giver”. Things are becoming too one sided for the readers, and there’s a lack of interactability that’s turning some readers away.


To explain; I’ve done a poor job communicating that the bulk – and when I say “bulk”, I mean 95% - of the budget isn’t expected to come from reader donations. That is an amazingly naive and unrealistic route in raising the funds for the film. To be perfectly honest, I don’t expect more than $300 in actual cash donations to come in by the time May rolls around. So, with readers under the impression that I was asking for a giant handout, it’s no wonder some of them are frustrated with me. It’s time to clear things up:


Q. How is the bulk of the $8,000 being raised for the film?
A. I’ve been preparing and fine-tuning a pre-production “press release”, normally these are created after a film is completed, but I’m calling it this for lack of a better word, basically it covers everything there is to cover about the documentary – both in front of and behind the camera. This package of info’ is geared at a more professional audience – looking for investors, sponsorship, etc…

On top of this package, I’ve been working on a more general ‘fundraising’ letter, with the, much appreciated, help of Chris, a woman who organizes fundraisers for a living. This letter is geared at a more personal audience – family, friends, random people in the phone book, just kidding, kind of.

The “press release” will be used here in North Hollywood, as well in Berlin, thanks to Olivier, Olan and Quentin – who have, time and time again, been more than generous with their time and energy towards this project.

Anyways, these two things – if all goes as planned – should knock a large chunk of the budget out of the picture; what ever is left will most likely be compensated for with personal money. Then there is always the option of selling my Mac & Canon GL2… or auctioning off body-parts for advertising purposes.

Q. Why don’t you just max out some of your credit cards, like Kevin Smith did with Clerks?
A. Oh, if I only had a credit card – I would be in debt so fast with this film. But, unfortunately, I don’t have a credit card – I’ve never been approved for one, I have no credit, not bad credit, but just no credit. I’ve never bought a car or anything else that required payments – not having a credit card, in the past, was something I was very proud of, everyone I knew, my age and up, was in over their head with debt. But now that I need $8,000 – what I wouldn’t give…

Q. Are you the “Hollywood” type – a.k.a., “a person who thinks he's too good for the "little people" but doesn't recognize that he's a little person? Someone who doesn’t realize that the people who support you are the people that get you places”?
A. On one hand, I find it kind of humorous that someone would even think to call me the “Hollywood” type. I would be hard pressed to forget that I fit under the category: “little person”, let’s just say I’m a starving artist not a Steven Spielberg. On the other hand though, it’s flat-out insulting, despite the fact that I do live in Hollywood, well, North Hollywood, I have no real interest or intentions of “making-it-big” in the industry, if you ask me, Hollywood [as in the film-industry] churns out shit 98% of the time – it’s a business, only interested in making a buck and playing the demographics safe, which means: cookie-cutter actions flicks, or cheesy recycled love stories with predictable happy-endings. Both filled to the brim with ‘A’ list actors / actresses. None of these things spark my interest, none of them appeal to why I want to make films.

Really, all this came about because this site doesn’t have comments. Personally, the connection is a bit of a stretch.


Now, even though the remarks made, indirectly, towards the site and myself were… harsh, I think is fair word, and personally attacking, they raised a few good points, so there are going to be some changes made around here. First off, the boat-thingy’, hasn’t gotten a warm response from people, so it’s gone.

I don’t want this site to become something readers can’t visit without being guilt’ed into forking over their hard-earned cash, and I’m afraid I’ve unintentionally already made it that way. From now on, if you feel like buying proj:pedal an hour of tape, go right ahead, if you feel like boxing up some canned food for the crew, it would be much appreciated. If not, I want you to be able to simply sit back and enjoy the show.

Secondly, I really do look forward to people’s questions and comments in the forum or via email, some readers have gotten the impression that I don’t care to hear what anyone else has to say. I don’t know how this has happened but it, honestly, really kind of brings me down. I love it when I look in the forum and find something new – but the problem is I’m not always the quickest at responding. So, I promise, starting today, I’ll be much, much quicker in responding to reader’s questions or comments. It’s the least I can do to show how much I appreciate anyone’s interest in this labor-of-love.

the contest

The first batch of proj:pedal stickers should be here by the middle of next week... the design, as you can see below, is really simple - I just wanted something I could get out there - I only bought 125 of them, which won't spread far considering all the local bike-shops in and around North Hollywood alone, but it will get the ball rolling. I'll also be mailing a handful out to a reader in Detroit, if anyone else is interested in getting stickers, please feel free to email me.



For the next batch of stickers I get printed up, I'd like a new design, something that looks like it took longer than five minutes to design. But rather than do all the work myself, I was hoping to hold a contest, having the readers get involved and send in their designs or ideas. The rules:

* It must have the website address somewhere on the sticker,
* It must be black & white,
* Your design must fit one of these dimension options [except for the 12" x 3" design].

There's no limit to the number of designs one person can submit. Feel free to include a "designed by..." on your sticker idea. The deadline for submissions is the 17th of this month, giving you 15 days to come up with the greatest sticker idea the world has ever seen. I haven't decided what the prize will be yet, but I'll do my best to make it worth your while [actually, if anyone has any ideas on what the 'prize' should be, send those in too].

One more quick thing before I go: check out the "promote" drop-menu to the left, you'll notice two things have been added under a "how to help your friendly neighborhood indie-filmmaker" caption, these are great and inexpensive ways to show your support for proj:pedal.

Besides that, goodluck, everyone!