221 days left

The fundraising letter - before I cut & paste this, I want to thank Chris and Laurie again for taking time out of their busy schedules to proof' this letter and offer their expertise...

This is the first of [what will probably become] many letters - over the next few months I hope to send at least four more follow-up letters to let people [who can't or don't follow the website] know where the project stands.

Also, I'm posting this letter more as a reference for someone who might be writing something similiar - I'm not expecting people to react to it as though I had personally sent this to them... having said that:

In the summer of 2001, I crossed the United States on my 24-speed mountain bike, leaving behind my family, my friends, my small hometown of Onsted, Michigan. 4,500 miles and 55 days later, I ended this long and challenging journey at the Golden Gate Bridge.

People told me before I left for the Pacific that the event would change my life - if I made it - but in returning home from San Francisco, I found that little had changed for me. Day to day life picked up exactly where it had left off, and in a way, I found that very reassuring. But there was one thing different, something subtle: I saw the world around me with “new eyes”.

I had gone exploring beyond my familiar surroundings, and with great sacrifice and determination gained great confidence and focus.

Just before the trip, I had spent several months writing, with a friend, what would become our first feature-length-screenplay, ‘Love at Last Sight’. At the time it was simply an incredibly fun and rewarding way to spend my days fresh out of high school. That new-love of filmmaking has grown into a very serious goal – a dream to direct films – films that are unique and inspiring to their audience.

Now, five years later, the memories and emotions from my 2001 trip still hold strong footing in my everyday thoughts. And with it; the idea of doing it all again - with two primary purposes:

ONE To personally reaffirm the lesson of who I am and what I am capable of once more, this time sharing the awe-inspiring experience with two very important people, my younger brother, Nick, and Amanda, my girlfriend of three years.

TWO To film a documentary of the experience, the hardships, the ups and downs, the inspiring travelers encountered along the way and maybe most importantly, what each of them take from their own travels.

This documentary, tentatively titled ‘Pedal’, together with this upcoming cross-country trip, is a pivotal moment in working towards these goals. The last year of ‘preproduction’ has been spent preparing for both the trip itself and the documentary revolving around it; mapping the route, narrowing in on the story, raising awareness of the film, bringing on crew members, finding equipment as well as financial support.

With 8 months left until ‘production’ (May 29th ’06), only one goal remains, and ‘Project Pedal’ needs your help to reach it: financial support.

This film has an incredibly small budget goal of $8,000 [whereas most documentaries start out at $170,000]. This money will help buy food for the four crewmembers [over a 55-65 day period], gas for the crew’s vehicle and several hundred hours worth of HD [High-Definition] tape.

The project has attached three “in-kind” sponsors, the ‘Adventure Cycling Association’, Clif Bar and ‘BicyclingWorld.com’, as well as a long list of high-end equipment – which has helped enormously in keeping the budget within reach.

Three ways in which you can get involved, and be a participant in the Project Petal team:

1) Make a donation to Project Pedal: Of an $8,000 budget, almost 25% goes straight to the 147 hours of Sony Hi-Def tape [DVM 63HD] needed to capture the coast-to-coast trip. You can contribute to the film enormously by purchasing just one hour of tape. And out of the same $8,000 budget, $3,000 provides food for the four crewmembers, which roughly works out to $11 a day per person over a 65 day trip. By digging out the canned peaches and chicken-noodle soup buried in the back of your cupboards you will contribute to the film enormously; the most important aspect of day-to-day filmmaking is keeping the crewmembers full, giving them the energy they need to be creative and on their toes. So, please send in Ramen noodles, boxes of mac & cheese, canned fruits and vegetables, kool-aid mix, gatorade, juice, pop [or soda, if you're on the west coast]. Of course, a check or money order to help us stock our mobile cupboard and keep the film rolling will also be gratefully accepted and appreciated.

2) Invest money in Project Pedal: The film is in need of 2 to 4 people willing to invest $2,000 to $4,000 each to help reach a production goal of $8,000 total. The first question, “will you get the money back”? The answer is, “yes – and with 5% interest”. The second question, “how”? Project Pedal will sell DVDs of the documentary, including a number of ‘bonus materials’ via our website (projectpedal.com). These sales, in combination with money earned at qualifying film-festivals, will go towards paying back the investors. It will only take roughly 350 DVD sales alone to remake the $8,000 with interest – a very reachable goal thanks to film’s current internet following.

3) Spread the word: Send out an email to all your friends with a link to the film’s website. www.projectpedal.com

This letter is going out to you, because you’re important to us and we want you on the Project Pedal team. To make this dream a reality, we need support from everyone and anyone able and willing to offer it. Whether you are able to join us as an investor, an in-kind donor of food or film, or as a friend and supporter who wants to give what you can, please know that your support—in the amount, and kind that suits you best will help us succeed in our cross-country journey.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration. If would like to learn more about the film, visit the website at projectpedal.com. And feel free to contact me at (555) 555-5555. I’d be happy to share plans, thoughts and stories from the road.

what's the hold-up?

I would have assumed by now that the "rough edit" I committed to editing would be complete... it's been some time since I've returned home from our "warm-up bike ride down the Pacific", but I've yet to get anywhere with my 15 minute "sneak-peek" at what you could expect to see in the finished film.

Why is this? Well, like everything, the answer is hardly black and white... two major drags on the mini-project have to do with my GL2 and eMac, the GL2 is needed to finish interviews with Amanda and myself - and the eMac is, of course, needed to edit this footage in with the bike trip footage. But a problem with the sound channels in my camcorder have made it difficult to shoot anything longer than three minutes without a short, high-pitched, metallic sounding "bleeeep". Despite cleaning the heads many times - the problem doesn't seem to want to go away. And as for the computer, it's as if half my RAM has mysteriously stopped doing it's job - video in Final Cut slows the computer almost to a stand still, I can't even preview clips anymore, I have to drop them in the timeline and render them out just to see what I'm looking at, where as before, it had no trouble what-so-ever juggling eight hours worth of footage in any given sequence.

But, a new computer is soon on it's way, and in the meantime I hopefully will have found someone to buy my GL2... despite the sound-issue.

But - it's not all technically difficulties - much of the time wasted not filming or editing was spend scratching-my-head on how to turn seven-some hours of first-person, incredibly restrictive shots - mostly due to the camera having to be bolted to the handle bars while riding for safety reasons - into something that could somehow, someway resemble the ideas behind "pedal". It took many, many weeks and anxiety-attacks to come to conclusion that: I just can't.

What I do have is the footage for is an interesting making-of, which can be uploaded to the site and/or thrown onto the DVD. Soon, when I get my hands on a different camera, I'll be sitting down and discussing the film's history so far and what we expect along the way in our next big coast-to-coast ride. I'll talk a little bit about the original inspiration for this film: the people I met on my first bike trip in '01. Etc...


But for any of you out there reading who happen to be in the middle of preproduction for your own project, or are simply gearing up to begin prepro', learn from my mistakes, if you are forced/ persuaded to push back the start-date of your film - do not, I repeat, do not commit to filming/editing a smaller project based on your full-scale-commitment for whatever reasons. It will simply distract you from a much more important, much more difficult, much more attention-worthy goal.


As of this moment there are 225 days of preproduction left - and I feel as though I've lost a great deal - and when I say "great deal", I mean like 80% - of the film's momentum that I had built-up before last May. I’ve a lot of work ahead of me in the next several months.

In an attempt to not “put all my eggs in one basket”, I’ve revised a fundraising letter I originally began writing some time back of December of ’04. I added a short “update” paragraph to the letter, explaining where we are currently at in the project – I plan on making my way over to Kinko’s in the next few days to print off 50-some copies and mailing them out to everyone and anyone. I’ll also - for educational purposes – soon post the letter in it’s entirety… probably under the “dig deeper” drop-menu to the left.

lyon

I received an email from Lyon [who I first mentioned on this blog in the post "'arctic quest' & the inspiration behind 'project pedal'"] in respose to the last entry about Amanda's "epiphany" while watching 'Thumbsucker'. It read:

I just took a look at the project pedal website to see how all was going for you. I think Amanda got it right....living in the moment is what those trips are about.....or at least what they end up being about whether you intended for that or not. I think you learn to go with the flow on those trips whereas, when you have a routine, a job, school, you're in whirlpool, going round and round, learning what to expect, and one day ends up looking very much like the one before. But on the trip, it's always changing, always different, and you don't know what to expect and therefore you don't.....you go with the flow and enjoy.