Post Production - Week 42

Post Production - Week 42 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

Coming home to find things like this is very touching, it keeps me going, it keeps me focused and ambitious. So thank you, Lori, for writing this.

I know my own journey will continue. I've not reached the Atlantic coast yet. I undoubtedly have thousands of miles to go. Every biweekly trip I make to Texas or California to visit my children or my wife brings immense fatigue to my body but resolve to my awakened spirit. With each milepost sign I pass, I find reasons to be thankful for this journey whether the desert basins are ablaze with sunshine or enshrouded with pregnant monsoon clouds.

I embrace the long hot black road now. God only knows what my final destination will be. There is no guarantee for success in my life. But like Mike, I "keep going, keep trying after failing, time, and time, and time again." Entire post here...

So Far, So Good

I was very happy to wake up this morning to find new (and some of our first) videos in the Stockpile group on Vimeo, and I wanted to take a moment to thank the people who were the first to join and upload to the group.

The first member to join, outside of Angela, Amanda and myself, was Stephen Niebauer. And the first video added to Stockpile was called, 'A loney valley in Nevada' by Merten, he took the footage during a NY to SF solo-ride he took just this last summer. I embeded a video below from the end of Merten's coast to coast ride. It's all in German, but it's exactly the kind of footage we were excited about getting.

The end of my tour from New York to San Francisco from Merten on Vimeo.

I really hope we can pull this off and reach out enough to collect a massive amount of other traveler's media, it would greatly add to the film to actually *show* the way we are all connected by the places we've been at different times.

When I think of the film's core message about the importance of doing something you don't believe you're capable of doing, and the way that I might be able to cut together thousands of videos from all kinds of different people and places to support that idea, it's just very encouraging. And something I can't wait to see come together.

Stockpile is here :)

Hello there.

Things have been going great working with Mike and Amanda on all things promoting and spreading the word about "For Thousands of Miles".

I've been in love with this idea ever since they told me about it years ago. It's always had a special place in my heart, and I would do anything to support the message they are trying to convey.

In the past week we've a launched a few communities involving "For Thousands Miles" and Project Pedal as a whole. We've started a spiffy new Facebook group that you can join and support here.

We have also launched a Ning community and Vimeo group called Stockpile. It's actually a really cool community for travelers. We are basically asking anyone who has great stories, pictures or film of their travels to contribute to the film. Doesn't matter how recent the trip was, it could have been 4 months ago or 40 years ago. Anything would be fantastic! By sharing your adventures with us, you will be giving us permission to use it in the final cut of the film.



As you all know we love to share our pictures and video with you. So we would like you to share with us :) We want to hear you voice, this is YOUR chance to be creatively involved with the film.

And thanks everyone for always supporting this project, means the world to us :)

Oh, and check out this short clip of one of our meetings at our favorite cafe.

Pedal Meeting :) from Angela Sauceda on Vimeo.

I Miss Everything About This Shot

Teaser 002 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

I believe Olivier shot this with the SGPro 35 Kit and the crew's FX1... we had Amanda's 300 zoom lens mounted (which was a lot of fun to film with).

We waited at the highest switch-back in Cascades National Park for Larry to pass and ride down into the valley. We took a lot of footage from this ledge, it was a very beautiful spot to spend an hour.

Amanda was hoping our 2nd teaser would be a clip from an interview we just transcribed, but I had this as a backup, and she hadn't gotten a chance to come over and tell me which section she wanted.

On a side note, the title for this post: I miss everything about this shot - is just referring to all the little things I remember about standing on that cliff, the temperature, the smell that comes off snow-capped mountains and the mist from the waterfalls. I miss watching Larry pass by... I miss the crew. Just everything.

I know this post is short... perhaps a little *too* short. But I'm hoping to get some writing done tonight.

what is at stake

I'm in one of those moods tonight. Perhaps it has a little to do with my smacking my head into a car, pulling an unexpected u-turn, at 30 miles an hour - I think the whole event (that happened last tue) has me thinking about... just stuff.

Maybe it has nothing to do with my accident, I do tent to go through this thought-process every few months. I really get caught up in what's at stake if I fail. Not in a panicky kind of way, but in a: stay focused - make progress - work towards "something" kind of way.

I guess I just find it important to remind myself that I've put the last 5 years of my stupid little life into this one film... and if I mess it up, if I slack off or become slow and distracted, that it will set a precedent in my life. That the stories I want to tell after Pedal, won't ever be if I do not see this through successfully.

And it's a good feeling - I just walked two miles back home after dropping off the rental car, and it was a nice night, it was quiet out, there was a cool breeze - and I just felt calm... but highly motivated.


I used to run Cross Country in high school for Onsted - my Coach, Mr. Hunt, taught me a lot about patience and pushing myself, but the moments I miss the most, from those four years of XC, are the several seconds at the line: I remember so clearly the tingling in my lungs from the warm-up run before the race, the focus I had, the quite as hundreds of people held their breath for the gun.

It was peaceful... even though you knew you were seconds away from running as fast as you could for 3+ miles. Imagining the blood-taste in your lungs, the heavy-oxygen-deprived acid in your legs, the pins and needles in your arms, the instinct to slow down... to ease the hurt... all of that seemed like perfect meditation. I guess I feel that way tonight, like I'm on the line. I have work to do.

Post Production - Week 39

Post Production - Week 39 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

such a tease

Teaser 001 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

I recorded a weekly-update vlog two nights ago, but I literally don't have any USB ports left open right now, and all the drives are busy backing up at the moment, so I guess I'll have to wait till tomorrow to post it. Not that anyone is holding their breath I'm sure, but still.

I have the next five days off and I plan on shacking up in my room for most of it writing more of Episode 9, which Amanda and I are embarrassingly aware has taken way, way too long to release. I guess we lost the balance we had going for 6, 7 and 8 and shifted our energy onto the film. We *have* been meeting a lot to discus where all the remaining episodes are heading, as well as the film.

I mostly wanted to write this quick post to share our first official "teaser" of 'For Thousands of Miles', I have several timelines in Final Cut for the film, most of them are simply for SmoothCam preparation, others are for other things like clips that need to be trimmed up and re-exported for what-ever reason... I have a lot of random clips scattered around my extra timelines and we thought it would be fun to share them.

So we're hoping every two weeks to post another clip - it's Amanda's turn to pick the next clip, and she's leaning towards something funny, so we'll see. The clip above is very short, I wanted it longer, but Amanda talked me down on the time. So... it's very much a teaser. Let us know what you're interested in seeing and we'll post those clips first.

you people are amazing

It's amazing to me that... a project as small as Pedal could come so close, so fast, to a disastrous dead-end, having drive failures like we did last week almost seemed the snapping point of the project. But, it's amazing to me that, as close as we came to loosing the last 6 months of work, that so many of you helped out on such short notice.

I just kept thinking about how things would be different without this blog, without the people who visit it and communicate with us so regularly, how watered down the film would be without your feedback... how alone Amanda and I would feel carrying this highly ambitious project. Last week was a huge reminder of that difference. And I wanted to say "thank you" to everyone who left a comment, everyone who was able to donate, everyone who crossed their fingers for us.

Last night I came home from work to find 7 new hard-drives waiting for me, five of them being 500 GB USB drives, and the other two being 500 GB firewire (800) drives. As I'm writing this I'm balancing out all of the film's footage onto the two firewire drives, which are named: Eko and Kate.

When Locke stopped mounting, I tried the usual tricks to get it to come back, I used an 800 cable, then a 400 cable, I plugged it into my MacBook Pro and then my Mac Mini, it wouldn't show up in the finder or with Disk Utility. I let it sit overnight to still have no luck, but for some reason, and I'm not complaining, last night I daisy-chained it through Eko and managed to get it to show up in Disk Utility! After a failed verification test, and a failed repair, I managed to "rebuild" the drive using Disk Warrior. I was so happy and relieved I wanted to run down the street screaming. It looks like we got through this without loosing a single file. *knock on wood*

As the footage is migrating over, it's being mirrored on dedicated USB drives, Benjamin and Charlie. I'm worried that just because Locke came on for the time being, that it's still too unreliable a drive to be used for anything Pedal related.

I sealed all the drives onto the top shelf of a bookcase next to my work-desk, and mounted a dual window fan to blow all the hot air *off* the drives, and also keep the dust out. I think they'll be happy in there.


On a side note, I wanted to mention that we have two new site features I released in the last two weeks - and I'm really excited about both of them. The first being a new re-designed music suggestion page, you'll find it in the menu bar to the left, it's called help us find ♫, the old blog post we were originally using wasn't built around "conversation" enough. Since we launched it a few days ago, we've already gotten several great new band suggestions. So thanks, and I can't wait to get more.

The other site feature is the new "get involved" page - this is completely differnet from anything else on Pedal and I'm really dorked out about it. Please take a moment to check it out, I think you'll like it, and you'll find a lot of cool stuff on there - free SWAG being one of them.

post production week 38

post production week 38 from amanda walker on Vimeo.

mike and i, hanging out, transcribing interviews and thanking ya'll for all your love concerning our hard drive dilemma :)

State of Emergency

Or should I say: "state of #@%$ing emergency". I've always tried very hard to not let day to day problems build up and cause high anxiety in my life - I know that taking my first bicycle trip in '01 has helped with that greatly. Whenever I get stressed or run into road blocks, something in my head has always snapped me back to the road, and it "turns the volume down" on what ever I'm dealing with at that moment. Having said that... I think both Amanda and I are about to have heart attacks.

I have 3 TBs of storage for Pedal, the first TB is a drive called 'Desmond', it housed 70% of the film's raw footage, the second TB drive, Hugo, was used to copy all the content from 'Desmond', both of these two drives where Western Digital MyBooks. The third TB of space, 'Locke', a Lacie Big drive, contained the last 30% of footage and also my Time Machine back-ups for my MacBook Pro.

In the last week, I've lost 'Desmond', and 'Locke' - which means I'm working off my back-up, 'Hugo', as a primary drive. And 'Locke', well if it doesn't ever mount again, I'm fucked on that last 35 hours of footage, I'll be recapturing it and re-logging... assuming I don't end up in a stress coma.

All this drive failure has left us in a position of being 1 drive away from losing 100% of the last 6 months of work. I plan on calling Western Digital and demanding my money back - but who knows how far that will get me. Amanda and I are, in a state of panic, buying what we can off Amazon. I just purchased a 500 GB Lacie USB drive, which is to be used as my Time Machine drive, I have lots of important Pedal related files that need to be backed up on a daily basis. Our goal is, in the next few days, to purchase six separate 500 GB drives, two of which will be 800 firewire, and the other four will be USB. I'll work off the firewire drives, and be constantly backed up on the USB drives. If something happens, we'll replace the firewire drive and continue working.

If you happen to be interested in helping us out, there's always our "we heart donations" page, which is greatly, greatly, greatly appreciated - there's also Pedal's Amazon wishlist, we believe we have the USB drives covered, that's about $400 we've scrapped together to begin to mitigate this problem. If you're like us, and are broke, then please just keep your fingers crossed for us. We are trying to remain semi-calm'ish.

google map conundrum

So I'm stuck on a small yet annoying problem that has to do with Google Maps, months ago I spent a few hours plotting (as best I could) Larry's route from Anacortes, WA to Bar Harbor, ME. Since his route avoided almost all major roads I had to "drag" the blue route line in a bunch of places, which made the map very complicated. Apparently when you do that, it causes all kinds of craziness with embedding.

Every few weeks I sit down and try to figure out a fix but I'm out of ideas - all I'm trying to do is take this map, and embed it onto a single page where it's stretched 100% for both height and width. The latest problem I'm having now is when it's embedded, the map is simply the map with no route on it. Something awesome for who ever figures it out... I don't know what that "awesome" is yet... but I'll think of something.