Well I’m heading home! Our last two days in Thailand were very low key. Less bussing around and more walking through neighborhoods.

Went back to The Loft Cafe and had an orange iced coffee which was lovely. The shop seems like it’s run by true coffee aficionados. Framed coffee tasting wheels, Thai coffee magazines, a siphon brewer. Even a roaster in the back but I don’t know if they actively roast their beans. I should have grabbed an espresso in retrospect. The coffee scene in Chiang Mai in general has been top notch. Would really love to come back and seek out the best cafés. 😛

Even the coffee shop attached to the hotel, 49 Coffee, was pretty decent. Lovely setting and design at least. I had an espresso this morning that was pretty good, at least on par with most neighborhood shops in the states.

And two days ago I had an iced latte that took an approach I’d heard of but never tried, at Cup Fine Day: frozen coffee cubes in milk. Scrumptious until you’re left with the cubes. Then it’s a bitter crunch to finish it off.

Suffice to say: good coffee here. Aside from that, great food as well. Had tom kha and phanaeng and both were spicy and scrumptious.

One of the more surprising things I’ve found on this trip is that my hotel WiFi has symmetrical up/down internet speeds of around 100 mbps. In fact, according to Speetest.net, Thailand as a country has a median upload speed of 172.95 mbps. There are probably flaws in this dataset, but that’s still shocking. The USA in comparison has a measly 22.78 mbps average upload speed.

What this means for me practically is I’ve been able to back up my footage every night to multiple cloud services, and it’s finished before I go out in the morning. How lovely! 🥰 I can only imagine how wonderful life would be if these kinds of upload speeds were available everywhere in the states. (Insert futuristic society meme.)

Also - realized today I totally should have watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which is a Thai film. I’ll watch it on the flight back!

In terms of food (the most important terms), today I ate eggs benedict for breakfast, with an iced coffee and some muesli. In the middle of the day, we went up to the mountains, met some elephants and stopped for khao soi for lunch (delicious!) with an iced latte (yes, I needed it) and mango with sticky rice as a dessert. Later, we walked through the night market on the outside of the old city. We went for Greek food at a place that you had to know was there, otherwise you wouldn’t find it. Down this alley and that. I had a falafel “sandwich” (and the falafels were sooo good, not too dry) and a Singha.

It’s my first morning in Thailand. Yesterday we got some coffee (I got lychee iced coffee - so good) and for dinner ate crispy pork belly which was transcendent.

On the flight I ended up watching A Brighter Summer Day and Beau travail. Two very different films. Both good. I feel like maybe I wasn’t quite in the right headspace for Beau travail after A Brighter Summer Day, which is so much more rooted in reality.

Last night I offloaded the b-roll and a few interviews I shot and added metadata in Resolve, renaming the clips using Resolve’s smart renaming using the metadata I inputted. Feels good to finally use that organizational method!

Over the next six days, I’ll be traveling to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to interview some missionaries that the church supports. I thought I’d keep a small travel log here for the heck of it. I don’t know if I’ll keep up with it but at least I’ve started.

Currently, I’m sitting in the international terminal at SFO waiting to board our flight. We have a 14 hr flight to Taipei and then a 4 hr connecting flight to Chiang Mai, Thailand. I’ve downloaded multiple movies that I’ve been wanting to watch but haven’t because they’re either too long to watch after a workday or too heavy. The films I’ve downloaded are:

• Yi Yi
• A Brighter Summer Day (The longest film on the list, clocking in at just under four hours.)
• A Touch of Zen
• Seven Samurai
• Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
• Drive My Car
• Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
• Andrei Rublev
• Stalker
• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
• Beau travail
• Cléo from 5 to 7 (The shortest film, at an hour and a half.)
• Metropolis

We’ll see how many of these I’ll actually get around to watching. I know I need to sleep but the idea of 14 uninterrupted hours of movie watching time is a delightful prospect.

I’m traveling with some borrowed gear from the church, courtesy of Jamie Rom. I have the Canon R5 shooting in 4K with CLog3 and two lenses: the Canon RF 15-35mm f/2.8 which will be my primary lens, and a 24-105mm for any time I might need a telephoto. The goal is to get tons of b-roll in addition to a solid interview. I’m shooting in 4K in the IPB Light codec flavor, mostly so as to optimize card space as I’d like to avoid formatting cards while I’m on the trip. We’ll see how that goes and if I have to pivot midway.

The pier at Seacliff is going to be demolished. I know a lot of people grew to dislike the pier. I get it. It’s old. It’s decrepit (esp. post-being-cloven-in-twain earlier this year). It literally stinks up the neighborhoods around it. The SS Palo Alto, a cement ship, intentionally grounded and taking on water since 1929, apparently was once a swanky place to eat. But no one really remembers that anymore. It’s just another disappointment of The Ugliest Pier.

But despite its shortcomings, I’m going to miss the pier. Years of beach days with the church, weaving in and out of its wooden legs. Walking barefoot on its planks and feeling each splinter tug at my skin, like a friendly pinch. Chatting with its pigeons and seagulls, and eyeing the water for a glimpse of a shark in the shallows.

At the end of the pier it felt like you could see the whole bay extend beyond you over the waters. You could hear the sounds of birthday party barbecues, and, cutting past the noise of the breaking waves, the soft sound of that one guy who plays the trumpet at Rio Del Mar.

It was a beautiful, messed up wreck. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much.

Attached are some snaps I took of the pier last year with my Canonet.

Quite fun. Story’s alright but mostly sits backseat to the gameplay. I grew up on the Jedi Knight games so it felt really good to get back to that type of Star Wars game. Nothing is quite as satisfying as force pushing a bunch of Storm Troopers off a ledge. 😌

I do think some of the criticism around level design makes sense. I thought it was mostly really great but there were a few repetitive moments in backtracking and such. I know they wanted it to feel like a cross between Dark Souls and Metroid, but I don’t know that the Metroidvania type level design lends itself as well to this kind of blockbuster storytelling. I’d rather they took an Uncharted 4 approach but 🤷‍♂️ we’ll see where the next one goes!

So perfectly captures the timing and cadence of the comic strips. I love that it doesn’t make a massive deal out of punchlines. The joke lands, Vince keeps grooving underneath and we move on to the next three-panel gag. It’s sublime.

View on Letterboxd →

Was talking with a friend about The Grand Budapest Hotel and came up with what I call the WATI (Wes Anderson Tolerance Index).

Weights your ratings of his films/shorts/ads based on runtime and averages the scores out. I have a relatively high WATI of 0.83.

Feel free to make a copy the Google Sheet and track your own WATI here.

At this point, the obsession over IP’s has been digging so deep that studios are pulling obscure IP’s out from decades ago that no one has ever heard of, which completely negates the original point of doing reboots and remakes of old IP’s in the first place. It’s just cringey and desperate feeling and I’m embarrassed on their behalf when I see it.

What’s even crazier is the amount of execs I’ve met that don’t want to do this (all of them). I’m constantly told by execs that lament about how they wish they could make original stuff and not IP’s, but that their hands are tied. None of us got into this business so that we could remake old stuff. We didn’t watch some movie as an 8-year-old and say “When I grow up, I want to make this same exact movie but for a modern, four-quadrant audience, and as the jumping off point for an extended universe of films.” No one wants to do this, but for some reason, everyone in charge feels forced to.

I mean aren’t we all starting to laugh at and get bored by “universes”? It’s alienating at this point, and a turn off, when you know that a movie or show you’re watching is just there to set up some other movie or season you’re supposed to watch later. You can really feel it in what you’re watching and it just feels gross. Let’s just make things we wanna watch now with an actual ending, then we won’t feel gross when we watch stuff and can just sit and enjoy it!

I think it’s a huge, joyless loss that an entire generation of artists are having their original, unique, and timely voices shifted almost entirely into the IP mines. A loss that I feel won’t be seen or understood fully for at least a decade, but when it happens, will feel like we’re missing an entire part of our collective souls.

Original post here.

In my video editing work, sometimes I need to make sure two videos match up perfectly, frame to frame. This could be for a variety of reasons, but today it was because I was conforming an edit that was done in Premiere Pro, to finish it with color and audio in DaVinci Resolve. “Conforming” encompasses a lot of things, but for my purposes it basically means, “Did this timeline make it ok from one program to the other? Did anything break? Are all the shots lining up?

I usually start by firing off an export from the original app as a reference video, and lay that reference video on top of my imported timeline in Resolve. Then, I change its blend mode to “Difference.” That does exactly what you’d think – it highlights the differences between the top and bottom clips in the timeline. So when I watch back the program, I should hope to see nothing but blackness, because everything matched up perfectly, right? …right?

Shoot. Here I had a clip that used Premiere’s “Modify → Interpret Footage” workflow for slow motion, something that doesn’t carry over via XML to Resolve¹. So I slowed my 30 FPS clip down to 80% and started slipping it left and right, frame by frame, until the most satisfying moment:

Ahhhh.

Conforming can be an annoying, frustrating experience at times, so I think it’s important to take a bit of joy in moments like these. Plus, sometimes clips with Difference blending that are slightly off sync can yield some cool results when in motion:

If you aren’t yet acquainted with Big Thief and by extension Adrianne Lenker, I suggest you have some acquaintin’ to do. They make delightful music that walks the line between folk & rock & electronic & country & most of the subgenres within. Their latest album has been on my rotation all year. Plus it has the dorkiest cover.

When I first heard them I was like “Yeah whatever, you’re sort of pitchy.” But now they’re one of the few bands I call myself a fan of.

A few of my favorites:

• Mary. A quiet storybook hymn. Best enjoyed with headphones in a dark room.
• Shark Smile. Contains the most wonderful “woo!”
• No Reason. Listen for the sing-along chorus. Stick around for the sick flute solo.
• Two Hands. Clappity clap clap. Great percussion.
• Time Escaping. Bonkers track.
• Terminal Paradise. Really great build.
• Red Moon. Leans hard into hoedown mode. That link is a video of them recording it live.

And a handful from Adrianne:

• from. Just haunting. Get’s the full band treatment also.
• not a lot, just forever. Really sweet love song. Makes me swoon.
• forwards beckon rebound. Showcases Adrianne’s rhythmic fingerpicking.

I was born too late to know the height of blogs in the mid-00s. However I have seen Julie & Julia and I do have delusions of grandeur. So here I am. Where once I simply tweeted my thoughts into the abyss, I shall now blog them furiously into an even abyssier abyss. I’ll probably regret it 👍

Hoping to blog about all sorts of things. Whatever’s interesting to me, I guess. I imagine it’ll mostly revolve around video editing, which I do for a living. I also enjoy taking photos for fun, but I wouldn’t say I’m a photographer. Similarly, I’ve recently been making a simple app for the Playdate called The Drawing Board, but I’m definitely not a developer. I love hearing developers talk tho, and love using beautiful apps. Currently, I’m typing this in Ulysses, which I haven’t cracked open since college. It’s refreshing. :)

See ya ✌️