At last, I have obtained the tracking numbers to our 1st RED ONE and tomorrow I will be waiting patiently to take delivery TOMORROW! I went ahead and activated my insurance a few weeks back in case the FedEx truck gets held up on a bridge and taken over by terrorist…must protect the precious cargo.

48 hour film competition is right around the corner so we might as well double it as a our RED camera test. I just hope the workflow does not slow us down considering we only have 48 hours to complete the short film. I have been experimenting with Final Cut Studio’s log and transfer tool which encodes the R3D (raw RED file format) into a 2k ProRes format which I feel is more then enough to deliver in. The results are stunning and this was all done on my laptop.

If you live in the NYC area and are interesting in participating in a 48 hour film festival then drop us a line with you name and contact and include “48 hour crew” in your subject line.

The anticipation is starting to kill me and after waiting over a year from when I 1st dropped my deposit for the RED ONE and then endured multiple production holds and delays…the time has finally come. I am fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to be working with the RED for the last several weeks as a REDTek and recently promoted to DP on my last gig so I am ready and more importantly I feel prepared. If you know anything about RED its expect the unexpected, RED owner Jim Jannard signature on RED’s official forum is

“Everything in life changes… including our camera specs and delivery dates…”

This is why my post titles ends with “maybe”, but I feel pretty confident since they released the image above showing camera numbers 1751-2000 being prepped for shipping. You can not argue Jim Jannard’s honesty, not to mention the man is a hype master with his recent thread titled “PREPARE”, which is a brief post on the new firmware build 16…an example of how RED can improve system specs overnight. RED is controversial for stirring up a fire in not only the RED community, but the film industry in general. As a RED technician, or what I call a REDTek… I have worked with film crews who I find very bitter over all this RED hype and I can imagine it gets out of hand but what can I say…so far RED lives up to all the hype. After the break you will find where the RED delivery schedule currently stands in case your interested…

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So I just got a phone call from one of my partners in Crime, Kendall Smith, who just informed me that it was official…we are registered as Team Lurkers for the 48 Hour Film Competition. Thank you Mr.Smith…I always manage to miss this deadline, not this time. Here is a blurb from the official 48 Hour Film Competition site…

The 48 Hour Film Project is a wild and sleepless weekend in which you and a team make a movie—write, shoot, edit and score it—in just 48 hours. On Friday night, you get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in your movie. 48 hours later, the movie must be complete. Then it will show at a local theater, usually in the next week.

A friend and filmmaker form my home town Richmond VA, Lucas Krost, called me down to work on one of his 48 hour films, Terminus, when he competed in the previous 48 hour show down, and all I can say is its insane film production on steroids…little time for sleep. Lucas reached out to the city for help and had an incredible response from Richmond which certainly paid off as his film was ultimately selected for the Cannes film festival and screening in about a week…Congrats to Lucas and his crew. While there was much to gain from Lucas’s approach, New York is another story….our budget is very low, competition is very high, but either way we are going try and have fun doing it.

Stuck, completely stuck and chasing my tail…asking myself where the F$!& is my STORY! In the indie world sometimes your fortunate enough to choose you’re own projects and other times the projects choose you, in my case it was a documentary, something I had the least experience in doing…that is until now.

I got a job from an established Museum out of Denver who hired me to document their experience into the depths of Black Rock city for last year’s 2007 Burning Man festival, if thats what you want to call it….either way, I was completely ecstatic to score this gig and hoped it would a good opportunity to further my career. I don’t want to stray too far off topic but for more information on Burning Man then cruise the official site HERE. This is where that old saying comes to mind, “If it can go wrong, it will go wrong”…lets just say this was the most challenging project I have ever participated in my life (mainly due to the harsh conditions of the environment), but what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, right?

6 months of post production and just now am I seeing the light at the end of the tunnel…what went wrong? When I wrapped the production, I left the festival with my head down, knowing very well that while everyone was packing up getting ready to go home having completed their mission, my job was only beginning…the world of post-production.

I run and operate a Final Cut Pro, Mac based editing suite for High-Definition content delivery and from previous experience I could make a decent living off of post (edition etc), if managed properly. However, if you don’t plot your course to take you all the way home then you are setting yourself up for disaster. Ever find yourself with all the right ingredients but cant quite bake the cake? Try and take a step back and see the big picture and avoid spreading yourself too thin as I did. Film production is a collaborative effort so dont be afraid to staff up and bring some fresh perspective to the table.

Often times Indie directors like to cut their own material and while there is nothing wrong with that, your decision making is some times clouded by your marriage to the project…saying to yourself for example, “I can’t cut this sequence out because it took an entire day to shoot this material” when a third party editor has less emotional involvement with the material and therefor has no problem tossing shots away that do not actually benefit your story.

Fortunately Burning Man is all eye candy so that is not the precise case. I would like to thank Patrick Sarni, writer producer, for stepping in on this project and helping me wrap things up with have a fresh take on an old project.

Today is the deadline to finalize my order and after flying out to Vegas to visit the RED booth and others at NAB 2008, I feel good about the choices I am making.

If you have not been following then I will bring you up to speed; the RED Bomb Squad recently announced “You order is nearly ready” in an email and gave me a week to add or subtract items before finalizing! Although finalizing the order can be a bit daunting at 1st but if you follow RED at all then you know they are consistently playing catch up to update the RED Store product descriptions and its becoming much more clear then it use to.  In case your still curious I will break down some examples from bear bones to tricked out.

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This is the subject of an email I received from RED today, and that makes me feel warm and happy inside. I am pretty speechless, everything is coming to place and this could not be more timely. Dan is my appointed Rep so I am going to head down to the RED booth today and see if I can hunt him down…watch out Dan! UPDATE: Dan was sent back to the ranch yesterday so you lucked out this time!

The RED Bomb Squad was created to manage the reservation holder’s accounts, when your number is up you should expect this email and identify who your contact is. To find out what serial number batch is currently shipping check the www.RED.com home page. I will warn you, when this email arrives you may want to keep a clean pair of underwear near by. I will not further disclose info about this sacred email as it is prohibited, but in a nutshell it means now is the time to finalize my order.

I would not normally judge a book by its cover but in the ever evolving digital domain I cant help but get a bad taste from bad web design. If you have phenomenal work but lacking web skills, budget, or a tech savvy friend to do it for you then focus on your reel 1st. I wanted to get a site up quick before NAB and I have a friend/programmer Ryan Morris who has been kind of enough to help out even though I am financially tight. My priority list goes something like this.

1. Demo Reel. Crucial and by far the most important element.

2. Contact information.

3. RED rental page. Although not your primary income, this is an option to consider

cause you don’t want a camera like the RED one collecting dust if your not using it.

haskellfilms is not live yet but at the very least you can watch the reel, something is better then nothing.

One year ago from today I decided to dive head 1st into the realm of digital cinema when I took the plunge with the RED and placed my reservation for a RED ONE™. I have been following the RED development since the very beginning but I did not personally bite until NAB 2007 when RED screened the Peter Jackson test footage which was a short film called “Crossing the line”. What’s that old saying, “Seeing is believing” …lets just say the the image results from the show were jaw-dropping and sent a ripple into the community. I do not care what the specs are, I need to see it to believe it…and RED, I am a believer!

Mr. Peter Jackson’s short film was the result of a camera test on two limited beta model RED ONEs (Borris & Netasha) with only one feature enabled, Record Run/Stop. After only watching 30 seconds of his WWII short film I was sold immediately and placed a reservation for RED ONE build #1781. You can read all about the RED, poke and prod for hours on end but nothing taste better then the proof thats in the pudding.

I am not alone, an army is brewing… so let the waiting games begin.