Camerado Movie and Media Production

Anyway, just thought I'd post these, a couple interesting observations about the metallic object I found in the jungle near Kebal Strung: 1) the compass on my Swiss Army knife spins wildly whenever I get within 4 or 5 feet of it 2) This morning when I woke up, I found a great deal of condensation on the surface, and a pool of water had formed around the base. It was cool to the touch--whereas everything else was room temperature (that is, warm to hot) Planning on taking it to the Royal University of P P next week, to have it looked at, determine at least the source of the inscriptions, its composition, etc.

Was back up North in the jungle near the Sesan river doing some reshoots fro the NGo video, and one of our assistants came across what looked to be some wreckage of a downed American plane from Kissinger's Cambodian bombing days in the jungle... ...the perplexing thing is, the material looked very new, was very lightweight and--I know this sounds cliche--was covered in strange markings. It was neither Khmer nor English, nor Russian. No one had any idea what it came from, but none of the guides would touch it. Anyway, we took it to the local border station, but I brought a piece back here with me and I hope to post a picture of it online tomorrow.

As I ride the humble Daelim motorcycle through the streets of Phnom Penh at night, perhaps on my way to Zeppelin Rock and Roll cafe, I catch glimpses of some shuddering moments I left behind: travelling all the way from New Mexico to New York for two job interviews, one with my Alma Mater (NYU--a mediochre use of bucks and time)the other asa potential DGA Trainee. The first, I went and interviewed buyt never even heard back from them, never even received a "thanks for coming", this again from my own Alma Mater... The other, well I made it to the next round of the very selective process, bu tthey kept asking me, based on my resume: "You like to make films, do you think you'd be happy in this program where you'd just be supporting a production?" YES--I thought and said, dying for a break, a gig in my field after starving for so long out West trying to push the picture forward. I remember the anonymous, mean highways of America...one time, Rich and aI slid off...

Yea, verily I chip away at the indigenous doc whilst I continue cutting Susan Hero; as for the latter, now figuring out how and when to load the second half of the material (15 more hours) which will be the final batch of material needed to make the picture ocme together. Will I make the Sundance submisison deadline in October? Hope so, but if not, then f*ck it, the movie's ready when it's ready. Some limitations are: very few NTSC decks to be had here, and I need one to load this NTSC footage. The Windows machine functions well, though Quicktime is a more robust format I think than .avi. Besides this: no more teaching, that gig ended as mentioned ( I think), some late night sessions at Martini's restaurant / girl-garden, installing software, troubleshooting systems...am back to the Internet cafe since we're changing our service provider, over here in Kampuchea you have to pay by the Megabyte for web traffic and this can lead to the usual corruption and overcharging ...

Rode merrily to Monirith's place to rent his deck only to discover that Allan' canon camera tapes wouldn't play on the Sony deck to to an incompatibility issue: thus, when my true nature required me to swing vine to vine, I was stuck as a computer geek AGAIN trying to figure out the problem. Finally Monrith and his younger bother showed up with a camera to use as a deck, but battery issues kept usdown. He then calleda friend who brought a new camera--but itwas a Sony, and it suffered the same fate as the deck! Finally, Monrith's friend bring s another battery and charger for the first camera, thus I can load the crucial footage-- But then the digitzer from Premiere Pro flunked out-- So then I fired up Sony Vegas andused it's digitizer, with the hope oflater importing those clips into Premiere-- But then I discovered the original clips wouldplay after all (sorry, iBook nowusedforBlog as windows machineis digitzingas Iwrite,and the iBookhas a bad space key) Went...

After much research and scraping, bought a new windows workstation which I'll use to cut the NGO gig; nice machine, fast Asus motherboard, nice graphic card, etc...problem is I'm a Mac guy and never owned a Windos machine, thus many quirks and annoyances...two hours spent trying to network them together til my eyes got sore from the screen, felt like throwing both into the bamboo pool... Lots of stuff happening though, new gigs appearing based on the first one, which represents lots of cas$h if I get them. Paradoxically, I'm once agaiun down to my last few dollars after getting the machine setup, after getting my visa extended (another six months, in case I head up NOrth again to do something remote, want to have it already)...also offered a gig (tentatively) as a game producer for a reality TV show which will be shooting in Vitenam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. The job of the game producer is to skip ahead of the rest of the crew with a technical sidekick and translator ...