Camerado Movie and Media Production

(From a package of DORCO brand razors I bought the other day) The features of Dorco "DORCO" By adopting micro grinding method which is far different from the existing grinding methods, Dorco "DORCO" could have the edge of curve and tooth shape that assures comfortable feeling while shaving and long durability. The lubricant oozing out from the lubricating strip attached to the top cap of Dorco "DORCO" reduces friction between the razor and skin and prevents skin damage while shaving. [Diagram] Two blades are positioned in such a way that the first blade stretches your whisker out as it shaves the whisker and then the second blade shaves the remaining portion of the whisker for a perfect shave.

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 ...

Rick Sherman, pal from NYC and BookWars days, taught me once in his scattered apartment on Houston Street, how to do Powerthought. It's a kind of magic, and I don'tbelieve in magic, but I started doing it again and it has its place. Closest I can call it is a kind of creative visualation...now that I strated doing it again, things are going OK [Cause or Effect?]

Just coming back from looking at computers,need to get a Windows machine to edit the new NGO job. With my savings from teaching,and the rest of the advancemoney, I'll have just enough to squeak by with a decent machine. Still moving forward onSusan Hero, which I'll continue to edit on my old Mac laptop (keyboard dying too). Thus,I'll have two dedicatedmachines for each project. Am pitching a couple more projects, incl oneabout UXO (unexploded ordinance) and the devastating effects on the local populace -- who often seek and harvest these deadly items for 500 Riel a kilo just for the metal! Sometimes they use the explosivesinside for fishing, actually. Below, see pix from one ofmy local playmates, Ritsa!

Quickly, before I forget; here is a link to the production stills from our recent shoot up NOrth in Ratanakiri province: http://www.camerado.com/docs/ratanakiri_alienation/index.html Now, I want to let you all know I have just made a momentous decision while eating a prawnburger for lunch; I have decided to quit my remaining teaching job and focus 100% on this NGO doc and Susan Hero. ** That is, I'm taking the Kierkegaardian leap of faith back into ONLY making movies again ** I can't help it: my inner voice told me very strongly to do it, and by the time I finished the prawnburger, I knew what I had to do... Three cheers for Kierkegaard!

Back after a week in the forest of Northern Cambodia, working on the doc about indigenous land issues. Listening to Black Sabbath here in my modest lair/office and regrouping: although Phnom Penh is a small, laid back town compared to New York --which is to my liking -- it's a whirring metropolis compared to Ban Lung, the provincial capital up North and biggest town in reach of the indigenous villages we'd been exploring. Thus, I go from a Tampuan village with pigs,. gourds, and old ladies with sagging tits, to the comfort of my Phnom Penh lair where I now peck, deal with SPAM and some important emails, and assess cash flow for finishing this project. Also, now once again cutting Susan Hero, which I'm chipping away at as best I can given the continually changing circumstances of life here. [will post pix from the Ratankiri shoot soon; needto update my system software first ] Before leaving though, had a striking dream about my (long deceased) father which I must relate bef...

Check out some frame grabs from one of the tougher scenes cut so far, and it's still only rough since I haven't added the material of Dr. Morell on the road [EXT Car shots] Seen below are grabs of 1) Dr. Morell (played by Dr. alan Rice) shaving just after arriving in New Mexico 2) shots of Javier Appollinaire (jaime Estrada) and Susan Hendricks (Drea Pressley) at work in the Meadowlark Movie House. Also pictured is Sanghpop Elpee, Susan's boss (played by Carlos Cabarcas) In this scene, Susan decidesto call Dr. Morell for the first time. Although his ad indicates he works with livestock for ranchers and horsebreeders, he is also now offering his cloning services to bereaved pet owners...which is why Susan, diatraught after the recent loss of her daughter, decides to call him. Javier can only listen in as Elpee, her overbearning boss, homes in and disconnects the call: "We can't make calls on company time..." Susan flips out and soon thereafter she does somet...

Not much more I can say. And I am not being melodramatic. Nor am I a rich guy from Connecticut with a hidden trust fund. I'm a guy who was reduced to a bowl of PHO a day as I slowly, trickingly, watched my money run out, after a year of unspeakable trials and tribulations trying to get my second feature off the ground. [read the physical, unrated diary, HURRICANE, to get a better idea] The grave economy in New Mexico led me to take the last desperate gamble: already reduced to Food Stamps, with my money almost gone, and screwed over by Rainbow Media and Kelly Devine to the tune of $2500, I decided to take a chance and come to Asia mainly to get some teaching experience, so that my skill set (already too narrow: film and TV? C'mon) might become more marketable. This followed months of looking for work in New mexico where the employers all agreed that "we can't hire anyone with the war goin' on and all" Nearly simultaneously do I get greenllit for the NGO doc ...

Rainy season has begun; yesterday on my way back from PTC computers with some new memory for my laptop and a power brick (backup power), some of the streets were flooded to the tailpipe of my motodriver's machine...certain streets we had to turn back, or take wheezing, wayward sloshing loops through streets on higher ground. Am now burnt out and flu-ish. Taught a lot these past few days, been meaning to quit one or more of the gigs but had to wait to make sure they all panned out an became "solid" with the new terms. Anyway, I have one particulalry huge class (over 50 students) , at the end of the day, and by the time I was teaching that class yesterday I was feeling detached, dizzy...once when I turned too quickly to point to the board, I saw a quick star flash across my vision. At one point I had to lean on the desk to remain standing without wobbling, and I did this as casually as possible. In the end, I played the tape a lot and let them do primarily listening exerc...

Came across a lost page of the Bible today, it fluttered down form the Tamarind tree... Felt like the ultimate loser yesterday, very doubtful about everything. What am I doing here? Then again, I have a place to live and a working space, whereas I was at one point reduced to living on foodstamps in New Mexico (read about it in HURRICANE) Here, I have steady work ---too much work, albeit it teaching--here in Cambodia, and I was just barely scraping by in New Mexico...also in New York. Go figure. Just some passing doubts, but as the Bard says, doubts can be our traitors in the end. More editing, I throw hours at the movie as best I can. Susan Hero is finally cooking. Nice sequences, also figured out a workaround re: the 32K ->48K audio problem. I know who I am and what I'm doing, but I don't know if I can explain it. To everyone else, the moves don't quite make sense. When the picture's done though, looking back, everyone will slap me on the back and comment on h...

And it's time to head over to NGO forum to do the paperwork for the upcoming video in Ratanakiri, finally. Now here's the rub: I've got too much work now, I think. I teach at two English schools, I'm editing Susan Hero (of course) and now I want to make this video for hire, a very important and timely doc about land alienation in the Northern Province of Ratanakiri. What to do? Take a leap and quit the English teaching? Or try to juggle everything? Also bidding for another video about a violent landgrabbing episode up in Poipet near the Thai border. If/when the money comes through, it'll be like rain in the desert, I've been so starved for cash. Amazingly, just framed my NYU diploma yesterday, first time in 13 years when I graduated. even though I think the NYU Film School degree was a waste of money (in light of its costs), I have it now and I might as well try to look impressive. So there it is: in a cheesy Cambodian gold frame perched on top of a wicke...

Continued editing the scene with Morell and Javier in Morel;l's lair. Some lighting issues, nothing severe; aciting by both is fabulous, Morell is very very real and very convincing. (Morell is played by Dr. Alan Rice, actor and scientist, who took a break from working with New York's Museum of Natural History to play the part) Javier is also very convincing, played by Jaime Estrada; I remember almost not being able to call Jaime after he auditioned because he didn't have his number on his photo! Anyway, it's the slow long marathon now in earnest, and as long as I can throw three or four or more hours aday at the picture, it'll right itself. Now attempting to download the 10.2.8 combo updater from Apple, but can only do this at the INternet cafe and I need an hour and a half here to do it. [97 Megs] More later...

Finally solved the OS X problem, which had led me into single-user, UNIX command line only territory, by re-installing a system from scratch (though I was running 10.2.8 and the only replacement I could find here in Phnom Penh was 10.2) In short, I was getting what's known as a recurring "kernel panic", the rough Mac equivalent of the "Blue screen of death" known so well in the world of Windows. Spent many a red-eyed hour on this frigging problem, days and hours when I could'a been outside frolicing, but I had to stay inside and be a tech-geek. And of course it's in moments like these that you really have to hold onto your hat, because there's and incredible urge to take the whole f*cking rig and throw it in the damn bamboo swimming pool and call it off. Forgot to mention as well that, in the process of reinstalling the system software, accidentally deleted a partition which had a lot of non-critical material on it: photos, some software. **Thanks ab...

Had a couple vivid dreams last night: I the first, I was in some kind of tomb or temple, and ancient place with various relics still lying around, although the place had clearly been looted. I believe I was there with some kind of team or group: nearby, occasionaly coins littered the floor. At one point, it became apparent that we had to prepare for some kind of promotion, the launch of a new liquor which cam e in very small bottles. So we began to package each relic with a small bottle of liquor, the bottles bore a fancy French script, though I don't recall what they said. Suddenly, one of my colleagues swung open a huge panel on a sort of entertainment center, revealing a well stocked liquor cabinet behind it. "See", he said, as if to show that there were more... II I was faced with the prospect of heading home to the US; I fell into a panic, realizing that everything I'd worked for in my new world would come to an end. "Don't you see, I like this place l...

Spending heaps of time burning a bootable OSX Cd so I can repair permissions on my boot volume, "New Brain", which will allow me to continue editing Susan Hero in trouble free fashion. Next scene to cut: Morell in his lair. For all the advances the UNIX kernel offers on the platform, it's still a pain in the ass to debug and tweak things, especially here where 1) the humidity is higher and can degrade equipment including HARD DRIVES and 2) we pay for the Internet here by the Megabyte. Thus, I surf the web with images turned OFF, and I create lists of things to down load, ala apps and utilities, which I'll download at an Internet cafe. Anyway, want to continue the tale where I left off, where were we, ah yes, on our way to the hospital. So we whipped aroung the traffic circle by the grotesque Lions -- due to the French influence here in INDOCHINA, there are traffic circles everywhere, even in Rattanakiri dirt roads which lead to remote hilltribe villages you might fi...