Editing, editing, and more editing...

Oyyyy....

This is my life right now.  The picture tells the story.

That's the truth behind all the fancy movies and TV shows you love to watch.  A couple guys (sometimes more, almost never less) locked in a basement or a bedroom with a 'Final Cut' system arduously, painstakingly, never-endingly working their way through crafting an episode or a film--making something from next to nothing.

As I pulled up to my editor's place yesterday (or was it the day before?) I had this moment where I realized that if I am to be successful in this new phase of my life (the producer/director phase) I had better get used to spending endless hours in edit suites.

(seriously, I'm fantasizing about what kind of leather couch I'm gonna' put in my suite once I 'make it'...)

And it's not like I haven't put in my time already.  Dude, I was supervising edits back when all we had was online reel to reel...

Yes, I was your friendly neighborhood tyrannical teenaged producer.

But seriously, this is where we live.  Sweating it out, hour by hour, working working working to try and find the best way to say a thing or show a thing.  Fixing things that don't work, making things up when there's no way to fix it, endlessly trying to keep ourselves entertained and fed long enough so that we'll be able to finish the race.

Sounds an awful lot like the dozens of hours your average preacher spends each week, alone in his office sweating blood to try and come up with a sermon that's worth the salt.

I often wonder what it is that drives people like that to do what they do.  I mean, you've got to be pretty possessed and absorbed to fritter away endless hours of your life in a dark room while the rest of the world chills at the beach.

And I guess, when it all comes down to it, I already answered my question...

They're possessed.

Of a passion, a drive, an ambition, a need to tell a story or tell THE story and tell it right.  Tell it in such a way that it connects, makes a difference, impacts the audience, turns darkness to light.

That's why we put up with day upon day of pizza and coke (with a little bourbon thrown in from time to time just to keep it 'live'...) and night upon night of late to bed and morning after morning of early to rise--because we love to tell the story.

No amount of money or fame or respect or praise would be enough to compensate you for the pure drudgery of doing this part of the job.

You've got to do it because you must.

No other reason will do.

'Cause it's just the editor and the pizza and you.

T

The view...

From up here, is pretty nice.

Wouldn't you say?

That's what you see looking out of my hotel room in Vancouver.

At least when it's not raining.

Back home now after 'the week of doom' last week basically working around the clock to get the first 25 episodes of THE DAILY: with mark & laura lynn shot and rough edited.

I feel like I'm still recovering.

I didn't really talk about how the shoot went, so here goes...

Monday to Thursday was non-stop editing, locked in a basement with my homee Russell Greene laboriously, and I do mean LABORIOUSLY going through every interview segment our on-location team had shot.  We had to decide what portions of each segment were useable (some more or less than others) then lock the time, decide on the theme, figure out how I was going to transition to and from said specifically-themed clip, makes sure all the clips fit the required time, the write all the intervening content to transition to and from the clips and create ancillary content to fill in the gaps where the interviews were too short.

Boring you yet?

Yes, that's how talk TV is made--slowly, painstakingly, laboriously.

Russell and I ate good pizza, lots of brownies, drank bottles and bottles of coke and occasionally spiked said coke with some whiskey he'd just gotten from his cousin.  Once the whiskey hit the system we cranked the 'snoop' to really get the mood into a more positive mode.

All to help us edit.

Then Friday hit--first shoot day.

I slept o.k the night before.  As I said many times to my wife on the phone in the days leading up, "I don't think (after directing my first feature-film) that anything will every really stress me out ever again..."  Didn't sleep GREAT though, just good enough to not be dead the next day.  I think I finished writing around 3am then slept 'till seven or seven thirty then hit the studio.

We only had a half day that first day and I had conservatively hoped we'd get five shows done allowing us to only (ONLY?) need to shoot twenty the next day.

We got one show.

ONE.

So, at the end of that day, before heading back to the edit suite then home to write again 'till 3 or 4am I called Niki to tell her I'd be staying longer.

Meaning she'd be home alone with four kids for an extra three days...  

The crew and cast and production team out there were kind enough to agree to come in on Sunday so that I wouldn't be stabbed by the Network bosses for screwing their new series before it had even begun.

Day two was light years better.  We got eight show done (I'd been hoping for nine) which left us only sixteen (16?) to do on Sunday.

I had been planning to keep things pretty 'loose' for the talent, preferring not to put them on teleprompter (a glass screen that goes in front of the camera lens off-which most TV people read things someone else has written for them so that they'll look smart/witty/funny/heartfelt/insightful, etc...) and allowing them to freestyle their lines for the most part with minimal direction from me.

My whole early career as a TV host, that's how I did it.  Freestyle.

Well, it didn't work.  At all.

So, Friday night I burned the mid-night oil and wrote all the segments for my hosts for Saturday and totally changed my 'freestyle' ideas to allow them some time to 'riff' (chat back and forth) with each other, based on their areas of interest/history/talent etc.

It was like night and day.

They were loose, able to focus on performance, not stressed.  Just 'on'.

So, I continued doing that, writing for them, bantering with them so that they'd have things to riff on, and generally working to their strengths instead of asking them to rise to mine.

Duh...

(I can be really stupid sometimes...)

Our staff (Shout out to Canadace, the Shaw team, Russell, Greg, Lynn, Lawrence, Geoff, Lindsday) just ripped it up, working their tails off to do their jobs to beyond the fullest extent to help make the whole thing happen.

And it did.

And it looked great.

And had substance and spirit to it.

The kind of 'mass media' my business partner and I are in the business of making.

I start editing tomorrow, and am very excited to deliver the first five episodes to the network on Monday.  I think they're going to lose their minds.

I'll make a point to pop some of our work up on youtube and post a link here in the coming days so you can see the stuff we're doing.

Peace,

T

Oh man, oh man...

It's 1:30am Vancouver time which is (gasp) 4:30am my time though, I must admit, I'm currently perched somewhere between the two time zones.

I just wanted to note that show business is sometimes fun and sometimes glamorous but then again show business if often just plain difficult and not for the weak in body or mind.

I've just finished working for today, not 'cause the work's done--I could easily go another three hours in order to be 100% ready for tomorrow--but because I'm done.

Can't go no mo'.

I started working at 7:00am--eighteen and a half hours ago.

How you like them apples?

That's day four of a seven day stretch.

Ooyyyy...

T

ps: set looks cool though, don't it?  And that's the actual set, not the digital rendering...

Gavin DeGraw...

This is a shameless 'pop-culturally tuned' endorsement.

Gavin DeGraw's new album 'In love with a girl' is fantastic.  Bought it yesterday and it's really great.  Well written, very cool sonically, hook-ey, everything you'd want in a rock/pop album.

I'd seriously suggest you go and check it out.

I know, I know.

I'm a fanboy.

T

The 'purpose driven' run...

Yeah, I know, the title's cheesy.

But it sells.

Anyway...

So here's the thing.  People were laughing at me but I must beg leave to ask who, dear reader, gets the last laugh?

Niki and I needed wine.  It was 'American Idol' tuesday and I'd just gotten back from another (short this time) biz-trip so we were going to do our usual thing; put the kids to sleep, hit the couch, watch our show, drink some wine and see if one thing might lead to another...

But we had no wine.

Understandably so, 'cause really, with managing the four kids by herself while Daddy's away, what moment of which day do we actually think Nik's going to dedicate to hitting the liquor store?

Not gonna' happen.

So I was going to go.

And we decided I should run.

So I did.

Jogged there, bought the wine, then jogged back.  3.5 km, non-stop, a bottle of 'Silverleaf Shiraz' switching between my left hand and my right for the second half of the run.

And people were laughing at me.

Enshrined in their gas-guzzlers (it did, in fact, seem like it was the SUV drivers who were laughing loudest and longest...) they saw me running home with my bottle o' goodness and they laughed at me.

Can you believe it?

I mean, it's not that weird is it?  You need wine AND you need to be in shape so why don't you combine the two?  

(Your wife's already sexy and the wine's gonna' go great with that and if you run you're gonna' be sexier [though never quite up to her level] than that fat fu***r in his Escalade, so that's a good thing right?)

And that made me realize that I need to apply that same principle to other areas of my life. There are things you want to do and things you must do and things you don't want to do.  So take the things you like and leverage them so that they'll only happen in connection to the things you don't like to do and the things you must do.

Right?

I like having sex with my wife.  I like red wine.  I don't like running.  I must run.

So I run to buy the wine then I'm away from home (where my wife happens to be) so I have to run home (and, you got it, I took only enough cash to buy the wine and not enough to book a taxi to get me home...) so I have no choice but to run home and then the chicks in the minivans start staring at me and that inspires me to run faster 'cause I don't want to look like some shlub who just hopped out of an Escalade you know?

Plus, the sooner I get home, the sooner one thing might lead to another.

So out you go friends.  Lace 'em up and hit the pavement and go an buy yourself a bottle of Silverleaf Shiraz, the best Australian Shiraz under $20 there is.

And it's 'eco friendly'.

See?

Everybody wins.

Keep tricking yourself into doing what needs doing and you and me both can have that last laugh.

T

1st day...

So these shots are from the first official day of shooting on one of our new TV series.

'THE DAILY: with mark & laura-lynn' is a daily show I'm showrunning in Vancouver--kind of a 'breakfast television' (if you're Canadian) or a Regis & Kelly with a nighttime and a spiritual twist.

TD will run five days a week, primetime, for a half-hour.  We've got a 260 episode (1 full year) pickup right out of the gate which is pretty cool.  The site (www.thedailytv.ca) will be up in a week or so and you'll be able to see what we're up to through that point of access.

We shot six interviews this past Monday, I flew in Sunday then out monday afternoon.  Laura-lynn Tyler Thompson (one of the co-hosts on the series) did a real good job and I'm beginning to get a sense of her 'bent' as an interviewer and the ways in which I'm going to be able to help her really shine.  We had great guests, booked by our production team out there and everyone seemed quite jazzed.  

The set up was fairly typically stressed for a 'first day' but nowhere near as crazy as some of the days I've endured in the past.  I'm feeling confident we'll be able to craft a strong show with this one.  I head back this coming monday for five straight days of our first studio shoot.  I'm working on getting a new DSLR for this trip so I can shoot some 'actually nice' shots to replace the grainy 'video camera still' and 'photo booth' images I'm rockin' here.  Said new images will also feature on the new site.

Plus I just (need) a DSLR.

What I find continually interesting about this whole process is that you just get started, build momentum until the boulder's rolling, then you just hang on and hope for the best.  Once it's going there's not stopping it--it'll just happen because it HAS to.  Yes, the work of actually producing something is hard but, it seems to me, that it's nowhere near as hard as the work of getting to the point where you actually get to produce something.

So, if you're not 'there' yet, may I just offer you the slightest bit of encouragement that you 'can' and that once you do 'arrive' you'll find that all the suffering and perseverance you've accumulated along the way will have equipped you to do the things that need doing to keep you from getting killed by the boulder you've (!) created.

So keep at it kiddoes.

T

Innovation...

So I realize I'm such a nerd.

I was getting into the shower this morning at 4:00am in preparation for flying to Vancouver today and the soap container 'spoke to me' so I tossed it in my carry-on so that I'd have it here tonight to include it in this post for you.

Irish Spring ladies and gentlemen.

But not just Irish Spring, NEW 'MicroClean' Irish Spring!

Yes, I'm a marketer's dream.

'Cause a part of me's a marketer.

(Of dreams and images and story and sound)

Anyway, they got me hook line and sinker.

See, it's like this.  "All New Irish Spring MicroClean with micro beads..." is your surefire ticket to "...a complete clean feeling!"

Such melodrama.

But y'know what got me?  It's at least kinda' true and that's something we producers and preachers need to keep in mind.

Companies that output product live or die by creating a constant stream of new and exciting versions of the same old thing.  My 'Gillette Sensor Excel' is another case in point.  The BEST razor ever, so good that they can't find a way to top it.  They tried the 'Mach 3'; nope we all stuck with our Excel's.  They've moved on to this new four-bladed one with a edge trimmer etc. 

Blah, blah, blah...

The Sensor Excel is the best razor ever invented, they'll never top it.

Which I'm sure it the matter of much discussion around Gillette boardroom tables 'cause they've made something so good they can't possibly top it and they're in the business of constantly outdoing themselves so that their customers/consumers will have reason to keep coming back for more.

And that's the lesson we need to learn from Irish Spring.

Irish Spring is great, but there's always room to change it up, throw in some 'micro beads' put a splashy new cover on it and market is as 'all new'.  It's still soap.  Great soap.  But just soap after all.

Your sermon this week is just a sermon, based on the Bible, inspired by the Spirit, filtered through your life.  Good raw materials to be sure, but just a sermon.  Until you get your hands on it of course--making it into someting so special that your audience can't wait to hurry back next week for more.

Your movie is just a movie.  It has the conventions--the appendages--of a movie.  It's a story told in picture and dialogue and sound and music.  Just a movie.  Until you get your hands on it of course--making it into something so special that your audience can't wait to hurry out of the theater and tell all their friends how you changed it up, how you added some 'micro beads' to it and made it this whole other thing...

Like Irish Spring.

So I'm just sayin', put some "Irish" in your sermons this week boys.  Put some "Irish" in the stories you're developing people 'cause we the people are suckers for that stuff.

And maybe, just maybe (if'n you do your job) we all end up smellin' a little nicer than when we started.

T