Andrew Smith

Wow. It's hard to believe it's the end of January already. I started off the year working with an editor friend, Chris Cole on a motion graphics project at his house for about 4 days. We did some really neat sci-fi screen animations and sliding glass doors and stuff that was a lot of greenscreen compositing work. I ended by showing him the video I filmed for SOZO, with Jamie and Matt Moore. He said it would have been good for a sociology video if it weren't for the religious content at the end. Eh. But he called today and has another job for me.

I recently downloaded a couple dozen ebooks and have been glancing through them. Two of my favorites so far are How To Be A Rockstar Freelancer, and How to Persuade People Who Don't Want to be Persuaded. The first is obviously about being in your own service business, and the second is a story of a master entertainer/storyteller/magician that is sharing his crowd-winning secrets with the world.

Also, I recently finished my demo reel. I've been meaning to get that done since late december. Other things on the agenda are starting a podcast, and having our logo printed on some t-shirts. The latter might be a closer option than I previously thought, as Tree and Leaf Clothing recently contacted me about doing some videos for them.

The Trail Dance film festival was a huge success. Anthony contacted me about doing some motion graphics intros about 2 weeks before the event. It took me about 3 days to make a 15 second intro from a template. At the event I got to see a lot of film that Adam and I were severely underwhelmed by. Our aesthetic is better than 90% of the films that showed, and it was very encouraging, but a little depressing that we didn't end up entering anything. Anyway, we ended up meeting a lot of other filmmakers and gave them cards and showed them our demo reels. It was quite impressive how well people responded to our work, one guy even sent us his idea for a pilot tv episode that was a comedy about alien fashion. We also got a couple requests to do music videos within a week of posting. My friend Ryan Dunlap ended up winning an award for his short film Leave Me, which I accepted on his behalf.

A couple nights ago I found out Caleb Vetter is going to be shooting his second feature on the RED this summer, it seems a feature he worked on last summer got him in good terms with a few of the right people. It's hard to believe it's been two years since his first feature, and my *amazing* motion graphics I did for the titles. Heh.
Paul Rogers invited me to come up to edit on his documentary for Not For Sale. We'll see. It'll be a couple weeks worth of work, but we haven't got to hang out since his wedding last August.

In other, more pressing news, our family is stuck inside during this bad icestorm. No electricity to speak of but Amos and most of the rest of the family is watching a Chuck Norris movie. While Adam and I are both working on our laptops until our batteries run dry...

Good night, and good luck.
-Andrew