my personal life is open for business

So while I do have a nice arsenal of professional clothing, I didn’t have any sport coats and honestly most of my shirts are more formal and not business. So I did what any self-respecting clothing addicted 21-year-old with expendable income would do…I got a few things.

The business wardrobe in interesting. You have to be ready for anything.

Here are some tips I found and should pretty much cover you in any situation.

1. A sport coat is essential. Everyday you wear a shirt and tie but a full suit is normally too much. If you have a meeting you need a coat to grab quickly. A suit coat shouldn’t be worn as a sport coat because it will ware differently than the pants…not good when you put the two back together.

2. Bright colors shouldn’t be a cornerstone of a wardrobe, stick to muted colors. You can do purples and blues, but light purples, light blues and french blues are centric. Pinks, red and a few other colors are fine, but don’t ware them everyday.

3. As for pants, make sure they match the sport coat. 9 times out 10 the shirt will match the pants and if you have at least two shirts, the odds should be in your favor (hunger games reference).

4. The sport coat is important to as mentioned above. In terms of color, blue or black. Gray is fine too. Pattern is the most important thing. Give people something to look at. A simple black sport coat is fine, IF you don’t have a suit that’s simply black too. A little pattern in it makes it distinct and you can always dress it up with a shirt and tie or dress it down with nice jeans. Read more

I get asked to do video projects once in awhile (imagine that…) so it came as no surprise when a classmate asked for my help on a tribute song/video he and his fraternity brothers were working on for the Mizzou basketball team. If you are not much of a sports fan, Mizzou has been doing pretty well in the college basketball circuit and with the success of videos like “This is Indiana” and Oregon’s “I Love My Ducks” (revamped version, “Return of the Quack“) white boy rap videos about sports teams have become somewhat of a semi-genre.

I have worked on other similar projects, the VolleyZOU video in 2010 with a similar “rap” group, so I was tentative to jump into such a project (the VolleyZOU video tanked). But this was a friend and they seemed pretty passionate about the project. Fast forward a month and we’re on the quad filming what will become this…

The above is my cut of the video. The final version that’s getting all the press is here. Read more

There is something to be said about the inundation we receive of romantic story lines in our current day cinema. While the argument can be made that love is a commonality almost all human beings search for and it is a story line we almost all experience, it is not an explanation for why the genre of romance has to be a cookie cutter story reworked every few months to seem current . Love, lust, romance, heartbreak, etc, we all experience it at some point in our lives, yes this is true. But rare on occasion does it go as portrayed in Hollywood films. Yes, the moments of standardized events such as cheating or meeting the family are commonly portrayed and a very real part of relationships. But there lacks a realness to these films that causes a viewer to not connect fully with.

The film “Life Crazy,” directed by Drake Doremus, offers an escape from the predictable love story.

Jacob and Anna meet at college in LA and fall in love. Anna is from the UK and in the states on a student visa. When she overstays her visa to be with Jake, it costs her and her relationship with Jake because she is not allowed to reenter America because of violating the terms of her visa. This puts a great strain on her and Jake’s relationship as they struggle to stay connected over a long distance and months without seeing each other. The trails of their relationship as they try to make this work and the troubles as they fail are the basics of this unconventional romance film. Read more

There are commercials and then there are advertisements. A few days ago an advert for British Airways came on during normal prime time television and this stunning 1:30 cinematic showcase of one of the longest running airlines is breathtaking. I honestly got chills.

Read more

So many of you who read this blog know I go to Mizzou and many of you who go to Mizzou know that Mizzou invented Homecoming in 1911. Don’t believe me? Watch this clip from NCIS. And with Homecoming starting up next week, my life is about to me consumed by it. We’re putting together a lot of videos for the Alumni Association and some of these days are going to be 12 hour days shooting.

Here is my problem and why Small HD is awesome for helping me fix it.

On my rig, I use a DP6, an amazing external monitor that gives me a clear picture of what my Canon 5D is shooting. The DP6 is made by Small HD, a company that’s got some amazing products for a indy budget. Check them out if you get a second. As mentioned above, some of these days are going to be 12 hour days and while the DP6 is great, the battery doesn’t last 12 hours. So I emailed Small and asked where I might be able to rent some and while their rental network is small and nothing in the Mizzou area, they sent me two for free!

Here is a company dedicated to the craft and not consumed by accountants and business people. It’s about video and film and making the best are possible.

So I needed to get some room back on my hard drive. I’ve been working on a lot of video projects and importing at ProRess and high bit rate formats that take up a lot of space on the terabyte drive I have on my iMac. I have an external drive but don’t edit projects off a external (I like everything to be local).

So I started investigating clean up programs for Macs and came across “Space Gremlin” in the App store. Now I was looking for two things. One was a way to visualize my drive from a birds eye view and find where all the space went; and two, allow me to see any identical files I might have on my computer. (I tend to save things in 4-5 different formats for export and then don’t delete them…)

Well, Space Gremlin really delivered on the first part. Scanning an entire terabyte of data in about 45 seconds and giving me a very clean look at my drive, allowed me to quickly see where the space was going. I found out I had entire folders of raw footage from year old projects deep nestled in folders I thought were labeled for other project files. Working with the program allowed me to see the drive as a whole, but also folders and the space individual files were taking up in each folder. I quickly cleaned out just a few outdated project folders and had almost 200 gigs of free space! Read more