Years Best

Every year all of us recieve christmas/new years/holiday/whatever cards. It happens this time of year because that's what the people like to do. It seems to me that I've been getting more and more as I get older. Maybe it's that I know more people than I used to or that friends have more money to spend on things like this or maybe we're all just getting to be those kind of people.

Regardles of why they come, I'm glad they do. I can remember getting the'christmas letter' from a family called the Riddells. They were mormons and lived down the street from me from age 4 to about 7. I can barely remember them living there. But I looked forward to getting the Riddell letter every year like I did the Sears wishbook (maybe not as much , but I did). The letter always came with a picture of the whole Riddell family together. Even when a member of the family was on a 'mission' (mormons, remeber) they would include a pic of whoever was missing. The other day I was at my folks house and I saw the latest incarnation of their family and I am happy to say that it's true, the mormons are breeding an army.

All that aside I decided to share with you my favorite holiday card that was recieved here at Worker Bee INC. Thanks you to James and Josie for the laugh.

The ISP Gang

This is the ISP collective.
ISP is a group of like minded artists who've decided to stop waiting for a scene to happen and make one happen. There's a small space in East Atlanta that we all get together at to put up shows supporting locals and touring acts. It's cool.
We (all the bands involved) got together the other week to take a picture. It reminded me of this picture...
This is a famous picture of 50 or so of the greatest jazz musicians alive at the time. It was taken in Harlem. Oh to have someone in 50 years look at our photo...dreams.

Working in a coal mine....

Been busy here at the shop lately. Had two 'big' shoots.
The first was with Delta Plumbing. We're doing an animated truck as their spokes...thing. Here is a pic from the shoot.

That's Mike M holding the boom , he's also doing the animations for us, and Evan Mc running the camera. Leisa Davis plays the woman washing dishes. It was quite a stretch for her. I'll post the finished spot here...'cuase it's going to be awesome!!

Two days later I did a shoot for Butler Brothers MX Team. They are an up and coming team in the motorcycle racing world. They race on dirt...as you can tell.

Evan was DP on this shoot as well...the difference... it was an HD shoot. There's really not much different in the way you go about things when shooting in HD, it just costs more. That's Stosh holding the reflector on the side and if you look closely you can see that the names on the jerseys they are wearing all say Butler...hence the name.
This will be the first national spot that Studio 5 has ever done completly on it's own. We are very happy about this.

Another thing we're (or should I say I) am very happy about...

...I've finally paid off the business loan that I took out to buy Studio 5. Three years of about 22% of my monthly spending is over. I sent this picture in with the final payment. Yea for me!

Anatomy #2

Here follows the tale of how to make you very own super cool CD for your band.

First get some spray paint and a stencil. Stencils are easy to make, here is a great site
on the how to part of stencil making.
Our materials.---------------------------->


Buy yourself some plain 'ole cardboard CD sleeves. Slap your stencil on it and get to spraying. The stamp was made by Southern Stamp and Stencil company..Fairly cheap too.
Make sure you get some spray on the other sleeves that are waiting to be painted and presto.


Our Finished Product.------------------------->

Thanks to Brian Slusher of WeatherProof Records for recording and mixing the songs that you will be able to hear on this. Also thanks to ISP for having us that night. This disc will be available at shows only for a few months.

Growing Pains

I have a problem working in groups. Not that I hate other people's ideas, it's just that they never seem to just say what they mean. I'm not sure if it's a product of a generation growing up being told not to hurt other people feelings or that a majority of humans don't like to make a cut and dry decisions.
That being said I know that I'm a bit of a control freak. This stems, not from my wanting to be in charge and tell everyone else what to do, but more from the fact that I HAVE to know what's going on in any given situation. What better way to know what's happening than to seize control and strangle the life out of it.
This dislike/distrust of 'committee' work can be illustrated in my day to day life. What I do for a living...I create TV spots that for the most part I complete on my own (and in cases where I do have to work with other people, it stresses me out and I am very demanding of them). I enjoy reading more than any other hobby I have...Alone, me and the story, that I read, at MY pace.
All this is just prologue though.
The real crux of this commentary is that I have, unknowing to me at the time, gotten 4 extra girlfriends. Mind you, I have a very nice relationship with a woman that I love and I am working very hard not to be too demanding of or confrontational with. She is smarter than me so she can handle my faults... And she lets me hold the remote control. It is a normal relationship one that fits into a definable category. I digress.
It started innocently enough, I just wanted to play some music. BOOM, next thing I know I have a date nights and there are talks about 'where we're going with this thing' or 'let's talk about the future'. We fight like wounded bitches if our faults are criticized and are as protective of our ideas as any mother bear is of her young. This is not like any relationship that most have ever had. Normally you fight with just one person and at he end of the day that is the only person to deal with. Not this fucked up poly/monogamous relationship. You get shot down and you think it's passed into the night only to realize that 3 of your 'girlfriends' have been talking about for 5 days afterwards. It is a dynamic that is utterly new to me.
I am not entirely ignorant of work place dynamics, I know that they exist, but I am no good at working inside of them. I was fired from my last 'real' job, because in the final analysis, I was unaware that people were talking about my work/me behind closed doors and therefore I did nothing to defend myself.
What does this all amount to? A head clearing rant...Yes. A cry for help...I don't think so?
I mean, I just finally, after more than half a lifetime of work at it, got a handle on having a relationship with a woman, and here I go getting into an even more confusing mess. A situation where there can be no control, only discussion and compromise. Strange place for a control freak to be.
I guess I'm growing.

A Christmas Show

Should be great fun...We're up for Best Album Art.

Anatomy of a release

My band is poor. Because of this we have to come up with new and inventive ways to put out our music. We're on the web...Along with everyone else. You can even download Pistolero songs from I Tunes now. This is all fine and well but in an age where you can use GarageBand to record your album at home and get a thousand discs pressed for about $1000 we were looking for something to set us apart from the rest of the heard. We wanted to have a product that people could identify with. Something that took time and effort to make and you could feel the love behind it. A little mushy I know, but we really wanted to the Y back in DIY (y=yourself).
Here follows the way we decided to do that.

We're poor, I think I said that, so we had to go with materials/skills that we that we can get for free or do ourselves. So I made up the cover from an old picture of some friends playing around.
I then sent the file down to our friend Rod. Rod works at Sign a Rama. They make things out of vinyl. He and co worker Jamie rasterized/posterized the file to make the detail...Well a little less detail-y. Then cut the picture out of long sheets of scrap vinyl. This is what that looks like.


While all this vinyl work was being done I went up to see the folks at Tape Warehouse (a god send for people that need blank media a lot). There I bought 250 of these little white cardboard sleeves and 250 white inkjet printable CD-Rs.


The band got together to do what is known as 'weeding'. You have to pull all of the little pieces of vinyl that are not going to be in the final product out. Before 'weeding' the pieces look like black pieces of vinyl with lines drawn in them. After weeding was finished, Rod got busy cutting out the sheets into individual pieces. These then have to be laid upon our little cardboard sleeves and the backing paper pulled off.


Remember while I was at Tape warehouse that I bought CD-Rs. Well, I happen to own a disc duplicator. So I threw the discs in the Bravo and proceeded to write 250 copies. Then I designed the disc label and had it printed on the disc once they were authored.


Back down to the sign shop where Rod was waiting with the finished packaging...


and Presto we have 250 new EPs to sell the kids, give to magazines and radio stations and possibly...Just maybe a label or two. All told we invested Just over $100 (and a little help from our friends) and we have and EP that is unlike any other that you'll see out today.
And the music is not bad either.


The Kissing Bandit EP will only be available at shows for the time being, so come out and support you local Pistolero. Each disc is numbered, just like ART.
I hope you enjoyed the lesson.

My Job

My work takes me all over the place and this is a big reason that I got into camera work. I get to see things that many of my friends don't even know exsist (and neither do I until I get sent to film them). This weekend I went to a race in North Texas called The Last Man Standing. The were not joking in the name of the race. Out of the 147 guys who started 2 finished. That's right TWO!
The track was 44 miles long thru creeks and up hills and over walls. The finish line was right after a 8 foot high shear wall. Meaning the rider had to get his bike up and over a flat wall that was taller than he was staning up on his bike. The guy, David Knight, who won made everything look easy, breezing up walls and over rocks. He finished over and hour and a half ahead of the 2nd place guy. Here is some video I shot to let yo see what it was like.