theMediaman.com

Well, in spite of my ranting time and again about Blu-ray, it did win the format war against HD-DVD. And in spite of my misgivings about the format I am overwhelmed that my very first mass-produced DVD was a next-generation video format.

Tonight I picked up a copy of Young People Fucking on Blu-ray. This was the first project I had a hand in authoring after starting at Juice. I didn’t do it alone. Saying I did would be slightly more egocentric than I commonly resort to. However, much of the troubleshooting and debugging (and repetitive coding) was performed on my part.

$29.95 and I have my very first Blu-ray disc on my shelf. I don’t even have a Blu-ray player yet.

It’s a strange feeling to see something I worked on out in the open. Eight years at Livewire and the most exposure my work would get was being projected on a wall behind Frank Stronach’s front page photo in The Globe And Mail. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m unhappy with the extensive work I’ve done over the years, but I find myself standing in awe as my very first month at Juice produced more exposure than any single project (or even the accumulation of all projects) that I have worked on over the last eight years of my professional life.

It’s a very strange feeling indeed.

I think it’s…

…pride?

Wow. My brain hurts.

But all that spare time spent learning about DVD capabilites, learning MPEG-2 compression technology, reading Blu-ray engineering whitepapers, and researching specs has paid off.  The crash-course I had today in preparing a DVD would NOT have been productive had I only ever experienced DVD authoring through Encore.

Tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Still, around 3 o’clock I was getting pretty sleepy. It might have been the load of information, or the lunch I had from Burrito Boys…

Oh yeah, and every Wednesday, Juice Productions buys everyone lunch and we just sit around and shoot the shit for half an hour.  Sweet.  It’s a very large group of people who like movies, but I had to hold back on displaying my full wealth of nerdy trivia knowledge in order to keep from sounding like, well, a movie trivia nerd.

Still, I was able to identify Seth Rogen as the actor they were describing, and I also gave a brief outline of a Canadian film based off the same story as “21“… I might have gone overboard with that particular innane piece of trivia.

Tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Dressed in khakis and one of my short-sleeve button-up shirts, I was woefully overdressed.  The only person as dressed up (and only just as “dressed up”) was one of the two partners. The other one - yep, shorts and a t-shirt. Tomorrow I think I’ll wear jeans.  However, I still haven’t gotten my gut down to a point where I feel comfortable in a t-shirt.

All the way to work I was feeling like it was the first day of school.  Simone had to reassure me that the other kids weren’t going to make fun of me.

I’m not kidding. Ask her.

The view is stunning, as it faces the downtown core from Adelaide and Peter with an unobstructed view.  I have to take a photo and post it.  This is definitely my new “favourite view” of Toronto following the obfuscation of my former favourite by all the new condos.

The trip home took 40 minutes. A far cry from the old time of 75-90 minutes. In fact, it takes an hour and a half just to walk the distance from work to my apartment.

Now I need sleep. My brain started slowing down today, and I need to keep my speed up. I have a little over a week before I leave for my honeymoon so I need to soak up as much valuable info as I can.

And tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Hwan’s back from his Vipassana meditation retreat. I’m not sure if he enjoyed it or has gotten anything out of the experience. It seems that he hasn’t figured that out either. It will be an interesting conversation to have once he finishes digesting his time there.

As someone who lives (and soon will work) in Toronto I find myself overwhelmed with input. Light, sound and scent pollution is a constant. I’m always hearing something, night is never dark, and even when there is no garbage or car fumes I am rarely treated with the sweet scent of nature.

I’m about to give up my status of Super-Commuter, which is a title far less enviable than it sounds. I gain a lot of my spare time back, just in time for my first year as a married man. What I lose is that “zone-out” time, where I would put on my headphones and ignore the world around me. By focusing on my thoughts and myself, I could reset my emotions following a furious day, or relax my mind following eight hours of programming. Sometimes I would arrive at home, having spent the trip crushed by someone too small for his/her seat, and/or sharing armpit space with someone who had been working outside all day. When that happens I need to sit at home and “zone-out”.

The term “zen-out” has also been used from time-to-time as it sounds less like I’m turning my brain off and more like I’m bringing it back to peace.

This is probably not a surprise for anyone who knows me, but there are a collection of films that I sometimes use to help me bring that balance back.

• 2010: The Year We Made Contact
• After Life
• Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring
• Jurassic Park - although I sometimes just watch this because it’s my favourite Spielberg flick.

In any case, I feel that I’ll need to consciously learn a new way to balance myself daily, as I’ll soon be trading in a 75-90 minute commute for one about 35 minutes long.  In fact, it only takes 90 minutes to WALK to my new workplace. I can opt to do that from time-to-time, but not every day.

I’ve never taken any courses on meditation, nor have I even read up on it. Last year I did listen to an interesting episode of CBC’s Tapestry on Christian meditation (this link is to a newer episode). That might be a direction I go with since a secondary benefit would be that I can become reacquainted with my spiritual side.

Or should that be the primary benefit?

Wow. Busy week.

Monday after work I met with some fellows at Juice Productions downtown. By Wednesday afternoon I had resigned from Livewire.

My last day will be the day after Labour Day. I will be leaving on my eighth anniversary of starting at Livewire. To put that in perspective, I spent nine years going from Kindergarten to grade 8 in public school.  I’ve almost spent as much time with Livewire as I have at Steele St. Public School.

It’s a real shift for me.  For the last four or five years I’ve been trying to push my way into more video and DVD work. For the last nine I’ve been trying to find  a job in the downtown core. Years of job searching managed to culminate in a single, whirlwind week.

I’ll probably go into more detail in a later post (and better composed), but for now I’ll say that I’m going to help the office move towards more Blu-ray production. I’ll be able to utilize my animation/programming background, and extensive experience with DVD production (al beit for corporate video productions…  zzz…)

It looks like a young and growing company, but they already have an extraordinary number of titles under their belt. It’ll feel good to be doing work that’s seen by thousands instead of hundreds or dozens.

I wonder what it will feel like the first time I see my work on the shelf at Blockbuster or Future Shop.

The location is supurb. Adelaide and Peter, between Spadina and John St.  A block east is the Fox and Fiddle, my favourite pub - best price/quality combination of any pub downtown. Just north of that is the Paramount Scotiabank Theatre, and just south is a Tim Hortons… a REAL Tim Hortons. No more four-timbit-selections for me anymore.

A five minute walk takes me all the way up Spadina’s rich Chinese district, or to the SkyDome Rogers Centre for a Jays game.  Three blocks will put me in front of Simone’s workplace.

I’m seriously waiting for the other shoe to drop. This job is exactly what I’ve been wanting and training myself for, it’s a perfect location and it is timed perfectly as I start my new life with Simone.

Even the cat’s feeling better.  Life is good.

Following a difficult search for last year’s Die Hard movie at the Blockbuster, I just dug it off the “Previously Viewed” shelf and paid the $6.99 to take it home. It wasn’t until later that I realized I was searching the shelves in the “D” section, while the full name of the movie catalogs it under “L”, “Live Free or Die Hard”.

This leads to yet another observation on movie nominclature, and how casual films that start with letters early in the alphabet probably do better than those in the latter part.

Where the theory fails is movies with star power. Just one week after an article asking “Who Killed The Movie Star?“, Will Smith’s poorly reviewed Hancock had a 100-plus million dollar opening weekend (al beit “extended” and “holiday” weekend). In these circumstances people are going to the theatre, already set on seeing Hancock.

Where the theory has legs is when your movie has a little star power, but is more likely to fall in the field of, “I feel like a movie, what’s playing?” For example, I was surprised to find that “Don’t Mess With The Zohan” is actually named “YOU Don’t Mess With The Zohan“. I’m confident that there would have been more casual movie viewers had the title placed it in the front half of the movie listings. Placement BEFORE instead of AFTER “Iron Man” could mean the difference between life and death in the first few months of this year’s summer movie season. No doubt there were many conversations this May/June as such:

“Do you want to see a movie?”

“Sure. Get the movie listings. What’s playing?”

“Umm… Chronicles of Narnia, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Harold & Kumar, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, Sex and the City, and You Don’t Mess With The Zohan.”

Movie theatres list showtimes alphabetically by movie name. However, I doubt that any Hollywood producers have caught on yet, or else all movies would be named like in the Yellow Pages; once you get past the advertising, everyone will call “A1 Plumbers” because they’re first in the book.

“Zohan’s Plumbing” won’t do very well at all, and “You Don’t Mess With The Zohan’s Plumbing” won’t fare much better.