update & people's joker review preview

hello folks! sorry it's been a while since my last update, i didn't want to post until i had something substantive to share. so, for your viewing pleasure: the first ten minutes of my review of The People's Joker, which i was lucky enough to catch a screening of at the Seattle Queer Film Fest last weekend.

anyway, i have a lot of great news for y'all today! but i want to get a few quick things out of the way first.

1. i got suspended from twitter! this happened a couple months ago, and honestly? what a blessing. i do the vast majority of my posting on mastodon these days, with longform stuff over on cohost (or tumblr for godfeels-related posts). i'm also on bluesky, but only because it's where all the other essayists wound up. i don't like that website and i don't recommend you use it.

2. speaking of longform posts, did you know i've been reviewing video essays on cohost? this is something i've wanted to try for a long time, and it's been an enjoyable exercise for sure.

3. i've been watching a LOT of movies this october, and reviewing many of them at length over on letterboxd. i'll be doing a few videos pulling from those reviews (more info below), but if you want my opinions Now, well, you know where to look.

4. if you're a godfeels person, i was on A Homestuck Podcast to discuss the history of godfeels, the so-called homestuck renaissance, and some other behind the scenes stuff. it is basically wall to wall me infodumping so if that's your thing, check it out!

okay, now onto the meat of this post. short version of the good news: i've acquired a bunch of new equipment and have a bunch of videos in the works.

long version of the good news: i've had a lot of false starts over the last few years vis-a-vis this whole "i'm back" business. 2023 has been a really obnoxious, annoying year. where '21 & '22 were a parade of various personal tragedies and interrupting the recovery process of a traumatic eviction and period of deeply uncertain homelessness, '23 has largely been a series of bureaucratic complexities and sickness. i was bedridden with stomach problems for most of march, good chunks of may and june, and then caught a stubborn cold (not covid, thank goodness) last month. these setbacks occurred simultaneously with a crisis of confidence in the quality and relevance of my work. despite my resolution at the start of the year to "just try some shit," making anything has been very difficult-- helped not at all by the increasing enshittification of every platform i rely on for income. i had a series of long, difficult conversations with my gf about what i'm actually doing here, what i want to get out of it, if i even enjoy this gig anymore.

somehow i came away from those conversations with the conviction that yes, in fact i do want to keep doing this. so i spent some time analyzing my production process, and realized something so obvious i feel kind of silly for not pinpointing it sooner: i've been using the same equipment for almost ten years!

all my lights and fixtures are pilfered from sets or acquired on the cheap, and none of it more complicated than a standard light socket. my tripod is a dented, clumsy piece of shit cobbled together from pieces of two separate broken tripods. my camera, the original 1080p blackmagic pocket, produces gorgeous images but has always been a thorn in my side as a video essayist because of its ridiculous 2.88 crop factor. short explanation of what that means-- a 50mm lens is called a "normal lens" because it's the closest you get to replicating the range of human vision on a full frame camera. because the bmpcc's sensor is so much smaller, however, the effective focal distance of any given lens is multiplied by 2.88, meaning that a 50mm lens is the equivalent of a 140mm lens, which means it's zoomed way the hell in. this makes getting wide shots in cramped apartment rooms hellishly difficult (go back and look at my old videos, i'm rarely framed with more than a quarter of my torso in frame). that's hardly the only pain point wrt that camera, but it's the one that's been the most consistent pain in my ass.

i worked in film for about five years in grip/electric. i have training in media production. i love playing with cinematography, shaping light in spaces to create dramatic images-- and yet i almost never indulge in that love. i've repeated to myself for years the notion that the best tools for the job are the ones you have access to, and just made do. but it finally clicked for me recently that none of the equipment i have remotely resembles the professional equipment i trained on. for almost ten years i've been using the kit of a college undergrad working out of her dorm, and then i wonder why it's such a hassle to shoot anything!

SO. all of this is to say that i finally bit the bullet and invested some credit card debt into upgrades. the above video about The People's Joker is the first i've shot on my new camera, the blackmagic pocket 4k. i've acquired a new tripod, and a beautiful directional LED light (which hadn't arrived yet when i shot this), and a whole lot of various gizmos and widgets to make the whole thing tick. there's more i need to get --a small handheld monitor, a couple basic LED light panels, a set of gels & diffusion, maybe a c-stand or two down the line-- but already, with just a week of playing with these new toys, i can tell you it's streamlined the process tremendously. for instance: unlike the original bmpcc the bmpc4k has a mini-xlr input with phantom power, meaning i can run my at2020 microphone directly into the camera instead of recording separately on a tascam. on balance this doesn't save a TON of time, but that's sort of the point. it's the little things that kill you, and i'm trying to smooth as many of them over as i can.

so, okay. let's talk about plans. as always, i've got a lot of big ideas swirling around in my head (yes i'm still reviewing tears of the kingdom, yes i'm still gonna make Everyone Is Wrong About LOST), but right now i want to focus on getting my confidence back with smaller projects. every year in october since 2020, my friends and i have gotten together in a server to watch at least one horror movie every day. last year i did a pair of videos going over the stuff we watched, which didn't exactly do numbers but that i greatly enjoyed making. i want to do the same thing again this year (though hopefully this time i'll manage to get at least one such video out in october lmao), maybe in smaller chunks for easier release. that'll give me at least two, probably three, maybe four videos. on top of that, there are a few subjects i want to rant about separately-- namely my accidental rewatch & surprising tier list of the Jurassic Park movies, and my complicated feelings on the recent horror film Talk To Me. i'm hoping to get these recorded & released relatively quickly, though i have a writing obligation to another project with a hard deadline this month that's the only hiccup. ah yes, balancing multiple creative projects at once, my greatest strength...

i don't like sharing my plans the way i used to because they're always changing. ideas that capture me one month bore me the next. but these are my plans this month and i've asked my girlfriend to hold me to the coals and make sure i follow through this time.

so that's where i am. i need to build up a whole new production pipeline here and i don't want to burn myself out on something huge right out of the gate. another aspect of this upgrade has been realizing how little i actually understand the tools of post-production. i know enough to get the job done, but i want to do better than that. i want to actually learn these tools. this will take time, trial, & error. but that is the other side of all this. ten years ago, assembling my kit was a process of ecstatic discovery. so much of the energy that drove me back then was just seeing what was possible, what i was capable of. i've spent a lot of the last few years feeling creatively stymied and held back by the memory & battery limitations of my old camera, by the crop factor, by my inability to craft light the way i really wanted to.

now i'm building the kit that'll last me the *next* ten years, and for the first time in a while i'm genuinely excited by the visual possibilities. i can do wide shots! i have a belt battery and 2tb hard drive on my camera so i can walk around getting shots for hours! lighting is easier, there are fewer cables, and!! AND!!!! i now have two cameras, which means i can FINALLY play with multicam!!!!!!!! this is something i've been fantasizing about for years, i have no idea how it'll work for video essays but i'm dying to find out.

i know money is getting tighter and tighter every day for all of us, and that giving your support to someone who barely updates is an increasingly difficult proposition to justify. to all of you who've stuck around this long, i can only say thank you, thank you, thank you, over and over again. despite how rough things have been, y'all have helped me pay the bills on time, and remind me every day that there are people in this world who like what i do and want to see more of it. the part of my brain that tells me i'm a failure is a liar, and it's easy to forget that when so many walls are crumbling down around us.

so, again. thank you for your ongoing support. take care of yourselves.